Rescue needs to go away.

[Packetdancer]

There's a thread on the Healer subforum where I suggested adding a "disable help from allies" feature similar to other games like Dota 2 where a skill can be used to either save a player or potentially troll and kill them. It seems like a good compromise to protect people from griefing and purposeful killing if they're worried about it, protect them from unwanted use if they care about it or are trying to greed with manaward or something similar, but it would still keep the skill around for the people who do want to use it and want it used on them for strategies or otherwise.

My only problems with this are:

1. I rarely use Rescue, and pretty much only ever in the situation where not using it is about to cost me Swiftcast and 2400 MP -- e.g. the target player is about to die -- or where the player is standing somewhere that's about to wipe all of us. (Aglaia's final fight in particular, during the scale mechanic.) Without Rescue, I have nothing I can do for those situations, and the DPS can't really refund my 2400 MP.
2. Rescue's timing is... I'll politely call it "somewhat odd". If I have to use it, I'm generally having to stop doing everything else for a chunk of time. If you make it so there's a random chance that Rescue is just not going to work at all -- on top of the existing "Rescue sometimes goes off so late you're pulling an unconscious DPS to your side rather than a conscious one" scenario -- then I am likely to stop using Rescue altogether, rather than just using it rarely. As, I suspect, are any other healers who use it for its intended function.

If you want to remove Rescue, then just remove it. Making it conditional and demanding the healer play a guessing game of "hey, do I have to see briefly into the future and then drop everything to Rescue you, but maybe you've disabled it so it's just LOLNOPE and I wasted that time" is actually worse than just removing Rescue, because it will be functionally the same thing while still pretending we have Rescue.

I have come up before with ways to make Rescue conditional, but they're always kind of convoluted; for instance, if someone has disabled Rescue but a healer tries to Rescue them regardless, the Rescue doesn't work and the player instead receives a "Salvation Declined" debuff for 10s. If they die within that 10s, they get an "Unsaved" buff. A healer can rez an Unsaved player in question instantly and without MP cost, but the player is rezzed having gone straight through Weakness to the Brink of Death 50% debuff you get when rezzed while still under Weakness. That way, people who disable Rescue because they have plans to get to safety have nothing change; they can still move to safety and the debuff falls off. And people who disable Rescue and then stand in the bad at least don't cost a healer 2400 MP, so long as the healer tried to save them.

(And it's not a freebie you can just cheese a mechanic with, because the DPS hit on rezzing an Unsaved player would be significant.)

But that's not super straightforward. And I suspect people would still complain that, like, now healers use Rescue on them right before they're about to die so that they troll them by rezzing them with a more severe debuff. Or something.

So, fine. Just remove Rescue. But if you do, have something else to give healers in its place, I beg of you; the ability to pull people to safety and out of the bad is literally the only utility unique to healers in this game, and when used properly, it's an excellent MP management tool (inasmuch as a player who is no longer in the bad is also no longer going to cost the healer 2400 MP).