Playstyle Overview
Sylvie revolves around utilizing her Flutterflys and Flowers to keep your group alive and deal damage. It can be very easy to get overwhelmed as a healer, especially if you are newer to the role or unfamiliar with the content, but just breathe and remember that it’s okay to fail, and sometimes you’ll have groups that make it more difficult for you than normal.
An important thing to remember is to ABC: Always be casting.
Healing Abilities
First I want to go over all your healing buttons. There might be brief mention of certain damaging abilities but I won’t touch on them in this sub section and instead this will entirely cover all things healing.
Pink Flutterflies
Sylvie has 4 pink flutterflies at her disposal and are your primary source of healing. You’re able to assign one pink flutterfly per target with Fluttercall: Heal and it’ll remain on them with no duration, healing them over time. These Flutterflies interact with almost every aspect of your kit and are very important.
Fluttercall: Restore Life
Fluttercall: Restore Life is the only reactive heal at your disposal and is a solid way to stay on top of your allies health bars if they are taking heavy amounts of damage. When you use Restore Life, 2 Pink Flutterflies become occupied for a brief moment. They move to apply this heal to your target, before returning to you and idling.
You can also do something referred to as weaving. What this means is essentially avoiding pressing Fluttercall: Restore Life twice in a row and instead using a different GCD in between uses. This dramatically decreases the amount you’re reassigning Pink Flutterflies since it won’t consume every fly you have out.
Sometimes you do just have to spam Restore Life to keep your team alive, but always try to weave when you can to be more efficient.
Blue Flutterfly
You have one Blue Flutterfly (nicknamed Bluey). Depending on where you assign this Flutterfly it does varying things.
If you assign it to yourself, it increases your Flutterfly Healing on all allies by 50% and reduces your mana costs by 20%.
If you assign it to someone else, it increases their Flutterfly healing received by 150%.
Typically you’ll dance between assigning this to your Tank or yourself depending on whether or not the group is taking damage. If there is no group damage you’ll default to having this on the Tank. You almost never assign Bluey to a DPS. It’s just far more efficient in 99% of cases to have it on yourself and use other buttons on them.
Life Petal
Life Petal is one of your healing cooldowns. It pulses healing periodically for 14 seconds. Its healing diminishes over time, starting off strong and focuses on the most injured allies in your party. During the early game this cooldown is very powerful and efficient. It has a very low cooldown at 60s, reduced even further with Nettlebolt casts. A lot of the time you can press this and trust it to handle any damage event. It does spawn 2 boomshrooms when it fades which I’ll touch on more later, but just keep in mind that unless you’re holding this for a specific damage event, just use it on cooldown.
The only problem is that it doesn’t scale particularly well in comparison to some other cooldowns we have access to, so once you hit around Adept gear you shouldn’t solely rely on it. It’s still worth pressing, but it stops being the powerhouse it is in the early game.
Heart Bloom
Heart Bloom is the strongest ability in your kit from mid-game all the way to late-game. It essentially replaces Life Petal in regards to allowing a single cooldown to carry damage events.
Heart Bloom places a flower at your side that stores 15% of all the Flutterfly healing you do, releasing this healing to all allies every 3 seconds for 15 seconds. When it fades it drops 3 boomshrooms.
This is effectively a ramping healing cooldown, and your goal is to increase the amount of healing this does as much as possible inside the window it's up. The best way to ramp this can vary but you’ll always want to Fluttercall: Restore Life right before using Heart Bloom since overhealing is included in the increase.
The main ways to ramp this are:
- For most damage: With Bluey on Tank = Restore Life on Tank -> Replace any pinks needed
- For Severely heavy group damage: With Bluey on Tank = Restore Life Spam
- For Triaging while Bloom builds: With Bluey on yourself = Restore Life weave on your team
The case in which you Fluttercall: Restore Life spam the tank is for extremely heavy damage events that don’t last a particularly long time. It’s extremely inefficient to do this for rot damage since the idea is to buff the later half of your Bloom as much as possible, doing little healing to the group before that moment.
Safe Haven
Safe Haven places a circle on the ground which increases the healing of all allies inside by 40%. With the “Natural Protector” Talent, this also applies absorb shields to all affected. This is a great cooldown to aid in keeping your group alive or can simply be used as an extra cooldown to aid your Tank. It has a 2 minute cooldown but if you plan well you can get multiple uses of this in every dungeon and it makes not only your life but the life of your allies considerably easier.
Fluttercall: Jubilee
Last but not least, Sylvie’s Ultimate, Fluttercall: Jubilee. This is a very powerful cooldown. It summons Dream Flutterflies that evenly distribute your party's health every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. You also get 30% haste for 20 seconds as well as a large amount of mana regeneration. This is a fantastic way to stabilize your group and it also spawns six Prickly Vine to do damage.
Damage Abilities
Sylvie has the capacity to deal significant amounts of damage. This can also increase your healing output to certain degrees.
Nettlebolt
Nettlebolt is your primary filler ability. It deals a minor amount of damage and reduces the cooldown of Life Petal with each successful cast. A good rule of thumb is: if in doubt, Nettlebolt.
Prickly Vine
Prickly Vine is a damaging ability you’ll want to use off cooldown. It’s a great way to deal extra damage on Sylvie and it also increases your healing throughput with certain talents. It costs no mana and spawns a Vine at your feet that deals damage to targets for 27 seconds. When it expires, it drops a boomshroom.
Shroomsplosion
Finally, Shroomsplosion. This ability lets you command all of your Boomshrooms available to launch at your target, detonating to deal splash damage. Based on the amount of abilities that spawn these for you, and the fact they have no duration or range, these are invaluable for dealing damage on Sylvie. You’ll accumulate a handful and then use them to deal large amounts of damage to mobs. Assuming you’re using your cooldowns properly, it’s surprising how many boomshrooms you’ll end up with and you can contribute massively to removing troublesome mobs from pulls.
Mitigation & Utility Abilities
Ironleaf Ward
Ironleaf Ward (similar to Iron Bark from WoW) is a 60 second cooldown external you can use on an ally to reduce their damage taken by 20% for 12 seconds. It also applies an absorb with talents.
It’s a brilliant way to mitigate incoming damage for a party member taking heavy damage. You’ll mostly use this on the Tank but it can be very good to use this on anyone in need, and since it only has a 60 second cooldown you can be very liberal with it.
Enfeebling Rootsap
Enfeebling Rootsap is quite a unique cooldown as it requires a target as well as an active Prickly Vine. Sylvie commands a Prickly Vine to Enfeeble the target causing it to deal 20% less damage for 6 seconds. This is a very powerful cooldown that can be used to massively reduce group damage at times.
Hidden Trail
On its own, Hidden Trail is nothing special. It’s effectively a movement speed increase. However, with talents it can be a 20% damage reduction CD on a 30 second cooldown, making it ideal for harder content.