Build Guide - Sage

Introduction

After becoming a Sage, you’ll have two new types of spells to worry about compared to when you were just a Mage: Summons and Damage over Time (DoT), both of which become an integral part of your kit. Outside of dealing damage, though, you’ll now have another role you’ll often fill, and that’s being a healer. The healer and damage roles of sage each have different best stats and abilities, so you’ll have to get used to swapping loadouts and gear if you want to be optimal.

Summons

Unlike at T1, in T2 and as a Sage, you actually get powerful summons you’ll want to use in many of your strongest builds. The key thing to know about summons is that their stats are based on your character's stats, but they have their own move pool they use with their own cooldowns and multipliers. Upgrading the level of summons doesn’t improve their multipliers but increases their stat scaling. Most summons will be ignored by enemy aggro; however, if there is no valid target for them to hit, summons will be chosen instead, and AoE attacks will hit your summons (and they are quite squishy). Because of this, in fights with lots of AoE damage, some summons with long recast timers may not be a great choice.

DoT

DoTs are one of the best ways for Sage to deal damage. The main DoT Sage applies is Erosion, which you’ll find on the abilities Dark Bullet and Shadow Erosion. There are two main things to know about DoT. The first is that each unique ability can only apply its DoT effect once unless otherwise stated; subsequent applications will just extend the duration of the DoT, not apply another stack. The second is that DoT deals its damage when an enemy takes its turn, then reduces its total duration counter by 1.

Base Hit Chance

Sage’s DoT and debuff abilities all feature a term called “base hit chance”, which is the chance the ability will successfully apply its effect. If you have a 50% base hit chance, you have a 50% chance to land it, but a 100% base hit chance would be 100%, nice and simple. To improve lower base hit chance abilities, chance to land you’ll likely want to pick up some Effect Hit Rate, which increases the Base Hit chance e.g. 100% Effect Hit Rate will improve a 50% base hit chance ability to 100% hit chance. Be careful, though, as enemies can have Effect RES, which will have the opposite effect on your abilities. Most enemies have 0 - 20% effect Res, meaning you’ll need even more Effect Hit Rate to cancel it out.

Healing

In solo play, healing abilities usually aren’t as strong as just using more damage abilities, but in party-based play, if you’re the assigned healer of the group, you’ll have to dedicate a few or all of your slots to the role. The only thing to know about healing is that it scales off of your total Max HP, so you’ll want a gear set which focuses on ensuring your total HP is as high as possible.

Stats

There are a ton of different stats and effects in SxS, but below are some of the more common helpful ones to look out for on your gear.

DPS Stats

• ATK: Scales all your damaging abilities and is one of the main stats your summons inherit.

• Elemental Mastery: Generic damage boost to all elemental damage, early on if you don’t have much DMG%, it’s usually better than ATK on gear.

• Affinity: Grants damage boost to specific elements, with the main one you’ll want being Dark. Your summons inherit your Affinity stats, so Fire Affinity is also not useless due to it scaling Flame Wolf, and when you’re using Treatling, you may also value Wind Affinity.

• Effect Hit Rate: You’ll want enough of this stat to ensure you can maintain all of your DoT and debuff effects consistently in fights; however, be careful you don’t stack more than you need, as that’ll just be wasted stats.

• Crit Rate & Crit DMG: Your summons and DoTs can all Crit, so it’s definitely a stat not to ignore.

• SPD: Improves the rate at which you and your summons move compared to the enemy, improving overall damage in a fight.

Healing Stats

• HP: Scales all of your healing abilities, making it one of the few ways you can boost your total healing output.

• Healing Boost: Directly increases your healing by the total listed % and is the other main way to boost your healing amount, other than HP. The other main stat you’ll be chasing when focusing on healing.

• SPD: Moving more frequently compared to enemies and allies allows you to heal them more compared to the damage they are taking, improving your ability to keep the group alive.

Damage Skills

When first becoming a Sage, it’s likely you won't have access to all the Legendary skills, and some Sage Legendary skills are complete game changers for certain playstyles, such as Shadow Impact for DoT builds, and Soul Impact for summoner builds. Before unlocking these more pivotal Legendaries, you may have to use a mix of a T1 mage build alongside a few of Sage’s more universal and generic damage options. By checking out the breakdown below, you’ll understand which skills can slot in early and also which are the skills that are built enabling.

