Quote Originally Posted by Connor View Post
Frankly I can see both sides of the argument about Sage.

It does feel like they totally baited players by telling them it would be some ‘offensive-oriented healer’ that ‘heals through damage’, then it came out and it’s just Scholar again lol. It barely differentiates itself from the other healers and Kardia is just an invisible fairy less abilities. That’s not going into things like making Toxicon II a dps-loss but also making it pretty much the only heal-dps interaction the job has. Hell, White Mage is arguably more of an ‘offensive healer that heals through damage’ with Lily/Misery management and alignment.

On the other hand though, anytime SE talked about Sage before release, I always assumed it came with the caveat of ‘offensive healer… in the content of ffxiv ’. Which, while ultimately disappointing, makes how it actually came out start to make a sad amount of sense.

Personally I feel like the fact they made so little effort to differentiate it from Scholar hurts Sage a lot. I can honestly forsee them creating another ‘Heavensward Bard/Machinist’ style buff war in future. They’re so extremely similar that basically any kind of individuality puts one ahead of the other, so the devs will have to spend the entire expansion constantly rebalancing them throughout to try and stop them constantly overtaking each other.
I think you make some very good points. I would have to say that my expectations were along the lines of an ‘offensive-oriented healer’ that ‘heals through damage’, although the initial trailer was less than impressive- aside from pretty animations- and as you say it was pretty much as SCH clone. So I would go into the 'lukewarm' or the 5/10 camp - has promise, however needs work.