I... need some tips for Sage.

[Travel]

So, I made a post on here a while back mentioning that I was picking up Sage to get it to 80 for the Shb role quests. Well, I picked the job up, tried to give it a shot, and... it didn't go well.

To put it bluntly, I couldn't even get past the first several groups of enemies; I'd put the Kardia on the girl and try and alternate between shooting enemies and dropping a few heals on her, but I just couldn't keep up. I'm planning on giving the job another shot later today - I found a site that gives a DPS and Healer rotation for Sage, so I'll try it out and hope it works - but any tips for getting Sage figured out would be appreciated.

There's also the issue of leveling; I was wanting to take a look at content aside from dungeons, and I've heard that the Bozjan Southern Front is apparently really good for leveling from 71 to 80. Does anyone have any other tips for leveling?

[Rilifane]

If you want to learn SGE, then I recommend running dungeons. Bozja is great as an exp source but it teaches you very little about playing the class unfortunately, same with fates. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do them but for practice, dungeons are still miles ahead of everything else.
If you can grab some friends, ideally one on tank, that would make it easier and smoother for you until you feel more comfortable but just writing at the start that you just picked up SGE and don't feel confident on the class yet helps. If you fear you won't get it typed in time, make a macro.

I don't remember too much about the SGE quest but I definitely don't remember having any difficulties at all there.
- is your gear up to date? I think unlocking SGE only gives an okay-ish left side but no right side.
- what are you healing her with? Diagnosis is incredibly weak, even Eukrasian Diagnosis is generally fairly bad. Do you use Taurochole, Druochole, Haima and such? Iirc aoe heals like Kerachole and Physis II also heal NPCs now but even without them, Haima, Tauro, Druo and Soteria is plenty with the auto heals from Kardia.
You may still need to the occasional EDiag if you run out of Addersgall stacks but healing really shouldn't be the problem here.

[ty_taurus]

As someone with a lot of experience having played all healers at times and played through Sage for the first raid tier to refresh my experience with healers and get a taste of what Sage has to offer. Here are my tips.

SGE requires that you know how to use OGCD healing effectively. Every cast of Dosis gives you 1 second to cast an OGCD heal and should be the near-exclusive way you should be healing. SGE's GCD healing is almost worthless in nearly every aspect of content outside of between fights or during phase changes in boss fights. I recommend you go to a practice dummy and practice weaving in OGCD healing tools while spamming Dosis. Additionally, you should get familiar with using Eukrasia for E. Dosis' Damage over time, and maintain your Phlegma casts. Phlegma will also allow you to use 2 OGCD heals before your next cast, so you can also try and use a cast if you want to double up on something.

Let's talk about Addersgall... Any action that ends in -chole will consume 1 Addersgall. You generate 1 Addersgall every 20 seconds, which will give you a lot of uses of these actions. You should be using these tools liberally as these are your real bread-and-butter healing tools. In the instance battle, Taurochole will not only heal Lalah, but also reduce her incoming damage. You will need to use E. Diagnosis on her for the instance when you see the large red tankbuster indicator over her. I think the instance wants you to use it this way, but you won't ordinarily need to do that for actual tankbusters on players. Druochole can also be used as needed if you feel her HP is dropping too fast.

Soteria, the other green action icon in contrast to Kardia, will increase the amount you'll heal Lalah for when casting offensive spells for 4 casts and is fairly strong.

Haima, the purple cube icon, will apply 5 stacks of a barrier on her that will gradually lower the damage she's taking.

Physis II is an AoE regen that will also increase the amount of HP you'll restore to Lalah's HP.

Lastly if things are looking dire, Zoe will increase the potency of your next heal by 50%. Using this on E. Diagnosis can be a great last ditch effort to keep her in a safe range.

