Loss of drain on Blm...really?!

[Cynfael]

Really?. If you have a tool that can keep you alive and you don't use it in a situation where you'll die if you don't, then you're being a bad player. And once you're dead, you're doing NO DPS. It's just as dumb as standing in an aoe that will one-shot you because moving means interrupting your spell cast.

Drain was such a bad tool that you neglected your fundamental job function by using it. Doubly true for BLM since they had very little to offer in the way of party utility, making DPS the only reason for including them.

As others have pointed out, the heal was awful to the point that you'd have to sit there and spam it in order to recover significant HP. If you're spamming Drain, you're not doing meaningful damage and have no reason to be there. Better to take the death and get a party with healers who are awake, because it would save more time.

[YanderePrincess]

Drain was such a bad tool that you neglected your fundamental job function by using it. Doubly true for BLM since they had very little to offer in the way of party utility, making DPS the only reason for including them.

As others have pointed out, the heal was awful to the point that you'd have to sit there and spam it in order to recover significant HP. If you're spamming Drain, you're not doing meaningful damage and have no reason to be there. Better to take the death and get a party with healers who are awake, because it would save more time.

Eh, takes less time to use Drain, stay alive, and finish the fight. And, if we wipe anyway, we were going to wipe whether I used Drain or my normal spells. If I keep myself alive, though, that takes strain off the [admittedly subpar] healers, and can sometimes make the difference. In Omega, doing less damage in this scenario can also actually be beneficial since it usually happened during the phase where we're fighting Male and Female, and killing one a significant amount of time before the other can be problematic, so delaying that while the healers or rdms get people back on their feet is hardly a bad thing.

I agree Drain, in general, was bad. It doesn't change the fact that there were a few rare situations where it was actually very useful anyway. Like I said earlier, I've saved fights where things had gone wrong by spamming Physick before. It was extremely rare, but it happened. Does that mean I want Drain and cross-class Physick back? Not really, though something to provide a little extra help in forced solo content would be kinda nice, and that's where Drain felt like it mainly belonged. A tool to help us out with forced solo content. Though, to be fair, we didn't used to have a buff giving us a sizable hp regen in the past. That helps a lot to make up for jobs that don't really have any self-sustain in solo content. Back before we had that and before we had drain, I remember having to solo a fight on BLM by kiting with SCATHE. Ugh. X3

[Archwizard]

I love how everyone writing "Drain was trash/garbage/useless/bad/etc" is completely ignoring that the devs could've just... buffed it? Higher potency, higher healing percentage, shorter cast time, lower MP cost, literally all of those are tuning knobs to make a better version. I've even seen it suggested to just have it replace Scathe.

I mean, look at the new PVP version for instance: The potency of both damage and healing increases as your HP gets lower. Yeah it's a cooldown but it's also free and instant.

Sure it was niche and mainly useful for soloing, but considering that leveling and world content are solo content (not to mention Eureka and whatever strange descendants that come of it) and we're at the beginning of the expansion anyway, I don't really see the issue.

It seems to me the primary opposition to just returning a buffed version of Drain to BLM is that a form of self-healing that comes at the cost of damage is not appealing to raiders, which... not every skill has to appeal to raiding, costing damage to improve your survivability is a viable trade if the conversion rate is fair (Titan-Egi says hi), a DPS shouldn't be able to overcome the need for a healer much as a healer shouldn't be able to out-damage a DPS, and giving each job access to greater self-healing opens avenues for mechanics where everyone has to pitch in to survive (that's already like half the point of Manaward, right?).
And personally, if we're gonna give Vercure and Physick (hopefully in a state where it actually scales with Int) to casters, I don't see why BLM's personal survivability should be bolted purely to a CD.

[Orbus]

Sure they could have buffed it.
They could have done it SB and they could have done it in ShB.
But they didn't and were never going to, the fact that they outright removed it is proof enough of that.
They don't like significant and reliable self healing unless its a healer because they don't want you to cheese your way through your punishment for screwing up, it's the same reason potions have never and will never restore enough hp to matter in raids or trials.

Red mage is a special case though.
It goes against what I said above, but take those things away and it's not a red mage anymore.

[Cynfael]

Sure they could have buffed it.
They could have done it SB and they could have done it in ShB.
But they didn't and were never going to, the fact that they outright removed it is proof enough of that.
They don't like significant and reliable self healing unless its a healer because they don't want you to cheese your way through your punishment for screwing up, it's the same reason potions have never and will never restore enough hp to matter in raids or trials.

Red mage is a special case though.
It goes against what I said above, but take those things away and it's not a red mage anymore.

Frankly I always disliked that Red Mage had Vercure because so many players don't respect it as a clutch utility but instead take it as license to waste time backseat healing in situations that don't call for it. Similar issue with Paladin's Clemency, but at least that one has enabled them to set off their own Divine Veils and provided sustain in event of healer death or MP starvation.

