Loss of drain on Blm...really?!

[Cynfael]

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.



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?



... 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?



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.

Too tired to go point-by-point in quotes, so brief reply:

- Drain was a bad button. Removing it shouldn't have had any real impact for the vast majority of players. My experience may not be the same as that of the next player, but if I managed to forget it existed for so long, I imagine I wasn't the only one. Not once since Drain was introduced have I ever thought to myself, "Man, I wish I'd had Drain on my hotbar for that thing I was doing." Its removal doesn't represent any significant dumbing down of gameplay, though I do recognize that at least some players would have liked to retain it as an option.

- Big difference between inexperienced player confusion and the issue of players who should know enough to know better but still refuse to read their tooltips and make reasonably sound gameplay decisions. The former is more descriptive of the RDMs who think that their job is to heal whenever party members lose HP even when healers are present and active (because, to their way of thinking, why else do they have Vercure if not to use it?), while the latter is more what you already described.

- The chocobo comment was offhand, because no one actually has to use one, but it's also nothing that requires excessive grinding or extensive game knowledge to acquire. I don't think it's actually possible to miss obtaining your chocobo companion and still advance in the original MSQ, is it? In any case, it was a reference to another, more efficient way that players can get reliable healing for solo content if desired without wasting time with stuff like Drain.