Sacred Soil

[DreamWeaver]

Sacred Soil is like the WHM job :

Pretty much essential during progression, but once you start out-gearing content, both are thrown away in favor of MOAR DPS (Energy Drain and solo healing respectively), and then people complain why Sacred Soil and WHMs are so useless.

[Hysterior]

Well to me Sacred soil is of course for damage reduction but also to say "pack here" to the team
I think it is still super relevant, especially in Turn 13

[IceSpear]

I like to use it in Shiva EX a lot seeing as shes got a lot of AoE attacks plus Succor it can reduce quite a bit of damage. I make sure to use it when she goes to Sword to reduce the AoE damage even farther and since everyones already stacked for that move it makes it worth while. So it's got some good uses maybe not every fight mostly primals and coil.

[technole]

I like to use it in Shiva EX a lot seeing as shes got a lot of AoE attacks plus Succor it can reduce quite a bit of damage. I make sure to use it when she goes to Sword to reduce the AoE damage even farther and since everyones already stacked for that move it makes it worth while. So it's got some good uses maybe not every fight mostly primals and coil.

Yeah, I always liked using a soil for those up to four Absolute Zero AoEs in Shiva EX, and Sword switch if you can. That is the perfect situation for one outside of coil. Or even an overloaded orb situation for breaking chaos in Ramuh EX. It's really playing the job to it's fullest potential and using it's tool chest for damage mitigation.

[CycLee]

making sure, that your party takes 10% less damage means, that your heal are about 10% more effective in term of keeping ppl alive. And your heals do scale with your mind. you could put it that way, that sacred soil raises the scaling of your heals by ~10%

And in addition, it scales with the HP the party member have. on a tank, that have 10k life, it prevents without heal 1k damage until the tank dies, while on a 5k-hp-fresh-lvl-50-pala its about 500 HP.

And if that is not enough to you: It is a Tank-LB1 without using the LB gauge

[TweekTweak]

I'm not a big fan of sacred soil. I know I've often regretted using it and losing a lustrate.

I'm often left with the choice of either getting sacred soil up of landing a succor Preemptively when everybody is getting together.

It may not be as mana efficient but I can still use energy drain afterwards or use a lustrate on somebody who may have dipped too low. I can't count the amount of times I've seen a tank die from a tank buster a short while after group wide damage and we all know how this game likes to make you dodge stuff afterwards.

[Cynfael]

making sure, that your party takes 10% less damage means, that your heal are about 10% more effective in term of keeping ppl alive. And your heals do scale with your mind. you could put it that way, that sacred soil raises the scaling of your heals by ~10%

And in addition, it scales with the HP the party member have. on a tank, that have 10k life, it prevents without heal 1k damage until the tank dies, while on a 5k-hp-fresh-lvl-50-pala its about 500 HP.

And if that is not enough to you: It is a Tank-LB1 without using the LB gauge

I find it more helpful to think of it in terms like these:

If the incoming damage were 1000, the target(s) would receive 900; if 5000, then 4500. If 7000, then 6300. And so on.

This is why I find Sacred Soil to be highly situational in that it only shines when NOT having that extra little bit of mitigation increases the likelihood that someone will die before they can be recovered by healing spells. Throwing it up just because it's yet more mitigation is on par with throwing out unnecessary heals on nearly-full targets just to give the appearance of being busy (rather than doing something useful like assisting with DPS). Any damage that can be effortlessly (over)healed wasn't really in need of that extra mitigation.

Again, it's a good spell for what it does, but it's just not very helpful outside of protecting against huge, scripted raid damage. About the most mundane thing I regularly use it for is to cover Wild Charge in T10 to slightly decrease the probability that someone will die outright or to a subsequent floor tick if a party member derps or lags and fails to line up correctly.

[Eloah]

When an ability uses a percentage it naturally scales in reference to the damage or healing being done. Think of it like saving or spending money, sales and tax, the higher the cost the more you will save or spend. 10% of 100 is only 10, but 10% of 1000 is 100?

[twili]

I don't normally speak up on the forums, but trying to learn SCH a bit better since I switch between healing and bard so I figured I would research more about how to use the spells more effectively.

I normally use Sacred Soil during large trash mob pulls (from Old WP to WoD). I have experimented with it during the big AoEs like the ol' Titan Jump or Garuda's 2 hour I found it didn't help too much with and the damage was still about the same (getting a succor off before and right after a large damage attack was more effective to me). Other than that I normally stay with Lustrate. I still find it funny watching people use it at the first Glasya Labolas big AoE damage because if you had a whm medica or medica II you didn't need to much except a possible Succor then switch to Cleric Stance and start DPSing again.

Like most healing in the game, its entirely situational and how each person prefers to play.

[HoratioTeakettle]

(part 1)

Here's an example hit from Wild Charge with a Sacred Soil, while I adlo'ed the marked target:

(Damage 6690+8104+4944+1455) + (Adlo 1040) = 22233 damage total

Without the soil it would have hit at around 24700 damage, which is a savings of around 2.4k which makes it equivalent to a lustrate on a tank with 9.6k HP so I consider it a fair use. For Electric Burst it will DEFINITELY be 100% better than a lustrate. I would rather save the mark'ed schmuck the 10% of his HP however because of the floor tick.

15s of resonance/autos/main head from T11 did 31675 damage

If I would have used sacred soil, I would have prevented ~3.1k, which is better than a lustrate. Not using it for this purpose also allows me to get the WAR who is taking the main-head-hit topped off better, so the usage of both is a little sketch. I have managed to used it for Seed of the Sea(?) and reached the tanks with it but I think just succor would be fine for that.