While is okayish at 1v1(fairly struggles against i-frame) , on large scale pvp he is horrible. He can't survive. Tournaments are proved that. Yes he has the damage but there no point of having damage when you can't use it. It's like you have the car but no fuel. People had faulty assumptions about he is being a RANGED while he is ranged/melee. He is like 60% ranged 40%melee. With the recent reworks I think all es are updated and fine. And if a still performs worse at pve should be buffed. In my opinion if a can pull 6k trash at sycaria with 285 kutum is good enough for pve. Now back to the point. The only reason Sage was strong because he was updated while others are outdated but after the reworks that has been changed. Sage is struggling a lot. Now there is a way to fix the without making it broken.

Make Overcharge Bolt i-frame(invincible). That will fix the and make it relevant to the game.

Overcharge is gives new effects to skills. In Bolt s case it's let you use the Bolt while it's on cooldown.

Overcharging Bolt is however you need to cast a skill before it.

It basically you need to sacrifice a skill before use an overcharge dash. 

When someone gets a heart attack, technically dies, to restart the heart you need to defib. When person returns to the life, becomes someone more careful.

At August 25 Sage had an heart attack and technically he was dead for 4 minutes (1month in real life = 1 minute in game time [joking] ) he is already having brain damage, before death become permanent we should defib it and Overcharge I-frame Bolt is our defib. 

As much as i would like to get the iframe back on sage (both awakening and succession) I believe that is something that wont happen.
Sage in general needs a re-thinking on what the class is and what the devs want it to be. Right now its a very squishy class that has to SA trade, which usually ends up bad for the sage. Its a "blow them up before you blow up" case. Not a fun gameplay at all.

My take on this would be to lower Bolt (dash) CD to 1 second and transfer the overcharge to divine executioner. Lower the CD of divine executioner to 7-9seconds. 

This change allows the sage to use bolt without wasting skills and at the same time, keeps the concept the devs gave to the class. The change to divine executioner allows to avoid grabs and make viable the "iconic skill" of the sage.

For succession the change is simple. Increase the cast speed of all the skills by 10-15% and reduce Rift Chain cooldown to 3-4 seconds. To compensate increase the stamina consumption during CD. 
This change allows sage succession to keep the concept the devs gave to the class (squishy unprotected but big damage) while getting a bit of better movement but heavily punished if the sage just moves around (no stamina = no movement = dead)

The whole idea behind lacking protection and cc on awakening kit is because there was iframe dash. After removal of the iframe the class didn't get any changes on kit. 

If there is no iframe I wouldn't go like that. Instead I add vacuum effect on divine executioner s spear throw. Then remove the spear bolt core instead add ator s spear super armor core. Add Upsurge stun. Also remove that extra 250 stamina consumption from overcharged bolt, that's just silly. 

This will make the class relatively good.