Core Sylvie Guide
Ву OneTooMany.
This guide assumes that you’ve first read your tooltips. I will not explain every single detail that is perfectly described by your tooltips, but rather focus on the less intuitive/fundamental parts.
This guide is intentionally written without exact numbers, to stay agnostic to minor balancing changes etc. Also because I’m lazy. If you want the exact numbers of everything, again, read your tooltips.
Abbreviations
- RL: “Fluttercall: Restore Life”
- FCH: “Fluttercall: Heal”
- HB: “Heart Bloom”
- LP: “Life Petal”
- HOT: “Heal over Time”
Sylvie Mechanics
Flutterfly Healing
Any healing done by FCH or RL, including both the RL application burst and the RL HOT, counts as flutterfly healing for the purposes of other mechanics in Sylvie’s kit.
Bluey
You have one bluefly (named Bluey). He either floats around you or an ally, depending on where you assign him, and has varying effects depending on where he is.
In essence, putting Bluey on an ally makes you heal that ally a lot more, at the cost of spending more mana and healing everyone else for much less.
Pinkfly Assignments
You have 4 pink flutterflies. No more, no less. You can think of them as permanent pets that you actively delegate tasks to. Each pinkfly is visible in the game world, and you can visually see them zipping around as you use FCH and RL.
When you use FCH, one pinkfly becomes active as a HOT on your target.
When you use RL, two pinkflies become occupied for short delay (scaling with GCD) as they apply the RL to your target, before returning to you, idle.
When you use FCH/RL, pinkflies will always try to assign idle flies whenever possible, but will fall back to reassigning those currently active as a HOT when necessary.
To summarize, each of your 4 pinkflies are either:
- Idle (floating around you)
- Active as a Pinkfly HOT (floating around you/ally)
- Occupied applying RL (swirling around you/ally)
Heart Bloom
While HB is active, it “stores”/”copies” a percentage of all flutterfly healing that you do, including overhealing. It periodically pulses this stored healing onto your team.
HB does not spend the accumulated healing when pulsing. Any healing stored into HB will be counted in all subsequent pulses.
HB pulses cannot crit, and are unaffected by haste and expertise.
(Those familiar with healing from World of Warcraft might see the similarity to Resto Shaman’s Cloudburst Totem.)
How to Play Sylvie
Breathe
This is more general healing advice than specific Sylvie tip, but it can be very easy to be overwhelmed as a healer, especially if you are new to it.
- Your team can often survive a lot more than you think.
- People don’t have to be full health ASAP, they just have to be not dead.
- It’s never about healing as much as possible, it’s about healing as little as necessary.
- You are not expected to be able to heal excessive avoidable damage.
- You should always try to recover a wipe, but don’t blame yourself if you fail to pull off a miracle.
If you ever feel yourself panicking mid-fight, pause for a second and just breathe. The worst thing that can happen is that you wipe. I believe in you, you’ve got this, just breathe.
Don’t Press Your Buttons
(This section is about not pressing your healing buttons. Follow ABC, and always press your damage buttons whenever you’re not pressing your healing buttons.)
Sylvie’s has a lot of resources that you can apply to solve problems. It is very easy to overcommit these resources, leaving you dry when you need them. This includes the basic resources like cooldowns and mana, which applies to all healers, but the most subtle resource usage trap that I see inexperienced Sylvie players fall into is overvaluing pinkfly uptime and/or not conserving pinkfly uptime by RL weaving.
RL Weaving
Pressing RL effectively comes with a cost of future GCDs spent reassigning the pinkflies that were occupied by it. RL weaving lets you partly ignore that cost. Efficient Sylvie play presses FCH a very minimal amount.
RL weaving means intentionally not pressing RL twice in a row. If you use RL two GCDs in a row, there is a short period of time where all pinkflies are occupied, removing all active FCH HOTs. However, if you weave a non-RL GCD in between the two RL GCDs, the same flies applying the first RL have time to finish and become idle again before the second RL, leaving the two other pinkflies unaffected.
Most of the time you can get away with just a pinkfly on the tank, meaning that you might not even need to apply the idle pinkflies back after you’ve finished weaving.
Sometimes, rarely, you have to spam RL without weaving to keep your team alive, that’s just how it is, but always always always try to weave RLs instead of spamming them if you can get away with it. Your future GCDs will thank you.
Bluey Weaving
If you move Bluey right after using RL, the RL will be affected by the new Bluey placement instead of the one before. Combining this with RL weaving can lead to some very efficient sequences in specific situations.
The situations where you want to move Bluey are rarer than you’d think, but they do exist. Don’t move Bluey just because you can, but when you do want to move Bluey, consider weaving it with RL.
Common patterns include:
- RL DPS1, Retract Bluey from Tank, RL DPS2.
- Both RL pops will be buffed by Bluey’s groupheal bonus.
- RL DPS1, Retract Bluey from Tank, RL DPS1, Send Bluey to DPS1.
- For the very rare case of suddenly needing to spam RLs for ST healing on non-tank.
- RL Tank, Send Bluey to tank, RL Tank.
Trust the Flower
Life Petal
During the early stages of the game where LP is very strong, approximately contender to mid-adept, Nettle to the Petal is a very efficient talent. It is surprising just how much you can heal by just pressing LP and casting a few Nettlebolts, instead of overcommitting an LP as well as an RL or two. You just have to let go and trust LP to handle things for you.
Life Petal eventually falls off in relative strength as you get more gear. The exponential decay each tick makes haste do very little for it, and spirit has no interaction with it either. It is still worth pressing, it still does decent numbers for a single GCD, but it stops being the powerhouse it was in the early game. You start trusting HB instead at this stage.
Heart Bloom
HB is the strongest ability in your kit come lategame. It slices, it dices, it ticks for 50% of your max health. A lot of mechanics can be handled by simply trusting HB to handle it, and it is very easy to overcommit when your HB is already fat enough to handle everything you’re trying to solve.
HB is primarily a groupheal tool, but it is not unusual to press HB just to aid in efficient tank healing, if you know you won’t be needing it for group healing later.
You almost always want to press RL before pressing HB: The HB will spawn just before the RL pops, effectively smuggling an extra RL GCD into your HB window.
The best way to ramp HB depends on the exact profile of damage you’re trying to heal. It’s not about making the fattest HB possible at all times, it’s keeping your team alive without overcommitting resources. It’s all a balance that you’ll have to learn yourself, and I unfortunately can’t prescribe exactly what you should do in every situation.
Common patterns include:
- (Bluey on Tank) RL on Tank, HB, RL on Tank.
- That’s it. Your HB is big enough for most low/moderate damage with just 2 RLs on Tank. Return to Nettlebolting.
- (Bluey on You) RL spam/weave on the team.
- More immediate groupheal from RLs to cover damage while HB is still building.
- (Bluey on Tank) RL spam/weave on Tank.
- Makes for very very fat HBs. You rarely need HBs this fat.
- Most of the groupheal happens at the end of the HB window, this is very inefficient vs constant rot damage.
- Enjoy!