Summon Skills

Sage receives two summons skills in T2, both of which are powerful in their own right. However, you’ll often notice that enemies with AoE attacks will splatter your summons, cutting their duration and total damage output short. In these kinds of fights, summon skills are at a distinct disadvantage, meaning replacement options can be better even if their maximum total damage output may be lower.

• Flame Wolf Summon: Stand-alone Flame Wolf Summon is one of Sage’s best damage skills, as it deals a lot of damage and bypasses the main downside of summons being their long recast time with its 2-turn cooldown and the fact that it summons 2 monsters instead of 1. The two Flame Wolves that are summoned each will first perform an AoE attack, then a single target attack, then another AoE attack, then despawn. You’ll be using this ability in most Sage builds regardless of what other skills you have and the encounter mechanics. As an extra benefit and insurance against getting killed early, Flame Wolf Summon counts as two entities to explode with Soul Impact, limiting the downside even if they die early.

• Treantling Summon : Unlike Flame Wolf Summon, Treantling Summon has a 3-turn cooldown, and the Treantling itself is singular and has less HP and Defense than Flame Wolves, making it liable to getting killed. The trade-off for this, though, is that it lasts 5 turns compared to the Flame Wolves' 2 turns, allowing it to deal considerably more damage in a fight as a result (as long as it can stay alive). Just like Flame Wolves, it deals both AoE and single-target damage, so as long as it’s a fight where it can actually survive, it’s worth slotting into most damage-focused builds.

• Soul Impact: Elevates the value of summons on Sage considerably (especially Flame Wolf Summon) by turning all of them into AoE Dark Damage bombs, which go off as soon as they die or despawn. The multiplier on this charm is quite high, and the fact that it triggers twice off of Flame Wolf Summon, both of which can hit a single target if they overlap, makes it a large damage increase for most builds. Soul Impact isn’t a mandatory legendary to begin running summons, but it does make them feel a lot more powerful after you have it.

DoT/Debuff Skills

Unlike Sage’s summons, their DoT skills unfortunately do somewhat rely on the Legendary skill Shadow Impact to reach maximum potential. Before that, they are significantly weaker and on many accounts comparable to T1 mage abilities early on, as it’s unlikely you’ll have them at a high rarity, so their multipliers will be lower. The reason for this is that DoT relies on enemies moving in order to do damage, and Shadow Impact completely breaks that rule by forcing them to activate multiple times, massively improving their efficacy. You can still use DoT and Dark skills before Shadow Impact; they’re just a lot weaker.

• Dark Bullet : One of two sources of Sage’s DoT application. Deals a moderate chunk of shadow damage on hit and applies a weak erosion, but the most important part of this skill is that it has no cooldown, allowing it to be used every time your character takes action. This fact makes up for its comparatively lacklustre damage compared to other abilities. The main reason to use this ability, though, is the fact that Shadow Impact can trigger its Erosion damage twice per cast; without that, it can fall behind other options.

• Shadow Erosion: Sage’s other source of Erosion at T2 and a much better one at that. This Charm deals over 3 times the erosion damage of Dark Bullet when at a comparable rarity and level, making it the backbone of your DoT damage in this tier. Has a lower base hit rate than Dark Bullet, but it can be applied by any Dark damage technique, meaning you have multiple shots to apply it, and it can be applied in AoE. Worth running in most Sage builds as soon as you get Shadow Impact.

• Shadow Impact : The main DoT enabler, which actually makes building toward DoT worth it. On use deals dark damage in an AoE and causes all erosions on all enemies hit to activate twice. This means the Erosion from Dark Bullet and Shadow Erosion will both activate twice for a total of 4 activations per Shadow Impact. This is the skill that takes DoT from OK in T2 to great and desirable in most DPS Sage builds. IT’s important to note that when triggering DoT twice, it consumes 2 turns of duration to do so, so you’ll want sufficient effect hit rate to keep DoT duration high enough to remain active.

• Weakening Hex : Not a high damage ability for Sage, but deals AoE Dark damage, which is important for applying Shadow Erosion in AoE so that you have it active before using Shadow Impact or so you can apply AoE Erosion before you acquire Shadow Impact. The other reason to use it is its ATK debuff, which applies to enemies. This debuff is useful in group play but also improves survivability in solo play, which can make up for its lower base damage compared to other abilities.

