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!)