If you give your average player a spell or ability, chances are that they are going to assume that it's there to be used, and Drain is one of those spells that muddies the waters and gives less experienced players a skewed notion of what their class and role should be doing. Clearly there are players in this thread who fully understand the proper context for skills like that, and I can get their perspective even if I have never shared it (e.g. again, Drain was so horribly bad at both things it purported to do that I had no use for it, period). Vercure isn't going anywhere because players expect Red Mage to have White magic, and thematically this seems to require that they have a heal. At least it's actually a somewhat effective heal, so the problem isn't with the skill but with the players who misuse it.

Finally, the other big reason I dislike spammable healing skills being granted to non-healers is that healers in this game have complained for years that there isn't enough healing to do, which is one of the central points of the never-ending and tiresome healer DPS-or-not-to-DPS debate. If you don't need to heal as a healer job, you should be hitting something; however, players who purely want to heal and don't want to delve significantly into DPS gameplay while on a healer are left twiddling their thumbs and being dead weight when healing requirements are easily satisfied. In this somewhat strict trinity model, when tanks and DPS have viable, spammable heals, you often end up with a lot of confusion and inefficiency as other roles drop their actual jobs and overlap with the healer.

In solo content, a healing chocobo is pretty overpowered, and the solo duties for DPS are designed not to require player sustain. It's not wrong for people who liked Drain for some reason or another to ask for it, but I think it's better gone.

[Zied]

I did like drain

[YanderePrincess]

the solo duties for DPS are designed not to require player sustain.

You'd think that, but (as one example) one of the RDM job quest duties pre-Vercure seemed to require it. Drain was the only thing that got me through it. Theoretically, it's possible without Drain, but the unavoidable damage in that duty was a major problem. Though, we now get a health regen buff in solo duties, so that might be enough to make up the difference there.

[Orbus]

Finally, the other big reason I dislike spammable healing skills being granted to non-healers is that healers in this game have complained for years that there isn't enough healing to do, which is one of the central points of the never-ending and tiresome healer DPS-or-not-to-DPS debate.

Certainly
Ironic that the classes dedicated to healing are always complaining about there not being enough incoming damage but will try as hard as they can to squeeze out what meager dps they can on a class type with the worst dps, while many dps players essentially want the kind of self healing that would render the healing classes pointless even if it means killing their own dps in the process.

[Sylvain]

If they ever add drain back in, I want it to be in the same fashion as the PvP version (and they could also remove the damage so it dooesn't become part of the rotation)

However, I wouldn't mind them buffing Mana Barrier. CD is VERY long for what it is

[Archwizard]

Sure they could have buffed it.
They could have done it SB and they could have done it in ShB.
But they didn't and were never going to, the fact that they outright removed it is proof enough of that.

Sure, and they removed Apocatastasis and Erase too. Look how many threads say that was a mistake.

I would argue that removing Drain wasn't out of a lack of interest in ever buffing it, but more likely out of the devs realizing it wasn't necessary as a DPS role action, particularly when only one of the jobs with access to it didn't already have a self-healing skill (even if Physick is just as bad if not worse). As a role action it would have to be balanced around equal accessibility; in the hands of one job, it just has to be balanced around that job.

If you give your average player a spell or ability, chances are that they are going to assume that it's there to be used, and Drain is one of those spells that muddies the waters and gives less experienced players a skewed notion of what their class and role should be doing.

True, in my time healing in Stormblood, I ran into several Arcanists who used Drain and Break as part of their core rotation.

... And at the same time there are players who outright refuse to ever use DoTs, either because they don't understand them, "don't like using them" or think the loss in damage is negligible. There are players who use Addle on CD, even on dungeon bosses with zero spells. There are players who use Enochian after every Foul cast because they think it's consumed, who mistake Scathe for an oGCD, or who throw out Fire IIs in single-target.
I believe there was an interview where Yoshi-P called those "bad players" and stated there was nothing that could be done about them.

How much should the devs balance jobs around the players who entirely misuse them? Should they simply go to the extreme of reducing each job to the fewest possible buttons, in the effort to minimize confusion?

Finally, the other big reason I dislike spammable healing skills being granted to non-healers is that healers in this game have complained for years that there isn't enough healing to do, which is one of the central points of the never-ending and tiresome healer DPS-or-not-to-DPS debate.

... and that's the fault of the DPS who already don't have any self-healing skills to use?
Or is that perhaps the fault of encounter design, versus the healer's access to HoTs and barriers that allow them to be somewhat lazy in that regard?

In solo content, a healing chocobo is pretty overpowered,

Sure. After you've leveled a chocobo -- completely optional and easily missable content -- and invested points in the healing tree. Nevermind that solo duties or Eureka exist, or that there are two other trees to invest in.