Quote Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull View Post
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.
From some of Yoshi P's interviews prior to Endwalker, it sounds to me like PVP Sage greater respresents his original description of the job. He mentioned how Sage would be able to apply a barrier effect to allies through DPS, and when the barrier was broken, you would gain a DPS resource. PVE Sage has no way of applying barriers through DPS actions, but PVP Sage does. Eurkrasian Dosis grants a barrier, and when that barrier breaks, you get a charge of Toxikon II as a free OGCD DPS attack independent of Toxikon which is otherwise a regular OGCD attack with a short cooldown and charges. If we look at Alphinaud's MSQ instance battle, Toxikon is OGCD there as well.

I think Sage was going to have something closer to what PVP offers, but something happened that made them pivot, possibly balance concerns. And rather than finding a healthy solution, they just replicated Scholar more than whatever the job already had. Which was a massive mistake.