Quote Originally Posted by Crushnight View Post
So sacred soil
-gets to be placed where ever you want allowing stuff like E8s Light Rampant to be mitigated and healed for those doing 1st towers/baits etc whereas Ast has to pick which.
-doesn't cancel any action including movement to get its effect
-heals on par with baseline(and I'm using baseline because this is the most practical use of CU with min cost) Diurnal CU while providing 12s longer of 10% dmg reduction.
-heals 400 potency better than baseline Nocturnal while having 5s less on the 10% dmg reduction that is also placed rather than free roam that Nocturnal has.
-gives 10 fairy gauge which is a fey blessing (ogcds heal) or an extra tick of fairy tether.
- at the cost of a 150 potency energy drain and some hp/mp recovery.

Yea no Sacred soil is better hands down the cost to Ast to make either CUs better is way higher than the peanuts that is 1 ED (min 180+500 3 DoT ticks and 2x malefic up to 750 of 3x malefics).
Assuming you just snapshot CU:
- Regen is snapshotted at 500 potency, just need to be close to the party once for the effect to apply. This is really common; party is together then needs to split far away for mechanics. For Soil you need the party to stay in it. Snapshot is better than placed.
- CU can be weaved just like SS.
- In continuous mitigation SS > CU. That said, SS still has a DPS opportunity cost, and continuous mitigation is available to nearly every job at no cost (Reprisal, Addle, Tactitian, Fey Illumination, Temperance, CU...).
- SS > Noct CU. But Noct is only needed if you absolutely need shields to survive something (and can't rely on Neutral)...
- SS technically has 600 potency, but to use that first tick requires your target(s) not to be topped when you drop it, which usually isn't the case when you're trying to mitigate a single big hit.
- SS has half the cooldown.

I wouldn't outright say that CU is better than SS in all situations.
But most of the time the opportunity DPS cost that SS has will make it worse than CU.