All of these are OGCD actions that you can use in that 1 second between attacking an enemy and beginning your next GCD spell. If you practice this and get better at it, you'll find that SGE is much easier than most people think it is. In fact, I personally feel like it's the easiest healer all around as its large library of mitigation tools helps prevent a lot of damage. WHM may be technically easier, but I don't feel that its healing tools are as effective. SGE just has so many effective OGCD heals that getting comfortable with using the Dosis weave window gives you such power and control over not only healing but also mitigating damage so that you need to deal less damage, and that's the key also. You have a lot of ways of reducing incoming damage so that you don't need to heal as much anyway.


If you want to level, you can also level quickly just queueing for dungeons, as healers don't have wait times during normal hours, but Bozja is a great way to level as well, yes. The Southern Front is more efficient for this than Zadnor. Though do your daily Frontlines Roulette as well for each day you're leveling as that gives you about half a level's worth of XP.

[MilkieTea]

With SGE, your goal isn't to heal but to shield. You're going to want to drop your oGCD shields onto your tank - obviously not all at once. The goal is to DPS as much as possible and just shield your tank.

[Renathras]

Quote

SGE is quite a bit different from the other healers in some ways. Has an expansive oGCD kit with a lot of things that have short CDs, so you can use them frequently for a lot of mitigation and healing, but its base GCD kit is relatively weak (and MP expensive), meaning not as useful for general emergencies or safety buffers as some of the other healers kits are.

So I'd suggest looking at all those oGCDs - including Addersgall abilities - they come in super handy. Haima is useful on Tanks pulling big packs, and you can use Panhaima for every other pull (pull 1, pull 2, boss, pull 1, pull 2, boss, pull 1, pull 2, final boss) of dungeon runs. Taurochole and Kerachole have the same damage reduction. They don't stack, but you can use Kera then Taruo then Kera like that to give Tanks a large amount (10%) of continual damage resistance. Once you unlock Holos, you can sprinkle it in, too, and it DOES stack with both the others for an extra 10% (I think this makes 19% total because of how multipliers work) of mitigation, too.

And unlike SCH, Addersgall isn't fighting with a damage spell (Energy Drain) so you want to use it on mitigation/heals since it's also how you regen/maintain MP.

A good place to level aside from dungeons and Bozja (Bozja is a good choice, definitely) is you can use Frontlines (you can que in then swap Jobs if you want once you zone in and you get XP from the Job you qued in as) and MSQ (Castrum/Prae/Ultima) which are all good for some pretty big chunks of XP with low stress. 24 man Alliance Raid roulette, too.

EDIT:

Both E. Dosis and Phlegma will allow you to use 2 OGCD heals before your next cast.

Wait, uh...E. Dosis does?

Eu Dosis has a 1 sec cast of Eukrasia then the instant cast of Eu Dosis, but that's only a 1.5 sec window, right? While you CAN cram 2 oGCDs in there, as they take 0.7 sec each, that's 1.4 sec and is running SUPER close to clipping unless you have super low - and I mean like basically 0 - ping...right?

Agree with the rest, though.

[ty_taurus]

Wait, uh...E. Dosis does?

Eu Dosis has a 1 sec cast of Eukrasia then the instant cast of Eu Dosis, but that's only a 1.5 sec window, right? While you CAN cram 2 oGCDs in there, as they take 0.7 sec each, that's 1.4 sec and is running SUPER close to clipping unless you have super low - and I mean like basically 0 - ping...right?

Agree with the rest, though.

Good catch. Gonna correct that on the original message.

[Travel]

Hey, wanted to thank all of you guys; the tips that you gave me really helped! I can actually use the job now, and it feels... well, not perfect, but certainly a good deal better than it was, at any rate. Looks like I'm going to be getting the job to 80 after all; thanks again!

