Remove role action Rescue : only a tool for trolling and poor gameplay

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Four days ago, my first time experiencing firsthand rescue grieving

versus

Several times experiencing firsthand legit rescue attempts.

My current gameplay days: 346d, so since day 1, I've only experienced my own firsthand grieving rescue in my 342nd day. How do/can I be pretty sure it was grieving? It was a trial roulette: Suzaku. Everything was smooth as butter. At 5% health remaining the other healer circled around the pithole on the middle, positioning themselves on the opposite site from where I was standing, then hits that rescue button. To the abyss I fell. There was no mechanic going on at the moment. If that wasn't done on purpose, then I don't know what was that.

Was it uncomfortable? Definitely. Do I want Rescue to go away? Never. If any, they have to improve the function. The obnoxious delay is what usually kills people. And no, I don't count troll rescue between friends.

[Lunalepsy]

Don't misuse it!

[Hammerhorn]

Don’t come in here cryin for one of the coolest abilities in the game to get takin out. People’s skin here is paper thin grow a pair build a bridge and get over it.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Healer main, don't touch mah rescue! It is very handy to make my death prone friend a bit less death prone xD

[Bsrking5]

I have been experiencing bad rescues more and more lately, and instead of being a minor annoyance, it has started to become a problem. Hence I posted in a thread pertaining to rescue.

I really doubt you have been experiencing bad rescues more often. Besides there's a difference between helpful threads, titanmen threads and threads with outdated/incorrect information.

[SturmChurro]

I really doubt you have been experiencing bad rescues more often. Besides there's a difference between helpful threads, titanmen threads and threads with outdated/incorrect information.

Check my post history. I have literally been complaining about it for the past few days. I got rescued on cd in a dungeon the other day. I have been seeing it being used quite often recently. Why would I even be lying about it?

[Bsrking5]

Don't ranged physical have arms length for the same standard knockback immunity? I think all roles have it in one form or another. Though yeah, they don't get to dash around like dancers do.

They do now, you are replying to something that was true at the time but isn't anymore.

[Packetdancer]

I think the reason people feel so fervently about Rescue is that it is disorienting to be repositioned, and sometimes (if you felt like you had it well in-hand) it feels like someone was chiding you or didn't trust you. (And it's almost worse when someone bumped Rescue by mistake.) Worse still, Rescue's behavior is wonky at best, especially given this game's snapshot mechanics. Which also means that like 75% of the time when you try to use Rescue to save someone, you're going to fail to do so anyway, and will simply pull their corpse along the floor.

Which only sort of adds insult to injury, because the person still dies and they felt like you were treating them like a toddler on a safety leash.

That said, my take on this remains, as always, that I've seen Rescue used to troll less often than I've seen it used with good intention. I grant my sample set may be skewed because I'm a healer main so a lot of the time I am the only one in a light party with the option to use Rescue, but I've actually been maining tank through EW so far (as a favor to a fellow healer-main friend) and I've still yet to see Rescue used for trollish purposes this expansion.

Despite the fact that it is janky as heck, the reason I as a healer main appreciate Rescue is because it is literally a cost-saving measure for me. If I see someone standing in the middle of the room and about to die to the Behemoth's meteor strike, or Amon's "Curtain Call", or not on the floaty circles when Xande's about to obliterate anything on the floor, that's a 2400 MP expenditure for me (or my co-healer) about to happen. (Unless I'm on WHM and have a Thin Air charge left.) If I can get the Rescue off correctly, that's 2400 MP I am not about to have to spend (and a Weakness debuff we don't have to deal with, if it's content where the party DPS is remotely relevant).

And if the timing isn't correct, the situation -- as regards my MP, anyway -- at least isn't worse than if I hadn't hit Rescue.

Now, I still rarely use Rescue outside of the Crystal Tower alliance raids (pull folks to shelter) or Shadows of Mhach raids (pull sprouts who've never seen a stack marker and run off with it back to the party) because the timing on it is wonky at best, and because people are often upset about it. So if I'm in PF and I see a DPS greeding a mechanic, I will tend to assume they have a plan to get to safety. I am often wrong, but I still treat this as my default assumption.

(Mind you, if they fail a mechanic repeatedly due to greeding it, after a certain point I will assume that I am their plan to get to safety, and then I will start using Rescue accordingly.)

But aside from being useful to haul tunnel-vision DPS or lost sprouts out of danger, there's another thing I feel is worth keeping in mind: it is one of the only, if not the only, abilities that is unique to healers in this game. Raising someone, SMN and RDM can do that. Esuna? BRD has their own version. Mitigations are plentiful this expansion, and there's even options to heal as things other than a healer. Heck, in the level 90 story dungeon the other day, the healer and reaper went down at about 40% on both the first and second bosses, and I (as gunbreaker) was able to keep myself and the black mage alive through careful use of Excogi- er, I mean, Heart of Corundum, along with Aurora and Superbolide.

So if anyone wanted to take Rescue away, I would say that healers need something to replace it -- and it should really be something that is specific to healers. And ideally something that gives me at least a snowball's hope in Thanalan of avoiding a 2400 MP expenditure when I can see the impending death hanging over the head of the oblivious DPS.

(Also, Sturm, why did you revive a Stormblood-era thread? I know for a fact there's at least one Shadowbringers-era variant of this thread!)

[SturmChurro]

(Also, Sturm, why did you revive a Stormblood-era thread? I know for a fact there's at least one Shadowbringers-era variant of this thread!)

Sorry, I missed this part of this post.

These?

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/428085
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/419783
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/428665

I posted in this one, because I recalled this one, and it also has many pages of previous discussion. I did not presume it was a "troll" thread or whatever else.

I thought this portion was relevant to my own issues, and the annoyance of it being used so often lately has had me considering the removal request more and more.

So far, what I've seen Rescue used for :
- Trolling (80% of the time) : pulling people into AOE, pits or breaking openers. I honestly don't care if you like to do it between friends, but doing it to strangers is plain rude. (...)
- A genuine will to pull people out of danger (19% of the time)... that actually fails and kill them. (...) Learn about LAG dude ! (...)
- A successful rescue : < 1%

[Packetdancer]

Sorry, I missed this part of this post.

These?

Well, yes. Also the one that went on for waaaaaay too many pages about making an 'opt-out-of-Rescue' toggle, which I feel zero desire to go hunt up right now, but which I recall making some (rather impassioned) posts in along the lines of "if you're going to do that, just get rid of the ability entirely, because the idea of an opt-in toggle is far worse than just removing it".

I mean, I was half-joking about "why revive an ancient thread", but also half-serious about it; I've seen folks revive really old threads complaining about a thing, and folks will thus read many pages of multi-year-old posts, and then reply to them going "What are you talking about, <X> doesn't work that way!" without realizing the post they're replying to dates back to, say, Heavensward.

That said, I admit I'm genuinely mystified. Sometimes I write it off as being cultural differences between datacenters when folks say they only ever see it used for trolling, but you're on Primal with me -- heck, I know we've ended up in the same alliance raids before -- so I'm genuinely puzzled.

Sometimes I wonder if it's not just that people remember those instances more so it feels like the trolling happens more than anything else...