Some Sage Discussion

[jojober]

I would like Holos better if it applied just a shield with the damage reduction. Would feel easier to use since i wouldn’t be wasting that healing for the damage reduction.

[Rilifane]

I would like Holos better if it applied just a shield with the damage reduction. Would feel easier to use since i wouldn’t be wasting that healing for the damage reduction.

You can chose how you want to use it depending on the scenario.
In trash pulls it's fantastic for healing the tank a bit and giving mitigation for a whooping 20s. Things start dying by the time it wears off.
For boss aoes it's just a regular heal, they don't hit hard enough to use it as mitigation even with vuln stacks.

In raids you can either leave some HP loss before the next raid wide so the initial heal tops the party off while the mitigation is for the aoe itself or, if everyone is already topped off, use it as an heal afterwards and either enjoy the mitigation for subsequent aoes or for the tank.

If you're using Holos on a single hit raid wide just for the mitigation when they'd survive without it, you're wasting its potential. If people survive it without additional 10% (you have a 10% mitigation on a 30s cooldown aswell), 300 potency heal is the stronger part as you'd have to heal afterwards either way.
You'd need to take almost twice as much damage as you have HP within 20s for the mitigation to outclass the heal when used like this. It's fantastic for aoe sequences like WL 2, Terminal, Cycles etc. And for all other scenarios it simple needs a bit of situational awareness.
Holos is one of the skills that rewards planned HP loss when used outside the abovementioned mechanics.

[KDSilver]

I would like Holos better if it applied just a shield with the damage reduction. Would feel easier to use since i wouldn’t be wasting that healing for the damage reduction.

I disagree.
Taurochole and Holos feels even better to use when finding the perfect moment to make full profit of both effect.
And if we have to choose beetween one or then so be it.

I like these dual effect/choices to make.

[Miziliti]

I feel like some DRK low key hate SGE. Every time doing a dungeon with DRK as SGE is a wild ride for me.

[Corbeau]

Sage is almost a legit healer. It has a bunch of multiplicative cooldowns that allow you to spike healing when necessary if you plan ahead, and it almost has a dps kit to boot. Even the simplest WoW healing class was still deeper last I played (been a while since I escaped that treadmill), but SGE at least proves that the XIV design team is capable of putting together an interconnected healing kit. There is a tiny chance that I could stand to play SGE in raid, though I'm still highly skeptical of encounter design.

Saying that Sage is "too busy" is wild though. Let there be complex healers to keep the role interesting; there's still SCH and WHM for intro healers.

[rewd]

Sage is almost a legit healer. It has a bunch of multiplicative cooldowns that allow you to spike healing when necessary if you plan ahead, and it almost has a dps kit to boot. Even the simplest WoW healing class was still deeper last I played (been a while since I escaped that treadmill), but SGE at least proves that the XIV design team is capable of putting together an interconnected healing kit. There is a tiny chance that I could stand to play SGE in raid, though I'm still highly skeptical of encounter design.

Saying that Sage is "too busy" is wild though. Let there be complex healers to keep the role interesting; there's still SCH and WHM for intro healers.

If only Sage was actually complex, though. I know healer players are starving for... Anything remotely interesting, really, but Sage is just proof that the devs don't care about anyone else than healbots. More of the same with a different coat of paint is still more of the same.

[Semirhage]

Saying that Sage is "too busy" is wild though. Let there be complex healers to keep the role interesting; there's still SCH and WHM for intro healers.

Or better yet, tell people to buy a story skip and watch the story in an inn room if the concept of playing a video game is so terrifying that classes are "too complicated", and give WHM and SCH identities beyond "playpen for people bad at healing".

[Corbeau]

By XIV standards, Sage is complex.

That's a super low bar though. Excluding cooldowns, of which I had a dozen of varying purposes and timings that almost all had optional synergy between them, I was still slamming 8+ rotational buttons as a resto shaman in Legion.

[rewd]

By XIV standards, Sage is complex.

That's a super low bar though. Excluding cooldowns, of which I had a dozen of varying purposes and timings that almost all had optional synergy between them, I was still slamming 8+ rotational buttons as a resto shaman in Legion.

Care to elaborate? I struggle not only to see how Sage is complex, but how it can be considered more complex than AST or even SCH. I'd agree with you that we can barely talk of complexity and difficulty about FFXIV healing, though.

[Corbeau]

Care to elaborate? I struggle not only to see how Sage is complex, but how it can be considered more complex than AST or even SCH. I'd agree with you that we can barely talk of complexity and difficulty about FFXIV healing, though.

AST at least has something to juggle on the DPS side, but complexity-wise pretty much every healing kit in XIV has at most one piece of interconnectivity. Heals are almost entirely oGCDs of varying potency that you press in priority order in total isolation from each other. Sage at least has % output buffs to consider. Even it's HoT being tied to offensive GCDs is a step up in interconnectivity - as laughable as that is when compared to Discipline Priest or Mistweaver Monk.

If you instead wanted a rant on how much more interesting WoW healing was though... boy would I be happy to slam a wall of text into the forums. I've done it before. The TLDR still comes down to kit interconnectivity though; there was a metric ton of inter-cooldown synergy in WoW healer kits, and fights were designed appropriately to demand a wide variety of use patterns. Though mana being an actual resource is also a factor driving that diversity.