I just cant grasp Sage

[Sililos]

Given it a try, im not a healer main, nor do I even have much experience.
This job just feels like total garbage.

WHM I was ok at, Pop Medica 2, DPS, maybe a targeted heal or two, win.

Sage has so much target switching its total chaos and both the barrier's and heals feel like they do barely anything, so far have only been trying to heal the NPC and she always drops dead pretty much the moment i target the enemy to start DPSing.

it feels chaotic, it feels unintuitive, it feels like theres just too much going on for this to be fun. Oh right thats healing in general.

Just what Am i supposed to do to get this job/job role to bloody work?

And my god, all the damn target switching, having to know where my cursor is at all times with everything going on so i can click elsewhere/the NPC meanwhile AOE's everywhere and having to also heal yourself.

I mean damn SE, Were humans, we have limits ands this just feels like there is too much going on at once and no time to react!

I seriously dont get it at all!

[NobleWinter]

Everything feels chaotic at first including dps jobs and tanks. Being new to healing means there is a lot to adjust to. Just give yourself time. No one has been able to play Sage for more than a day yet. There is plenty of time to settle in. Try lower level dungeons where your kit is smaller and work your way up. You'll get the hang of it soon enough.

[Sililos]

TY I will later once I have calmed down. 25 times seeing the NPC in the first story dungeon lose 95% HP in one blow while shielded, then lose the rest after an instant heal but before you get a chance to pop any others, gets a bit.... well Its pushed my desire to play at all too an all time low lol.

So i think some calming down is in order for now.

[Jirah]

Let it settle give it a go, if it’s not your thing then it’s not your thing.

[IckeDerTyp]

You'll get it eventually! I think Sage is very solid and pretty easy to get the best out of.

Tho, I basically only did a few Rous and some dummy practice.

Put the thingy on your Tank, use dps abilities, use proper heals sometimes and you'll be golden, promise ^^

[Sylve]

Given it a try, im not a healer main, nor do I even have much experience.

This'll get the backs up of everyone here, But swap Dosis, Toxikon and Phlegma for a macro that goes something like:

/ac "Dosis" <t>
/ac "Dosis" <tt>

What it does is simple. If the target is hostile, casts at that target. If the target is friendly, your Dosis will be cast at whatever the friendly is targetting.
It'll prevent you from being able to queue those spells and leads to a DPS loss over time, though the feature should be a freaking baseline in Healer DPS spells.

But it does let you freely DPS while holding your target on the Tank or other party members. Which eliminates the annoying need to be swapping targets every 2 seconds.

That story instance shouldn't be chunking the tank NPC anywhere that hard.
Eukrasia Diagnosis should be dropped on the NPC whenever it isnt up.
Your main healing will come from Eukrasia Diagnosis (Even in mass pulls, i only need to resort to regular Diagnosis spam when DPS is too slow and i run out of everything else)

If you've never tried it, set the boss/hostile to Focus Target. Tankbusters will usually be long cast attacks that will be visible on that bar for you while you have the Tank targetted.
Eukrasia Diagnosis while the tankbusters are charging. Taurochole if the tank is missing HP to heal it and grant 15 seconds of damage reduction.
Kerachole if they're full HP for the same 15 second damage reduction.

If you ever played Dark Knight during Heavensward, Eukrasia is basically a GCD version of Dark Arts (Part of why i love Sage i think lol) and is meant to be used liberally.
If done right, you can go whole dungeons and never have to hardcast anything other than Dosis.

But probably the main thing is to ensure you have a full set of gear going in lol.
My Armory was all over the place so i didnt notice that i didnt have the right gear on me and the recommended gear button put a cosmetic helm on and level 50 accessories including a caster ring lol. So i did that story dungeon technically with half my gear missing XD

[Recon1o6]

I advise you go learn a lower level healer first rather than sage to get a feel for how healing works. The most important thing to do as a healer in ff14 is NOT PANIC and the second is to dps when you don't need to heal. Given sage heals by dpsing, this is even more important. The moment you start panicking is when things die.

The sage toolkit is a bit overwhelming at first like any new job though so that will be a significant factor in why you panicked

I also feel for you about the target switching, ugh that was hard on controller when your tank isn't in the party. Thank goodness druochole is so busted

the principles of healing in ff14 are

1. Read your tooltips (like any job)
2. Get a feel for your healing tools and their strength/frequency.
3. Dps when you dont need to heal.

[Gemina]

I guess this is what can happen if you just jump into healing. I strongly recommend taking a healer into Hall of Novice. I was able to hop right into SGE because I've been healing using all three jobs since HW, and even then I still had to really read the tooltips and put them into practice to understand was SGE is trying to do. I couldn't even imagine just hopping into healing @lv70 with a ton of skills I don't even have remote experience with.

The solo instance giving you difficulty is not due to the design of the encounter. If you or the NPC keeps dying, you are either not keeping them healed, or not doing a certain mechanic that punishes you and/or her if you fail it. Sometimes solo encounters do have soft enrages that has you focus on DPS, but that is not the case here. I know you hear all the time to cause as much damage as possible no matter what role you are playing, and SGE has a heavy 'I do deeps' vibe, but instances like that one is to teach you three things:
1. Keep your own butt from frying
2. Keep your team from dying
3. Destroy all hostile targets

The instance is a good indicator that if you can't clear it, then stay out of dungeons until you do.

[Naoki34]

Sage is a bit complicated to understand at first, but it's a lot of fun and quick to play, you can chain mitigations and Dps together very quickly.

There is a sort of DNC buff, but that provides the heal when you dps: Kardia.
You can place it on yourself during quests or your chocobo. It allows you to dps while enjoying a heal that helps.

Spells usually heal but with a special action Eukrasia, adding mitigation to the group or target rather than healing it more.

Some skills regenerate mana very often. Which is kind of strange at first when dps a target, the spell does a normal attack and with the skill changing the spell Eukrasia, it becomes a dot, it's a hit to take.
When Eukrasia Diagnosis takes damage when placed on an ally or yourself, it gives stacks that allow you to cast the remote AoE Toxikon.

Eukrasia is a skill used all the time for mitigations, Toxikon proc or DoT. It's a skill used all the time. It's keyboarding that does it, I don't know what it does on gamepad shortcuts. I'm talking mostly for Ps4/5 players, where the Mouse, regardless of the number of buttons, only takes into account the basic ones, not the side buttons or MMO's Mouse.


It's a kind of AST with fast and nervous mitigation (and no buff Ofc), I love it!
I just wish the running animation with the weapon out and some cooler skill animation, but that's a detail.

[Psythe]

One thing to remember also is there have been lots of tanks just coming back to the game from a while ago or people rolling tanks for quick queues that also have no idea what they are doing. I have ran many dungeons where not a single tank cool down was used yesterday.

Having played healers in every game for as long as I have been playing them helped but sage still took some extra reading. Yesterday I had two occasions where I was told along the lines of "omg sages can be amazing but I thought they were undertuned or bad.". I have found the burst healing on then can be insane and can fix things other jobs would really struggle with. You do have to learn the abilities which like any class will take some time to learn especially starting out at 70 with a ton of abilities.

The biggest thing is don't panic. Stay ahead with your shields. Even if you don't know when abilities are coming drop a group shield in a boss fight, they stay up for 30 seconds. Don't be afraid of the longer cool down heals just make sure you have charges for the ones that need it. I almost never use diagnosis without eukrasia as all the ogcd and long cool down abilities have general healing covered. Most regular content if I am not going crazy on dps my mana/tp has been no issue at all even forgetting to hit my regen.