Housing Blueprints
Stat Priority
The Stat priority for Sylvie is as follows:
- Item level / Intellect
- Haste
- Spirit
- Expertise
- Crit
Item level is king in Fellowship as main stat has the greatest effect on your damage, healing and survivability.
Haste decreases the global cooldown and increases the tick rate of your Flutterfly Healing and Life Petal. With Flower Power talented, haste also decreases the recharge time of your Heart Bloom charges.
Spirit decreases the cooldown of your ultimate and gives you a chance to refund the mana cost of an ability when used, also spawning a Prickly Vine. Remember, for each Prickly Vine you will generate 1 Boomshroom and all Flutterfly healing is 3% stronger. With the Symbiosis talent, Prickly Vine will also buff your Life Petal healing.
Expertise increases your healing and damage by a flat amount.
Critical Strike has a chance to double the effect of our damage and healing. It’s mostly an offensive stat but it does increase our throughput as well. The random nature of it makes it less desirable but it’s still good.
Remember, stat ratings have diminishing returns. For that reason, this stat priority should not be followed religiously and is mostly a guide for the early game. Towards the end of the gearing process, you will likely just be equipping any essence bonus socketed items you have. Do not concern yourself with farming "perfect" stats.
Item Modifiers
There is a lot to talk about with gear and Modifiers in Early Access Season 3 as the entire system was completely overhauled coming from Season 1 and 2. Gear can now roll Traits, similar to weapons from previous seasons.
Weapon traits can no longer be upgraded past level 1 but any duplicate traits from multiple sources effectively upgrades that trait up to a maximum of tier 4. Besides traits, gear can also roll primary stats, secondary stats and/or gem power.
BIS in season 3 is much more complex than in previous seasons and there is not yet a total consensus on what exact combination of traits we should aim for. Some things are certain though and by understanding the new categorization of Sylvie's abilities and of healing in general, we can make a rough prioritization for traits we should aim to have.
So first, let's understand the categories mentioned above. Season 3 introduces ability categories and for Sylvie those are as follows:
- Basic - Nettlebolt
- Core - Prickly Vine, Shroomsplosion, Fluttercall: Heal and Fluttercall: Restore Life
- Major - Safe Haven and Ironleaf Ward
- Power - Life Petal and Heart Bloom
- Control - Enfeebling Rootsap
- Defensive - Hidden Trail
- Utility - Cure Ailment and Fluttercall: Protect
Now that we understand the categories, we can start to understand why certain traits are going to be better for us than others. For example, 'The Wayfarer' is a trait that interacts with 'Core' abilities and gains value when using core abilities with a cooldown. However, the only core ability with a cooldown on Sylvie is Prickly Vine and even that is a relatively short cooldown. Understanding this, we can conclude that The Wayfarer is not going to be a very high value trait on Sylvie.
I'd also like to mention that traits that buff our damage could end up being very good for lower end content or in a meta where extra healing consistency and general stats aren't required. For now, I have ranked these traits lower, but keep that in mind.
In this section I'm going to talk about The Mad Gardener's Shawl and how I recommend building around it. Because Ironleaf Ward is a major ability, we can take better advantage of The Monarch and The Philosopher than if we were playing the Heart Bloom build. A few things between the two builds don't change and those are: we still want stats on leg/chest/weapon (ideally haste but spirit or int is also playable) and we still want to run the same 3 or 4 set bonuses.
Here is an example full build. Note that we don't need to stack 4/4 The Monarch but for The Philosopher we do want 4/4. 4/4 Emerald Judgement is used for First Strike uptime on long encounters, Martial Initiative is used because when played correctly it is a personal defensive, damage buff and healing buff and Visions Of Grandeur is used for ult generation. You should never have more than 1 point in Visions Of Grandeur but if you have extra points in Martial Initiative that is okay.
Here is what your gem tree looks like with the above build:
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Remember this is just an example, my gear doesn't look like this, but I wish it did. The reality is that fully perfect gear in season 3 takes a lot of farming and luck as there are multiple layers to RNG as compared to before.
For less experienced players or players doing lower end content, I would recommend a build that centers around Loop Of Unyielding Bloom. There's a few reasons for this.
First, this build has a much lower impact on your play style compared to the "default" Sylvie play style. It is lower apm, more passive and helps you easily and consistently meet group healing checks, even if you misplay. The absorbs also allow your group to misplay positioning and interrupts more than with the cloak build. The cloak build is centered around tank survivability and damage, both things you'll value less in lower end content.
In this build we don't value The Philosopher nearly as much as only Safe Haven and Ironleaf Ward are major abilities while Life Petal and Heart Bloom are power abilities. One point in The Monarch is still good as we'll still get good value out of it with our haste. Instead we can aim to get The Intrepid, probably just 1 point although more is fine.
Here is an example trait/blessing/gem setup when playing with the ring legendary.
Necklace Traits
I've broken down the Necklace Traits by tier below:
We are going to aim to have The Boar and The Mountain in most scenarios, especially for newer/less comfortable players or players who primarily pug. These traits make you basically unkillable and make your mistakes much more forgiving.
The Lake, The Oak and The Gryphon are all great choices when given the correct situation, with The Lake being the most consistently valuable of the three.
The River is very strong when paired with The Mad Gardener's Shawl and lets you deal with frequent dispels easier as a bonus. This should be your go-to option when your personal survivability isn't an issue.
The Wolf and The Dragon aren't bad for the defensive value they grant you upon casting Hidden Trail. However, they require you to use Hidden Trail as a defensive rather than a movement ability and Sylvie otherwise has no other movement abilities. The Boar also has a lower cooldown than the base cooldown of Hidden Trail, making it hard to argue against.
I would not consider running The Oak, The Stag or The Viper in their current iterations.
Gems & Gem Builds
Here is the gem setup I recommend for Sylvie in the Early game. It will help supplement your haste while giving you good value from green/blue:
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
When you have better gear, you can choose to go for a setup that runs 10 green/10 blue and then either purple, yellow or red with whatever remaining gem power. Here is an example:
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Either setup can be used with either the ring or cloak legendary.
Why yellow? Haste is one of our strongest stats and Rogue's Resurgence is a very strong defensive node.
Why green? Green provides general cdr, ehp through the absorb shield (albeit inconsistently) and also gives us our rank 2 First Strike that will be proccing from our Emerald Judgement.
Why blue? Spirit is a very strong stat for us and Resonating Soul is the best defensive node that you can get from gem power. When running a blue heavy tree, you will have greatly increased ult uptime.
Red gives us a lot of throughput on bosses and a boost to ehp, whereas purple gives throughput on all encounters but less ehp.
White gems should basically be ignored outside of maybe white 3 if you have some random gem power slots that you haven't rolled into other colors yet, but it is definitely our worst tree.