If you want to be a Sage come Endwalker, I would recommend SCH and Nocturnal AST. Shield healers are all about proactive mitigation versus reactive healing, so playing either shield healer in preparation for Sage will give you experience on pre-planning your shielding and being proactive about mitigation. You will have the faerie to juggle with SCH, but other than the buggy pet AI in this game, it’s not a terrible learning curve dealing with Eos/Selene and Seraph. The main issue with the latter is that most content doesn’t have a lot of outgoing damage to warrant using her without blatant overhealing/mitigation. But still worth toying with.

I’ve been taking SCH into level 80 24-mans and EX primals to play with it a bit more, and I’ve had a lot of fun. Does feel really nice to deploy Adlos and prep Consolations to take less damage.

Noct AST isn’t terrible either. It just isn’t as good as its Diurnal counterpart. It will be going away come 6.0, so if you’ve ever been curious about it, now would be the chance to try it out.