[ForsakenRoe]

the way i look at sage in dungeons at least, is there's a bread-and-butter combo of krasis, physis2, kerachole. you wont have krasis yet but dont worry about that for now, its for the explanation. due to the short cooldowns, these are basically up on every wall to wall. after that, you can use 'top-ups' as needed, and rotate them as you go through the pulls. for example, first pull you could 'top up' with haima and soteria, the next you could do holos and panhaima. you can even use pneuma (at 90, in your expert rouletes when you get there) as a top up tool, it's very good with zoe to make it 900p. as mentioned too, once kerachole falls off, you can hit the tank with taurachole, to reapply the same mitigation (and heal them a bit), then once that falls off (if the pull is still alive) kerachole would be back up. this gives you up to 45s of 10% damage mitigation on the tank!

unfortunately for raids im a WHM main, so my method to playing sage is quite literally 'wing it'. still cleared hard-ish stuff with it despite this, but i'm not gonna be winning any awards for my performance in there lmao

[Renathras]

Hey, wanted to thank all of you guys; the tips that you gave me really helped! I can actually use the job now, and it feels... well, not perfect, but certainly a good deal better than it was, at any rate. Looks like I'm going to be getting the job to 80 after all; thanks again!

\o/

Glad to hear it!

If you like it, you can keep going with it. And there are some pretty good tips here, too. I forgot to mention Physis. Love that spell. It's on a 60 sec CD, but that's short enough to have it up all the time and it's great at healing parties. It also boosts healing power of other things - healing ACTIONS, not just healing spells, means this applies to EVERY healing thing you can throw on them - which is pretty awesome, too. And Kerachole gets a HoT effect, which is also nice for keeping parties topped off and healthy.

And remember, you CAN fall back on those GCD heals/shields if you need them. Being instant cast makes SGE's more responsive than SCH's. But they work best as just agumenting the rest of your kit rather than being your first go-to tools. You have so many powerful oGCDs on SGE, and the fun part is that they're up all the time, so instead of using them as panic buttons, you can hit them frequently and get a ton of use out of them.

[Rilifane]

Keeping in mind that 60s cooldowns are up for every pull and alternating 2min is a good approach.
It's much easier to handle a pull that is mostly taken care of by oGCDs and only having to use some GCDs worst case than fully oGCD'ing one pull and then being reduced to GCDs only the next pull. Like mitigation, spread them out a little but because SGE is weaker than other healers when GCD healing as they lose the Kardia heal potency. So a Diagnosis is technically 270 potency from losing the Kardia heal before 85, not 400.

I'd also like to add that Krasis and Autophysis (the heal buff) affect Haima and Panhaima.
Haima is already incredibly strong as it is, with 1800 total potency unbuffed it's like a mini tank invuln while it's active. With Krasis, it can reach up to 2160 potency depending on how fast it gets consumed. If you apply those skills in proper order (e.g. Krasis > Physis II > Haima) you'll get more value from them.
It's a fairly minor thing but try to make it into a habit.

It's also a good idea to make sure the tank has already lost some HP before applying Haima/ Panhaima as these skills prevent further HP loss but Kardia and regens will continue to heal and have a high chance of overhealing if you instantly throw them up at full HP. Your aoe is instant so you don't have to worry about missing the right timing to use them.
I often go:
Kera > 1-2 GCDs (> Krasis at 86+) > Physis II > Haima/ Panhaima. That way Haima/ Panhaima get the heal buff and the Kardia/ Kera/ Physis regen won't get wasted.
They're all minor things and SGE is fine without doing it but practicing it will make healing easier over time.

Having access to non-stop 10% mitigation and several oGCD shields makes incoming damage a lot smoother and easier to judge and decide what you need to do. I agree with ty_taurus, SGE maybe overwhelming at first, partly because it starts at 70, but I find it overall the easiest healer.
Easier than WHM as WHM has to deal with much more erratic HP bar pingpong in wall to walls, having longer gaps between oGCDs from Holy being 2,5s and often losing value if healing too soon. It's not difficult per se but the HP bar pingpong makes it easier to misjudge, lose confidence and then just spam safety GCD heals rather than trying to risk anything again.