Quote Originally Posted by Cynfael View Post
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