Now, I am one of those disgruntled healers who has complained much on here.

At the moment Sage for me is met with cautious optimism. I agree with posts like Grimoire-M's, but there's plenty of threads with my concerns/complaints/issues, so let's look at the optimistic side to my cautious optimism. I think if SGE ends up a step in the right direction, then it's better to play SGE because it'd give feedback they've done something right with SGE and that there's something about SGE that draws people more than other healers.

I think it's positive they're embracing that healers DPS. Because not DPSing as a SGE is a HPS loss. I think it acknowledges the basic healer design of this game and that's to juggle heals and damage and not just focus entirely on heals, but it is forgiving enough in the majority of content to accommodate the latter. SGE may end up a good teaching tool if anything.

The DPS rotation I think is the biggest concern on a healer on whether it'll be interesting or at least break up the monotony. The first point is that it looks like your DPS rotation will depend on shield usage, because it looks like they're using a Blackest Night like mechanic to fill your "Adder's Sting" stacks and they're spent on Toxicon and possibly a mystery skill we didn't see a tooltip for but was on the hotbar (it could be a single target version of Toxicon).

So my expectation is...

So my expectation is...
Your single target focus:
- Eucrasia -> Eucrasia Dosis every 30 secs
- Spam Dosis
- Use Phlegma every 45 secs
- Use Pneuma every 120 secs
- Attempt a shield up time
- Spend your Adder's Sting stacks on Toxicon when you need to move (it shares the same potency as Dosis) or a single target version if it turns out one of the unknown abilities is one.

Your AoE focus:
- Spam Dyscrasia
- Attempt a shield up time
- Spend your Adder's Sting stacks on Toxicon
- Use Phlegma every 45 secs
- Use Pneuma every 120 secs

So this already feels like an improvement on the SCH and WHM experience for handling DPS.


The we look at the enhancement mechanic. This is similar to an Emergency Tactics change I suggested for SCH, heck one of them is a reverse of one example I gave of it. My suggested was for Emergency tactics to turn Biolysis to do all of its damage at once. Dosis/Eucrasia Dosis is the reverse of that. Whilst mine suggestions were more DPS & Utility oriented, it's still a dynamic way of adding more abilities without taking up more room, which was the main logic behind the suggestion. Not to imply they took my idea, because the logic has existed before in Dark Arts and Emergency Tactics already kinda has a similar effect. But to see it, is a plus.

Another suggestion I had seen around the forums was to reverse how Emergency Tactics works on Succor/Adlo, where it applies the shield and if you need it then you detonate it because it avoids using Emergency Tactics and find it gets wasted because the cohealer got them to max health in the time it takes to go from Emergency Tactics -> Succor. So this will be a positive thing for how Sage handles shields/version put heal and looks like it has more flexibility. So it is looking like SGE is going to be a better pure healer than SCH and it kinda makes sense because AST is a better shield healer than WHM. So hopefully it means SCH gets more love in its shields than SGE does...and in some ways it already does because of CritLo (which can be forced with Recitation), but I've made it clear for a while my stance on shield healing, so I won't go into that. But we'll obviously see what this means for SCH when the media tour comes around.

The fact SGE has to use shields to aid its DPS rotation has me on the cautious side, because lilies has a similar system for using heals to get to Afflatus Misery but people require healing to build it (and wait until you have 3 lilies too). But the upside is that it could maybe encourage more shield use in your kit and a shield is still useful at full health and you only need to use it when you know somebody is going to damage and it may be harder to waste. The other advantage is that you can stack them up during a damage bursts so I can see the advantage and how it could break up the monotony, so it might not be so bad, it seems 1 shield = 1 Adders' Sting as opposed to 3 heals = 1 blood lily.

And then with Cardia, it is a replacement for SCH's faerie and her Embrace, but you get more control over who it targets, if you can do this on the fly it could be an interesting mechanic to optimise, because you'll be juggling it with your DPS rotation, which could further break that monotony.

So I am seeing things that make me a little excited to see what happens. But until I see it in action, see how everything works in practice and maybe get to play it, I can't shake that cautiousness.