Awakening Sage, the God Fallen from Grace...

Sage's awakening was designed around his movement (bolt) being fully protected through invulnerability frames (i-frames) on a 2 second cooldown. Typically, classes that have this type of movement such as Awakening Sorceress, Succession Dark Knight, Awakening Hashashin, or even Awakening Ranger have high stamina costs associated with that movement. This was the case for Sage's awakening as well. At the time of its release, Sage's awakening was ill received (in the PvP scene) due to the high damage output that came in conjunction with his ability to easily move about the battlefield with little risk of danger. After the largely negative feedback, Sage received a variety of nerfs that addressed all of the PvP issues that the community had, such as conversion of i-frames to super armors and decreased damage. Unfortunately, this came at the cost of his ability to effectively grind end-game spots in PvE. After the class reboot, awakening Sage is now considered one of the worst classes in the game as it cannot keep up in either PvP nor PvE with all of the other classes that got updates during the class REBOOT as well as the newer classes that have since been released. Hopefully with this post, I can gauge the community's support on my proposed changes that should alleviate most, if not all, of the main PvE struggles that awakening Sage currently has.

Primary PvE Issues

Awakening Sage has a variety of skills that allow him to effectively move around quickly which is advantageous in higher end grind spots such as Ash Forest, Hexe Sanctuary, or even Crypt of Resting Thoughts. The one caveat that awakening Sage has is that most of his movement abilities are also his damage abilities, meaning they must be used on a target. The other drawback is that, since his damage abilities are also his movement abilities, they cost stamina rather than mana. This means that awakening Sage quickly runs out of stamina when trying to avoid attacks that do heavy damage or reposition in a fight. Normally this wouldn't be too much of an issue as there are a lot of non-mobile classes that can easily grind these places such as Awakening Witch or Succession Woosa. The difference is that both of those classes have various forward guards to help them stay alive when taking damage from these areas whereas awakening Sage does not. Fortunately, if a class has stamina issues and also lacks protections, they would have access to various forms of sustain through abilities that provide HP on hit, but awakening Sage lacks that as well. Although there are many changes I'd like to see addressed to make awakening Sage more competitive with other classes, I'm a realist and I'm going to highlight the five changes that I think would have the biggest impact on his shortcomings allowing him to become a viable class once again.

Because I'd rather allow the devs to decide what direction they want to take the class, I'll be proposing two suggestions per skill:

Addressing Stamina Issues

Bolt: Currently, this ability costs 200 stamina to cast. This ability can be cast while on cooldown if used after casting any other ability for a cost of 250 stamina. Skills with this high of a stamina cost typically would be fully i-frame. For Sage, it is i-frame when Overcharged (casted after another ability) otherwise, it is only Super Armor. However, if casting the Overcharged version while on cooldown, it loses the i-frame protection.

Overcharged (Left) / Normal (Right):

Overcharged (on cooldown):

I propose:
Option 1 (preferred): Remove the overcharge condition and make it just i-frame when not on cooldown, Reduce the stamina cost from 200/250->150 flat.

Option 2: Add All Evasion Rate +9% for 10s when using the skill (resembling other classes like awakening Hashashin whose class identity is almost identical to awakening Sage).

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Divine Executioner: Almost all classes have a means to escape a fight to either take a break or recover their resources such as HP, MP, WP, SP, Stamina, etc. and Divine Executioner would be the awakening Sage equivalent of that ability. This ability however causes awakening Sage to be stamina locked. An ability that should allow Sage some time to recover stamina ends up costing stamina and locking him out of recovery for even longer. Costs 80MP, or 150 Stamina if using the flow.

Normal Cast:

I propose:
Option 1 (preferred): Remove the stamina lock, change the stamina cost to mana cost, Reduce cooldown from 17s -> 15s.

Option 2: Remove the stamina lock, Reduce cooldown 17s -> 12s.

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Spear Bolt: Originally when awakening Sage was released, this ability was unprotected and caused stiffness, which caused massive issues in PvE as well as PvP because you could get knocked out of your Spear Bolt mid-dash. To address this, they added Super Armor and removed the stiffness and transferred the stiffness to Shock Relay (but removed his only other Forward Guard from the Shock Relay in exchange). After the nerfs to Shock Relay due to adding protections on Spear Bolt, the Super Armor wasn't helping Sage survive in PvE or PvP so the Super Armor was replaced with Super Armor->i-Frame->Super Armor but the stamina cost was unchanged and the distance was shortened. In lower end grind spots and PvP, Super Armor is fine. However, in places like Hexe Sanctuary, Super Armor is more or less meaningless as you will still die from the damage you're taking. Succession Sage has access to a better form of this ability and I think the protections should be unified.

Awakening (Left) / Succession (Right):

I propose:
Option 1 (preferred): Forward Guard -> I-frame (like prime spear bolt, but without the linger since it is more spammable).

Option 2: Reduce stamina from 150 -> 100.

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Lightning Prison: Awakening Sage lacks a method to sustain in areas where they are constantly receiving damage. Since awakening Sage's main forms of AoE damage come from Lightning Prison and Rift Storm, which cause him to be standing still in Super Armor, he takes quite a bit of damage in end game spots like Hexe Sanctuary and Ash Forest. Lightning Prison already has built in sustain of 25 HP per hit but this value is severely outdated based on the healing we see from classes such as Woosa. In the GIF below, I even have HP recovery add-ons for it and the healing is still extremely low. Another issue with Lightning Prison is that, in an attempt to prevent awakening Sage from being able to kill people in their forts in NW/Siege from outside of the walls, they made Lightning Prison have extremely unforgiving elevation/terrain parameters. Even being a few pixels above/below where the skill is being cast from will cause the ability to not hit the target and should probably be addressed.

