Sage

[Novak_04]

Prepare to judge the hell out of me...

I am in total fangirl mode over the Sage right now. From to working out my hotbars to picking out my starting glamour, it's all about the Sage for me.

With all the anger-posts on the healer forums (rightfully so), I wanted to take a moment to see if there were any fellow Eorzeans planning on ditching their books, staves, and discount globes to don the mystical, floating lightsabers (with lasers).

So for those who know for sure that they're making the switch:
What is appealing to you about it? What are you leaving as your main? On a scale from 1-10, with 1 being "meh" and 10 being a 12-yo girl at a Justin Bieber concert circa 2012, how excited are you about the job?

For those who aren't switching:
What's keeping you glued to your current job? What are, if any exist, your qualms with the Sage job?

Sage!
Sage!
Sage!
Sage!

[SweetPete]

I am definitely on the Sage train. I currently main summoner but main the healers from 2.0-4.0. Still got them to 80 in 5.0. Summoner looks amazing in 6.0 but with the changes it will be very simple to play and I honestly like a little bit complexity to jobs and Sage fits it perfectly.

I love the instant cast shields when you augment their spells. I love how it’s a little bit of Whm and sch in there. It’s gonna be so much fun to play. I am on a 10 of fan girl central! I can’t wait!

[Sani2341]

Defenitly on the sage train as well.

Spent my last week's evenigns slowly grinding out the ShB PvP heal set as I feel it will make a great basis for a Sage glamour. (Unless we get a magically/crystally Sage Weapon so that my normal Priestess inspired Healglam fits)

Did some leveling on my Monk (only class I had at seventy atm) to see how efficient ShB leveling dungeons vs Bosja will be to bring sage up to par. (Seemed to be the same on average as far as level ups/h go, though dungeons were more reliable than Bosja where dependign on CE spawn it fluctuated a lot)

Now i am stuck how to most efficiently get a DPS up to new Max as well soonish after launch. (SMN was really handy for that for doing casual things without having to play heal back when I still had hope for SCH).

Figuring out Hotbars will be something I do once I have the new toy in my hands, because I had issues with preplanned Hotbar set ups not 'feeling right' once put to practice before.

[Grimoire-M]

For those who aren't switching:
What's keeping you glued to your current job? What are, if any exist, your qualms with the Sage job?

I’d rather not endorse SE’s habit of completely ignoring older classes within a role or outright stripping out their depth only just to make some shiny new class that does half of what the old ones used to and maybe one or two forum suggestions from an expansion ago then call it a day.

Basically, why you settling for just Sage getting the attention it did? A modicum of mechanical depth that won’t even last past 7.0 shouldn’t be dangled at us like a toy. It’s insulting.

[Gemina]

It's actually AST that has my attention. I'm a healer main, so Sage will get leveled along with the others by default. And I'll actually have to use Sage as my barrier healer since my SCH is on strike until it gets reworked. But I can't help but be curious about AST, and really want to see their tooltips.

WHM I always play because it's just such a pretty and aesthetically pleasing job. WHM really has that angelic tone to it. You can almost smell the lavender and chamomile anytime they're in your party.

Sage has a futuristic appeal to it that's just really neat. I'm sure a lot of players will really enjoy this job. How much I will end up playing it will just depend on what happens with SCH.

[BooPoo]

I’d rather not endorse SE’s habit of completely ignoring older classes within a role or outright stripping out their depth only just to make some shiny new class that does half of what the old ones used to and maybe one or two forum suggestions from an expansion ago then call it a day.

Basically, why you settling for just Sage getting the attention it did? A modicum of mechanical depth that won’t even last past 7.0 shouldn’t be dangled at us like a toy. It’s insulting.

I don't think 6.0 Sage is as difficult as 6.0 AST tbf.

[Cyrocco]

I've been an AST main basically since the job dropped, the tease for it was basically what locked me into the game.

I really love the card system and being a buffing healer, the aesthetic of using pseudo-tarot cards is what really drew me in.

Now I'm a college student in the medical field. Sages design and magic style and skill names fit more closely to who I am now, so I'm ready to make the switch to Sage.

[Bsrking5]

For me its a 4. I can see that single button damage coming, especially for aoe. Im not happy to see the single button healer dps staying. Its a tie between ast and sage for me. Im pretty sure sch is dead and whm doesn't hold more interest than 5.0 for me. I'll probably level up ast first before any other job and then a tank, then a dps(probably smn), from there i dunno, maybe sage. If it wasnt for that i'd say closer to an 8 or 9, but i think reaper is a 10/10.

[Mindiori]

It’s insulting.

Well you aren't wrong. Yet it will be entirely ignored and they all know it, so sans quitting - you can't really blame them. Despite my displeasure at the game direction, in practise its simple. If 'something' manages to engage me longer than 2 minutes I might try it. If it is just an even bigger tendonitis/one button mash though; alongside other 'accessibility' (cough) options, then I may just consider the game dead at that point and put everyone out of the misery of my complaints with a rl alt-f4 on it all.

[Saefinn]

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.