Quote Originally Posted by Brandedblade View Post
We have made this point. It's the fact you never hold it that makes it weaker then Sacred Soil. When you do not hold it it becomes weaker then Soil because you loose one of the effects after 3 seconds while the other persists. Sacred Soil does BOTH effects at half the cooldown. And as I've repeated time and again the dps loss of not using energy Drain is mitigated not only by the additional healing potency you're saving for later with the fae gauge, but by the fact you're theoretically reducing the gcd healing your cohealer has to do, which gives back more potency then you lose.
Stronger/weaker in terms of healing potency only (and stronger only in 2 very specific scenarios).
You'd get Fae Gauge anyway if you used ED instead, so that is irrelevant.

To make things clear, when mitigating one hit (most common):
Sacred Soil: 10% Mitigation + 500p Healing, 150p DPS cost
Collective Unconscious (Diurnal): 10% Mitigation + 500p Healing, 0 DPS cost

The two scenarios where SS is stronger (healing-wise) than CU:
- Mitigating multiple hits (E4S Tumult, LL Splash).
- Using SS after the hit for one extra HoT tick (600p total healing).

As I've repeated time and time again, SS' opportunity cost makes it worse than CU in most cases.
Unless you're running Noct AST. In which case your cohealer is WHM or an AST, and SS isn't in the picture.