Sacred seals, some questions

[Artimise Flare]

So if I am understanding them correctly, seals scale up the power of incantations with some buffing certain incantations even further.

So Dragon Communion Seal buffs dragon based incantations such as breath attacks, claws etc.

Beast Claw seal buffs Beastial incantations

So for the Erdtree Seal, does it buff anything in particular? How does this affect things like straight up buffs like Golden Vow? Does any particular seal boost the effectiveness of buffs?

[Nobby]

You can check it in-game, it's listed in the item description which specific origin of spells they buff. For the erdtree seal I don't think it buffs anything specific.

I also think that only damage output is affected and not buffs. So it'd not like golden vow will suddenly give a higher % buff

[Señor Brown]

Originally posted by Artimise Flare:

So if I am understanding them correctly, seals scale up the power of incantations with some buffing certain incantations even further.

So Dragon Communion Seal buffs dragon based incantations such as breath attacks, claws etc.

Beast Claw seal buffs Beastial incantations

So for the Erdtree Seal, does it buff anything in particular? How does this affect things like straight up buffs like Golden Vow? Does any particular seal boost the effectiveness of buffs?

Nope, it has no passive bonus. The Erdtree seal is simply the engame seal for a pure faith build due to having the highest FAI incant scaling past 68 FAI. It doesn't improve buffs, but higher FAI incant scaling makes healing and weapon buff incantations more effective (since they only scale to FAI).

Only thing that really improves buffs like Golden Vow is: Old Lord's Talisman, which increases the duration of certain spells .

[Artimise Flare]

Originally posted by Señor Brown:

Originally posted by Artimise Flare:

So if I am understanding them correctly, seals scale up the power of incantations with some buffing certain incantations even further.

So Dragon Communion Seal buffs dragon based incantations such as breath attacks, claws etc.

Beast Claw seal buffs Beastial incantations

So for the Erdtree Seal, does it buff anything in particular? How does this affect things like straight up buffs like Golden Vow? Does any particular seal boost the effectiveness of buffs?

Nope, it has no passive bonus. The Erdtree seal is simply the engame seal for a pure faith build due to having the highest FAI incant scaling past 68 FAI. It doesn't improve buffs, but higher FAI incant scaling makes healing and weapon buff incantations more effective (since they only scale to FAI).

Only thing that really improves buffs like Golden Vow is: Old Lord's Talisman, which increases the duration of certain spells .

Weapon buffs? Like adding elemental damage to them such as poison, fire, and holy etc?

[Rando the Crit Clown]

The best seals are:

Finger: If all your stats are low, at the start of the game.
Godslayer's: If you have a 27-68 FTH, and aren't super overlevelled.
Erdtree*: If your Faith is 69+ and you aren't super overlevelled.
Golden Order*: If you have a lot of FTH & INT, and aren't super overlevelled.
Clawmark: If you have low FTH, high STR, and aren't super overlevelled.
Frenzied Flame*: If you have low FTH, or are super overlevelled.
Dragon Communion*: If you have high ARC, or want to inflict statuses with miracles.

Seals marked with an asterisk are weightless, which could make them be chosen over a different more optimal seal (e.g. Erdtree Seal has slightly worse scaling than Godslayer's at 40-68 FTH but Godslayer's has 1.5 weight). The only seal that actually does something different if you cast from it is the Dragon Communion Seal, the only seal in the game which lets your status buildup scale with your ARC stat.

Any seals that have extra effects like enhancing a certain type of incantation will enhance it even when not casted from it so the best way to use them is typically to have them in one hand and a better seal in the other and you cast from the better seal. Weapon buffs & healing spells only scale off FTH and nothing else so the best seal for those is always Finger, Godslayer's, or Erdtree. Body buffs like Golden Vow do not scale at all and are the same with the minimum stat requirements for the spell & the worst seal as they are with 99 everything & the best seal at +10.

[Gearwar]

also remember that wearing a sacred seal in offhand while using another sacred seal in mainhand, will still buff and affect the casted incantation even if you casted it with the "wrong" sacred seal.

Lets say you main the clawmark sacred seal and in offhand you have the dragon communion one. Now if you use a dragon communion spell with with the clawmark sacred seal you will still do more damage than you would have done had you not had the dragon communion seal in offhand

[Artimise Flare]

Originally posted by Rando MacArthur, Crit Horologist:

snip

Wow! Thanks for the thorough breakdown, that answers just about all my questions regarding seals, TYVM!

[Señor Brown]

Originally posted by Artimise Flare:

Originally posted by Señor Brown:

Nope, it has no passive bonus. The Erdtree seal is simply the engame seal for a pure faith build due to having the highest FAI incant scaling past 68 FAI. It doesn't improve buffs, but higher FAI incant scaling makes healing and weapon buff incantations more effective (since they only scale to FAI).

Only thing that really improves buffs like Golden Vow is: Old Lord's Talisman, which increases the duration of certain spells .

Weapon buffs? Like adding elemental damage to them such as poison, fire, and holy etc?

Yep. If you have higher FAI incant scaling, then your elemental weapon buff will add more elemental damage to your weapon.

Poison incantations can be approached in a similar way. The difference is that poison build-up scales with ARC. They also require a seal that scales with ARC (i.e. Dragon Communion Seal).

EDIT: grammar

[Kamama Hairless]

+1, lot of good info for fai builds in here

[Juno Brier]

Originally posted by Rando MacArthur, Crit Horologist:

Clawmark: If you have low FTH, high STR, and aren't super overlevelled.

Clawmark is also good if you're raising Strength and Faith in equal measure.

[Rando the Crit Clown]

Originally posted by Juno Brier:

Originally posted by Rando MacArthur, Crit Horologist:

Clawmark: If you have low FTH, high STR, and aren't super overlevelled.

Clawmark is also good if you're raising Strength and Faith in equal measure.

I don't know if that's true or not, but it sounds right. I believe it. Also one of the DLC seals is good with low FTH so that should be added to the list.

Finger: If all your stats are low, 10-26 FTH.
Dryleaf: 27-51 FTH.
Godslayer's: 52-68 FTH.
Erdtree*: 69-99 FTH.
Golden Order*: If your INT is at least as high as your FTH.
Clawmark: If your STR is at least as high as your FTH.
Frenzied Flame*: If you have a lot of DEX and very little FTH, or are very overlevelled.
Dragon Communion*: If your ARC is at least as high as your FTH, or you want to inflict statuses with miracles.

Also something I forgot to mention about the Clawmark Seal is that if you twohand it your effective STR will be multiplied by 1.5 so you can do that to increase the damage of spells. It doesn't affect FTH, though, so it won't help with healing or buffing.