Old Skills

As mentioned earlier, if you’re missing some of the key Sage skills for either summoner or DoT or both, then you may have more success mixing in some skills from T1. As you can pretty much use half or all of the best T1 mage builds/skills, we won't list them all out here.

However, outside of that, some T1 skills are also just “good” even in some of Sage’s strongest builds. Here are the main “old skills” to consider slotting into your fully completed DPS Sage builds or ones we just think you need to know about.

• Gale Shield : Sage doesn’t get any new defensive Charms or survival skills in T2, so continuing to use Mage’s T1 Gale Shield is often a smart choice for progression and group play.

• Elemental Mystery : One of two top-tier damage boosting options to slot in when playing Sage as a DPS. If you don’t have a large amount of DMG% or Elemental Mastery from other sources or you don’t have Mana Surge, this charm is likely your best option.

• Mana Surge : If you already have a large amount of DMG%, elemental mastery, or you have a sizable amount of Crit DMG already, then Mana Surge should be your choice.

• Insight : As an alternative to Elemental Mystery and Mana Surge you can use Insight to get extra Effect Hit Rate; however, you’ll usually get more than enough of that stat to get by just by having a single secondary stat on either your staff, orb, or a decent amount of sub stats/relics. Because of that, it’s usually better to use other charms instead.

• Curse Resonance : This Charm might look like a huge damage boost for Sage due to it interacting with Ailment and Debuffs; however, why we’re listing it here is because that’s often not the case. Curse Resonance does not boost the damage of Erosion or Summons, which are a big part of Sage’s damage because neither is “technique damage dealt by the caster”. Because of this, it falls behind other charm options.

Healing Skills

Healing Skills

Healing skills should only really be used during group content when you’re designated as the healer of the group; outside of that, they aren’t too useful. The skills below are the new healing skills unlocked with Sage, but you’ll need to combine them with the healing-based skills from T1 Mage in order to form a full healing build.

• Radiant Restoration : Your main party healing skill and a must take if you plan on fulfilling the healer role in groups.

• Resurrection : Not a mandatory charm to have (which is handy given its legendary rarity); however, it is a fantastic safety net to have in group play when someone gets unlucky and dies. If you have it, while healing, run it; else, use something else.

• Healing Mastery : Provides a large amount of passive Healing Bonus, which increases your total healing output. You can get this stat from other sources, so this charm isn’t technically mandatory, but in T2, it’s unlikely you’ll have a massive amount of it so it’s usually always worth running unless you’re incredibly confident in your group surviving.

Old Skills

Spells that mostly went unused in T1 on the mage class become useful for the Sage when adopting the healing role. You should have picked up most of these throughout your time in T1, but if you don’t have a spell like Void Blessing yet, you’ll have to do without by running an additional flex spell until you get it.

• Healing Touch : The strongest single-target heal Sage has access to at this stage of the game, thanks to its 1-turn cooldown (compared to Radiant Restoration's 2 turn cooldown) and solid healing multipliers. Also cleanses an ailment or debuff from the target, giving it extra utility. We recommend taking this skill for most sage healing builds.

• Void Blessing : Sage’s only buff at T2, which is definitely worth running if you have it and are worried about the group dying. Increases all targets it affects HP by a percentage of your own (which should be high), making the entire group tankier. Also has a strong healing effect that triggers on all allies that are low on HP.

• Tough Soul : This Charm increases your HP by a flat amount, which will in turn increase your healing by a small amount. This Charm is completely optional and, in most cases, not really that strong as the amount of HP it grants compared to how much you should have from the rest of your gear and bonuses isn’t usually that significant. If you have no other charms you want to run, you can consider it, else use the slot on something else.

Builds

Use the Generalist build of Sage whenever you need a damage-focused build and there are enemies present who can quickly kill any Treantlings you summon. If you’re against an enemy who won't kill summoned Treantlings too fast, the damage it outputs is incredibly high and definitely worth running so long as it can stay alive.

In dungeons, when responsible for the healing role, you’ll need to run the healing build. You can choose to slot in either more survivability abilities into the flex slots or your choice of damage or debuff abilities. If you feel your team doesn’t need much healing, it is possible to cut back further on the amount of healing abilities you use to run even more damage, survival, or debuffing abilities.

Generalist DPS

Situational DPS

Healing Build