It is blatantly obvious that the class is dead. Succession spec is completely irrelevent and all that awakening has going for it is that its "not bad" at grinding so basically normal.

People actually make fun of you for playing it. If you're seen casting divine executioner in RBF you're laughed at.

Succession had a niche of being the "caster" version of succ striker PVE, but that's not allowed I guess. They have to make it completely useless.

The recent awakening buffs made it unfun to play, made the grind more clunky and less fluid. The """buffs""" didnt address any of its issues. If you want to buff the awakening then buff the awakening. Don't make us delete our stamina bars with rift chain or make us forced to add 0 dmg pre-awaken skills into our already very long combos. 

Just actually buff sage, PA. Stop the PTSD, sage won't go destroying planets if he is playable.

What's even sadder is that even when they try to buff the class, like in the most recent patch, they have so few understanding of the class mechanics and issues that it ends up being a nerf ....

The dev commentary in the global lab patch note is quite hilarious and revealing of the fact that nobody plays the class anymore at PA.

Sage’s Impaling Flash is one of the skills representing awakening. In order to use this skill more actively, we have given the option to return to the original position (where the first cast was performed) after using Impaling Flash. As a result, it has been improved to return to the original position or use finishing skills near the target as before.

In addition, to deal damage in a more stable state, a defense check has been added to the Spear Bolt and flow: aftershock skills. (However, as the two skills are added, the defense judgment effect of the existing Core: Spear Bolt has been removed.)

In addition, when Bolt is on cooldown in Kibelius state, the Rift Chain skill can be used immediately, adding a bit of survivability.

They talk about "improvements" of some skills to make them more "iconic", with modifications that made them actually useless from now on and that nobody asked for, like Impaling Fash.

In this example, if they want Awakened Sage to be able to hit targets below him like they showed in the the gif,  well that's quite easy, they should just have given terrain check back to Lightning Prison and Interrogate .... but not messing up with one of the few skills that worked.

Of course, people who never touched the class, or only when it was busted at release (like every other class), but cried about the sorc nerfs scheduled in the GLab, to the point said nerfs were basically canceled, have already downvoted.

I would also agree that there is PTSD regarding this class. They foolishly released a broken class that everyone FOTM rerolled to. It was OP at launch, and as a result everyone who wasn't a Sage hated him. The thing is, Sage has been systematically nerfed over the course of one year, patch after patch, while other classes were buffed.

All Sage players have rerolled to other classes, especially Wizard or Hashashin, and when the 5 Sage players left complain about the state of the class, we get laughed at by people who are stuck in May 2021 and still have Sage PTSD and just hate the class. Basically no-one except for RPers is playing Sage anymore, yet we're still bullied by the playerbase and PA that Sage is broken and needs to be nerfed.

Yeah the impaling flash change was undercooked.  They should have made the "return to original position" property a flow input like: hold s would have you return to your original position once it's done, and just pressing nothing would make it work like it did before.

Yep. On top of that they also nerfed the range of the skill.

Right now it's not really usuable anymore, even in PvE where other skills do a better job for what it does now, while before the patch it allowed to jump easily from pack to pack. Not anymore.

Sage was a medium range battlemage during release. Battlemage archtype is meant to sacrifice range for damage and tankiness, because it implies excess risk to have shorter range than the typical mage. After several changes he is neither tanky nor high damage(compared with other classes). If they dont want him to have iFrames then add a evasion or dr buff to one of his skills. If they dont want to do that than add more base stats to his evasion so he can go evasion.