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.