Thread: Sage suggestions

The overall sentiment around healers right now is that spamming glare/broil/malefic/dosis 100+ times per fight is boring as boring gets. There are ways for the developers to change this without having to add more buttons or create new assets. It also wouldn’t necessarily raise the skill floor which is what the devs seem to use as their reasoning for not adding any complexity to the role.

As sage is the only healer I’ve played extensively this expac, I have a few suggestions that would allow us to have less dosis spam and play more into sage’s identity of “shield healer” and “heal by damaging”.

1. Addersting is generated upon casting diagnosis, eukrasian diagnosis, prognosis, or eukrasian prognosis.

2. Using toxicon reduces the cooldown of phlegma by roughly 15-20 seconds.

3. Phlegma has three charges.

4. Physis grants nearby party members kardia for 15 seconds. This would mean more damage=more heals and would give an actual reason to use soteria.

5. Kerachole no longer has a regen effect. Now it applies a stacking shield to allies for 15 seconds. Every time you use any damage skill while Kerachole is active it applies another shield to allies. The potency of that shield depends on the damage of the spell.


I’m sure these wouldn’t work flawlessly and would necessitate potency and cooldown changes, but I think something along these lines could be a good change.

Oh, and

6. Eukrasian dosis doesn’t apply all of its kardia healing up front. Kardia would trigger for every tick of the dot.

The general sentiment is Sage's honestly are what they tried to do with Bards. DPS Healers who focus on DPS instead of healing. I have seen alliances mass quit after getting all Sages on the team.

Honestly, I don't consider Sages Healers or good healers in fact when it comes down to it if I get a Sage in my party I automatically will commend anyone but a Sage. With the 6.1 patch increasing healing spells I think the developers have gotten the hint we want Healers who can actually do more Healing instead of DPSing.

Originally Posted by HisShadowX

The general sentiment is Sage's honestly are what they tried to do with Bards. DPS Healers who focus on DPS instead of healing. I have seen alliances mass quit after getting all Sages on the team.

Honestly, I don't consider Sages Healers or good healers in fact when it comes down to it if I get a Sage in my party I automatically will commend anyone but a Sage. With the 6.1 patch increasing healing spells I think the developers have gotten the hint we want Healers who can actually do more Healing instead of DPSing.

You clearly have a negative amount of understanding about Sage since it's still the highest HPS healer in the game with very few weaknesses. You could always, ya know, pay attention to what your team is doing in battle to decide who you want to commend, but I'm fairly certain you'll just respond with something about how "rational-thinking" is overrated.

As for the OP, here's some feedback:

Points 1 & 2: If you made Toxikon reduce Phlegma's CD by 20 seconds, you'd be looking at an approximate 557 DPS potency 2-button combo on GCD healing, which ultimately means all this effort does nothing to change the healing style of Sage since it's still a DPS loss to GCD heal. Simply upping the CD reduction is, at that point, functionally the same as just increasing the potency of Toxikon, and it's been discussed before about how that's not really a great idea on it's own. Either it's a DPS loss and we don't care about using it, or it's neutral or a gain and we spam GCD healing whenever possible which is antithetical to Sage's design. It needs more nuance to allow Toxikon to shine without making it a spammable tool.

Point 3: It makes sense with the idea of making Toxikon reduce Phlegma's cooldown, but seeing as that is not an effective solution, it's ultimately not a necessary change. It would also inadvertently increase Sage's burst DPS, which isn't inherently bad, but should be taken into consideration.

Point 4: I think it would just make more sense for Soteria to be AoE and essentially function as a temporary, secondary Kardia.

Point 5: Interesting, but I'm not really sure what your goal is with this from a gameplay perspective. It would mean you'd want to use Kerachole much earlier to build up that stacking barrier before a nasty raidwide. Currently we try to use it just before a raidwide, or in certain situations earlier to have the cooldown back again for the next raidwide, but it would also cut out a big chunk of our AoE healing. Perhaps the Soteria or Physis II change would compensate, but I'd definitely want to test out what that feels like in practice.

Point 6: If you're spreading out 170 across 30 seconds, that would just be a heal of 17 potency per tick. I'm not sure if that's worth the thematic synchronization.

Originally Posted by HisShadowX

The general sentiment is Sage's honestly are what they tried to do with Bards. DPS Healers who focus on DPS instead of healing. I have seen alliances mass quit after getting all Sages on the team.

Honestly, I don't consider Sages Healers or good healers in fact when it comes down to it if I get a Sage in my party I automatically will commend anyone but a Sage. With the 6.1 patch increasing healing spells I think the developers have gotten the hint we want Healers who can actually do more Healing instead of DPSing.

I'm going to assume this is more of a you problem, not a Sage problem. I haven't failed a pull since the start of this expansion regardless how bad the party has been. But good on you for effectively giving innocent Sage players the middle finger simply because you don't like their job, that'll show em! /s

Healers might not be very well designed but if the party dies because the healer is only dpsing and not healing, and no one else is playing poorly, then that is a player problem not a Sage problem. Between Kerachole, Taurochole, physis, Haima, Painhaima, etc you have more than enough tools to avoid wipes even in below average parties. So tone down your healer bashing just a smidge, I even noticed you have a tank forum thread complaining too.



But on this topic I did always find toxicon to be exceptionally underwhelming. Addersting just feels flawed. It would be nice if the mechanic did synergize with the rest of the kit in some fashion.

Don't feed the troll. He's a 0 mitigation tank who got called out for it a while back but decided to go on a vendetta against healers instead for not covering for his own faults. Nothing to see here.

I’d reply with quote but I’m on my phone and that’d take forever. So I didn’t crunch any numbers or do any math or anything. Specifics like potency adjustments, healing ticks etc weren’t taken into account. Obviously, anything like this would necessitate number changes. More things I thought of after reading your guys’ comments:

The overall goal with my train of thought is to allow gcd heals without them being overtly punishing, reduce dosis spam, and turn what are currently regens into either shields, or kardia appliers since kardia is effectively a regen anyway.

Maybe adder’s sting could be generated when using anything that uses addersgall.

Kardia could heal based on the amount of damage you deal, not whenever you cast an offensive spell. Sage doesn’t have any attack that’s crazy high potency anyway so single target fights wouldn’t be massively effected by this but it could make dungeon trash more interesting. My point about kardia ticking with each tick of your dot is more for dungeon pulls than bosses. I do agree, having kerachole give a defense buff and just a strong barrier makes a lot more sense. As for points 1, 2 and 3, if addersgall skills and GCD heals generated stings, and if toxicon completely reset phlegma’s cooldown, would that make it any better? In my head that would basically make toxicon then phlegma a combo, but I’ll take an occasional two button combo over 111111111.
Skills like holos and taurochole make no sense as they are. If holos was just a defense buff, that’d work. If taurochole were just a defense buff, that’d work. As taurochole is currently, they only time it’s really worth using is on multi hit tankbusters which is really niche. Holos is just meh.

I do agree that if the devs don’t seriously lean into the regen/shield healer dynamic then it’ll fail. I’m reserving judgement until 6.2. Though, Yoshi P’s “just do ultimate lul” and “we replaced the healer on our test team bc they got too good” comments make me terribly skeptical.

My only suggestion for SGE is for Kardia to proc on every action via just attacks. While SGE has plenty of oGCDs, when crap hits the fan and you're forced to GVD heal for whatever reason (namely those no mitigation tanks that collect vuln stacks like they're mog tombs). Kardia is dead when your spamming E.Diagonsis and being without your regen is very noticeable.