Reaper & Sage – New Endwalker Jobs
In our limited experience messing around with Reaper and Sage in the new areas, the two jobs fell on two ends of a spectrum.
Sage, the new barrier healing job, felt very natural to jump in and figure out, even without prior healing experience. The most I’ve ever healed in Final Fantasy XIV was during the Stormblood-era. I capped out Astrologian and loved playing it before the dev team simplified the job with Shadowbringers. I haven’t healed since.
This job, though, is going to absolutely appeal to the (hopefully large) subset of players that understands and enjoys that Healers can and should DPS too. Sage rewards DPSing most directly considering it’s pretty much required for the job to function.
The job is heavily inspired by modern medicine giving its presumed connection to Sharlayan. Sages build up two different types of charges while playing called Serpent’s Gall and Serpent’s Sting.
The Gall bar will charge automatically and can be expended to gain access to powerful instant heals with damage reductions.
The Sting bar will charge as the shields you put on allies are broken down and will allow you to cast useful DPS spells to keep the battles moving quickly.
The Kardia ability is key to the job’s basic function as well. You can use Kardia on a single ally and cure them as you deal damage; a dream skill for any healers that love to DPS.
Eukrasia is another action you’ll be using quite frequently. After popping it, it will augment your basic healing and DPS attacks to have new effects such as applying barriers and adding a DPS effect to your basic attack, Dosis.
These basic actions form the foundation of the Sage job, allowing you to heal while doing light DPS, apply barriers, and as those barriers get knocked down, turn up the DPS even higher.
Of the two jobs we got to test, Sage feels the one most well-suited to newer or less experienced players. In fact, it seems like it may be a great first-time healer job. It basically demands that players mix in healing and DPS spells together in order to even function, and these learned skills can be applied to other healing obs where the DPS spells are a bit more nuanced and less intertwined with the healing.
On the other hand, Reaper is far more complex, at least going into it blind as we did in the media event. Unlike Sage which has a playstyle that experienced Healers at the very least should be able to settle into no problem, Reaper has a playstyle that is quite unique even among a crowded DPS category.
Reaper has a ton of actions and traits that evolve and get enhanced as you build up Reaper’s two gauges Soul Gauge and Shroud Gauge. On top of that, it has a decent amount of positional actions that are worked into the mix too.
You’ll need to use actions to generate Soul Gauge, the Soul Gauge can then be expended to perform powerful abilities that will eventually build up your Shroud Gauge. Once you’ve built up your Shroud Gauge enough, you can become the embodiment of the Reaper itself and turn into a DPS monster for a short period of time, giving you access to the Reaper’s most powerful skills.
The result is a job that is extremely busy and likely will have a fairly complex/long rotation with lots of little things to remember and consider as battles progress and the number of enemies changes. Personally, as cool as the job looks, I probably wouldn’t recommend it to someone who is still new to the game; someone that maybe just got into FFXIV over the last few months as it has grown exponentially.
In fact, I tend to recommend ranged/magical-DPS as they tend to be a bit more forgiving and allow players to get a more bird-eyes view of difficult fights instead of being right in the thick of things. This leads us nicely to what some may consider the “3rd new job” in Endwalker.
