Now that I've done all high end content this expac (except TOP lol) on healer I find it hard to believe that anyone who thinks Sage is a well designed job or "better version" of Scholar is doing high end content on either job - and I don't mean to say that with offense. At both levels, prog and reclears/farming, Scholar just offers more to a party than Sage does. However, I feel that numbers don't really matter if a job inherently feels "good" to play or is fun. And if people like Sage, I'm happy for them. I hope they continue to move Sage in a direction that Sage players are happy with, without the cost of cutting into Scholar more to do so. If SGE offers people something that has what they like and doesn't have what they might not like about other jobs, such as opportunity costs or more involved management, that's totally fine. Diversity within this role needs to be cultivated more and encouraged more.

Sage's aesthetics aside, it is disappointing in nearly every aspect and represents everything truly wrong with the 5.0+ era of healer design. Sage shows that the developers either have no idea what to do with healers as a role, or are truly scared to try to innovate out of fear that something may get left behind in Party Finder again. This situation still happened though, with SGE being dumped in DSR in favor of taking Scholar because of how much better Scholar was (and still is) at mitigation in a mitigation intensive encounter leading to SGE having to get a buff. SGE's design also shows how obsessive the job design team is with having parity of healing skills, rather than having diverse skills that might be better or worse for a given encounter. This obsession leads to SGE especially being bland, where as the other three healers have some nuance to their kits that is just completely stripped away from Sage.

Do Addersgall heals really need to be copies of Scholar's? AST and WHM have different oGCDs and GCDs. Essential Dignity is different than say, Tetra or Solace. I don't think WHM has any functional equivalent to Essential Dignity, nor does AST really have anything that is similar to Lilies. And while AST and WHM do have a lot of similar buttons (Horoscope vs Plenary, Celestial Intersection vs Benison, Exaltation vs Aquaveil, their non lily GCDs) Astrologian has to approach healing differently than White Mage does, and that's a great thing. This isn't the case for Sage. Also, why do you have to heal when it isn't needed in order to keep your MP economy going?

Druochole is literally just Lustrate. Ixochole is literally just Indomitibility. An attempt was made for Taurochole vs Excog and Kerachole vs Soil, they do the same thing and fill the same functionality and you can swap between jobs and put them in the same places in your healing timelines and nothing changes for you. Kerachole's difference was a bit more interesting and an upside but now that they've made Soil even bigger it feels less like an actual difference or plus for Sage. Even some non Addersgall buttons of SGEs are just copies of Scholar ones. Pepsis is just Emergency Tactics but worse and Physis is just Whispering Dawn + Illum without the mitigation. Rhizomata is just Recitation if you decided to make it terrible.

The only interesting or slightly unique healing buttons that SGE has are Haima, Panhaima and potentially Pneuma, but I think Pneuma is underutilized for what it could be. Haima and Panhaima are actually cool and unique, and it makes me wonder why they played so much else of Sage's kit so safely. I wish they would've moved more of the kit into a direction similar to those buttons.

Some people say that Kardia is "Embrace but better" and I would just disagree entirely. Embrace does not require GCD uptime versus Kardia, meaning you are getting full value out of it when using GCD heals like Adlo/Succor or you have downtime mechanics. In something like P9S or P12Sp1's limit cut, you are still getting those Embraces, where you aren't getting the healing from Kardia as Sage during those mechanics. You can also use Fey Union to target specific people, and Eos will automatically heal targets for you. It has much more flexibility than Kardia. Even this tier I would just make Eos move over to a tank's platform after the tank towers in P10S and she heals them with no issues.

Eukrasia is such a letdown of a system. They came up with a good way to reduce "button bloat" and to also give Sage an actual DPS kit and it... is for two GCD heals and the DoT. Great. Riveting.

Addersting is also a terrible, terrible system. It requires an outright rework, in my opinion. Toxicon is such a terrible concept considering you cannot even use it if you don't have your free stacks from instancing/downtime or if you do not commit fully to a 330 potency loss to gain one stack back. You have to commit to 4 Ruin IIs on Scholar for a full loss of a Broil (295/300 potency) versus how you have to gain them back on Sage. Scholar too, can choose whenever to use Ruin II it wants, and even though it's always a DPS loss, SGE doesn't get the luxury of having full uptime during it. Of course, with 1.5s cast times, you should just be slidecasting everything, but the flexibility of SCH's kit vs the rigidity of SGE's makes me scratch my head how people can unironically say SGE is better designed. In what aspect?

This job is just absolute crap for the new healer job after 6 years. It fails to be what people were asking for, a healer with a more involved DPS rotation, and it also fails to do anything interesting with its healing kit which seems to be where SE wants these jobs to be different. It's honestly like they asked themselves "how can we take a good idea and make it worse?" But it's not for me, and that's fine. I just hope its design doesn't continue to cut things out of Scholar's by osmosis, much like it did with Energy Drain losing its MP recovery going into Endwalker.