I've only done up to EX and one savage fight as sage. WaxSw basically nailed it. But i'll add this. Nocturnal sect was removed from AST to make way for sage. And instead of taking a handful of ideas from noct ast and putting those in sage, they made sage a copy/paste of SCH which really shows that either the devs ran out of time, had no ideas, didn't care, didn't try, or some combination of the above.