Skill Description (Left) / Skill Effect (Right):

I propose:
Option 1 (preferred): Double the HP recovery per hit from 25 -> 50.

Option 2: Make ability ignore terrain/elevation like witch/wizard meteor/blizzard

Quality of Life Change

Rift Storm: One of awakening Sage's main damage abilities when grinding. This skill requires awakening Sage to go inside the mobs to use it, which can be deadly since its provided protection is Super Armor. Unfortunately, even though Sage risks taking a lot of damage to use it, the radius of it is so small that sometimes it doesn't hit all of the mobs. In Succession, Sage can pre-cast the ability and complete the cast after repositioning in order to stay more safe but if awakening repositions during the skill it will cancel the second half of the ability which causes Sage to lose half of his damage (which I will show below).

Skill Description (Left) / Awakening Normal Cast (Right): 

Awakening Cancel (Left) / Succession Cancel (Right):

I propose:
Option 1 (preferred): Allow awakening to pre-cast Rift Storm and reposition with Bolt just like Succession can with Rift Chain.

Option 2: Increase AoE size by 1.5x.

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There are plenty of other changes I'd like to see with the class involving protections and core abilities and the like but I think these 5 abilities need the most love and would love to hear everyone's opinions on my changes. 

Thanks for taking the time to read my post! :) 

- A slightly disgruntled Awakening Sage player who loves BDO but refuses to roll off of the class <3

EDIT: Thank you to the Adventurers who pointed out my mistakes about Bolt and Spear Bolt's original protections. I've edited the post to reflect the true evolution of the ability over time. Keep the feedback coming guys!

Every skill of his kit, their stamina costs, their protections and the overall defense scalling of the class (which is one of the worse of the game, if not the worst) were designed with iframe on his dash in mind. Everything revolves around it and they killed the class as soon as they removed it.

They can tinker all they want (ofen making things worse because they don't play it, like removing FG from Shock Relay, his main opening, and such) , the class simply cannot work without this fundamental. It would be like wanting to balance Ryu in Street Fighter by remonving his Hadoken and Dragon Punch.

The saddest thing is that after their infamous class reboot, which came right after these nerfs, a lot of other classes became far more dominant and for a much longer time than awakened sage has ever been, even in his strongest state.

But alas they won't go back, they are too affraid of irrationnal wrath from players that never even tested it. The class is dead in the water.

I like these suggestions a lot. I know a lot of newer sages struggle with keeping themselves alive in more difficult spots so it feels as if they need to stay in lower difficulty spots longer than a lot of classes.

The primary PVE focus on these changes are nice breath of fresh air, but these changes would also give it another minor pump outside of PVE

as well. A place where awakening is being significantly dwarfed by succession sage.

Come on PA, since classes like Drakania exist in the game, I don't think a buff to awakening sage is too much to ask for.

Make Zeus whole again!

Current state of awakenign sage could be summed into few quotes.
Most accurate being:
"Last one to enter the fight, first one to run out of stamina"
Issue with stamina is not only visible in pvp but also in pve in mid spots like orc camp. I don't see a reason for spec to suffer this much when event it's succession counterpart has good stamina with way more damage to dish out outside of combo.
It's really flustrating not being able to fight back because I simply can't breathe.

One of the biggest turn off to me about awakening sage is his stamina. Not only pvp but also in pve especially for places that require constant pack to pack movement. Like give the old man some stamina buffs already!

A very nice post with a lot of thought behind what improvements could genuinely make Sage feel better in a meta state where he currently feels completely out of place and practically unviable in a lot of content, hopefully this can gain some traction!

A couple short notes from my side:

-Spear bolt used to be an unprotected catch instead of the (semi-) protected skill it is now, not full iframe, but the problems described persist anyways and deserve some fixing up.

-Personally, I'd love to see some attention being brought to the skill Lightning Surge, which, for a skill that can be mechanically quite interesting, feels completely left behind especially when compared to other kits in the game. With high stamina cost, no protection, very short movement and subpar damage, it seems completely out of place when compared to, say, Awakened Hashs' Silent Breach, which basically has the same use cases but provides SA for large part of its duration, doesn't cost stamina, has a better CC and does more effective damage. Lowering or removing the Stam cost and adding SA, even at the cost of the Stiffen CC, would go a long way in improving Sages currently miserable mobility and general flow of the kit!

-Lastly, I can only pray for a revert on the skill Impaling Flash, while the changes were marketed as a buff due to the option to return to the starting point, this mechanic is practically made useless in all situations by the range nerf that accompanied it. The skill feels genuinely horrible to use since the "buffs" and is another one of the main reasons why Awk Sage has a horrendous time trying to move from point A to B

Yes please , new to the sage just leveled my first one and I would for sure stay on the class longer with these changes. 

The best defense is a good offense, buff its damage so his skills don't feel like multiple wet noodle attacks.

Upvote. 

keep the Fotm losers off the class but give the actual mains some help.