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Today I want to go over one of the advanced skill paths in The Use Of Life: the Sage.
If you’re wondering which skill route to take, or you’re struggling a bit with character building, hopefully this guide will give you a clearer picture.
Alright, let’s get into it.
- Sage is excellent at both sustained combat against mobs and burst damage against bosses.
- Despite being a magic class, it’s surprisingly tough, thanks to evasion buffs, healing spells, and HP-draining magic.
- Just remember: MP recovery items are your lifeline, so keep a good stock of them.
Sage Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
- Compared to physical builds, Sage has a much easier time exploiting elemental weaknesses and status vulnerabilities, which makes combat far more efficient.
- Stat allocation is also very simple (more on that later), so building the character isn’t complicated.
- Thanks to Absorb and Endless March, you can actively restore HP during combat. This gives Sage excellent staying power, meaning you’ll rarely need to rely heavily on healing items.
- Another big advantage is Boost, which increases damage by 1.5×. It’s easy to apply it exactly when you want, which makes Sage particularly deadly in boss fights.
Weaknesses
- You’ll need to constantly restock MP recovery items while progressing. If you run out, there’s a real chance you’ll hit a wall.
- Also, the Mage fire spell upgrade that says “Power increases at Mage Lv6” is honestly a bit disappointing. The actual damage increase is less than 10%, which feels pretty underwhelming.
Recommended Stat Distribution
Since Sage is a magic-focused class, it’s tempting to dump everything into INT.
But if you do that, bosses will chew through your HP in no time and you’ll end up losing fights you otherwise could’ve handled.
A much better approach is:
- Split your points evenly between INT and VIT
- Put any leftovers into SPD
The VIT investment increases both defense and max HP, which makes boss fights far more stable.
Adding even a little SPD also helps because it increases the chances of triggering Graze, letting you avoid or reduce incoming damage.
Skill Impressions
One particularly strong and flexible setup is this “wait-and-react” style build
Poison Bite + Sword of Life + Absorb + Mirage Mist + Endless March
The Sorcerer-side skills form a really well-rounded defensive core.
Poison Bite applies poison to almost every enemy in the game—including bosses—and the total damage over time is roughly on par with Flame Burn, the Mage’s second-tier offensive spell.
Then there’s Sword of Life.
It costs HP instead of MP, but deals nearly 1.5× the damage of Flame Burn.
The HP you lose can be recovered with Absorb, which drains life from enemies. Conveniently, Absorb itself hits about as hard as Flame Burn, so it doubles as both damage and healing.
Once you layer in Mirage Mist to boost evasion, and Endless March for immediate healing plus an HP regeneration buff, the setup becomes extremely stable.
Overall, Sage manages to combine high damage output and strong durability. For a class that’s supposed to be a fragile spellcaster, it’s actually remarkably tough.
In Chapter 2, testing magic damage on the chicken enemies gives roughly these numbers:
- Fireball: around 260 damage
- Flame Burn: around 430 damage
- Sword of Life: around 590 damage
With Max HP 620 and INT 51, the healing from Endless March looks like this:
- 420 HP restored immediately when activated
- 300 HP restored at the end of each turn
So yeah—it’s a massive amount of recovery.
Careful with Chanting — It’s Risky
According to the in-game help, entering a chanting state cuts your VIT in half.
And once you actually try it in combat, the increase in damage you take is huge. If you happen to use it on a turn where a boss is Enraged and the predicted action is shown in red text, you can easily get slammed for massive damage.
What makes this worse is that the damage increase on your side is pretty small—barely around 10% at best. As a pure damage buff, it’s honestly not that impressive.
For reference, when testing Sword of Life on regular enemies in Chapter 2:
- Without chanting: 431 damage
- With chanting: 467 damage
So in practice, it’s better to think of chanting not as a damage buff, but simply as a requirement for casting certain spells.
Sage Attack Spells Are MP-Hungry
At Sage Lv1, you unlock two attack spells: Toxic Fire and Ice Bind.
They’re hybrid spells, combining Poison + Fire and Paralysis + Ice respectively.
Since you’ve finally reached an advanced class, it’s only natural to want to start using them right away—but unfortunately, these spells are extremely inefficient in terms of MP.
Their damage output is roughly the same as the Mage’s mid-tier spells, Flame Burn and Ice Coffin.
But the MP cost is twice as high.
If you start spamming them, you’ll run out of MP in no time.
Becoming a Sage does boost your MP recovery a bit, but it still doesn’t come close to compensating for how quickly these spells drain it. To be honest, they’re pretty awkward to use in practice.
Burst Damage on Demand Fits the Game’s Mechanics
While chanting skills don’t provide huge raw damage increases, they have one major advantage over physical builds.
Physical classes often depend on CP or critical hits, which can be somewhat random. Sage, on the other hand, can line up its damage boost exactly on the turn you want.
And in The Use Of Life, there are three mechanics that amplify damage:
- Enemies take increased damage while enraged.
- When an enemy’s predicted action appears in red text, the following turn increases the damage you deal.
- Attack Boost from a filled gauge multiplies damage by 1.5×.
If you stack these three conditions together, then fire off a high-tier spell that requires multiple chants, boosted with Attack Boost, the damage can be enormous.
Done correctly, it’s possible to erase nearly one-third of a boss’s HP in a single hit.
