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.

[Archwizard]

- 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.

Honestly? As a RDM main, there have been several points where Vercure has come in clutch for me, and not simply as a means to get an extra Dualcast. I can name several instances where I've seen that our healer was struggling to keep up with the demands of a mechanic, or where I needed to rez a healer and then heal the tank until they could complete the rez animation and recover their MP, or even when I needed to do a large amount of self-healing because I had to get as far as I could from the group for an explosion mechanic immediately before the boss was about to fire off another I wouldn't be able to avoid.
Sure, maybe that's a result of being in plenty of scenarios where I just had a bad healer, but the point is that I had that option "in a pinch" and it has, realistically, come in handy. That's the point of an emergency tool.

Should players who can use it well be robbed of that ability, just because bad players will be bad and misuse it at the cost of their own personal DPS? Is that a fault of the job design not being intuitive, or that of the players not understanding the tools at their disposal?

What about WHM? They get Afflatus Misery, a massive DPS cooldown, even when they should be healing. Should they not have that and other damage tools so they aren't fooled into doing a DPS's job?

The first job I leveled was BLM, and because we're squishy, there were so many times I had to use a combination of Manaward and Drain (even at its most pathetic) to keep up with the damage output of a quest mob (or pod, if Sleep proved insufficient) when soloing, or attempt to sustain myself until the group's healer could get off the ground.

Do I expect any version of Drain, Vercure, Physick, Bloodbath, Clemency, Second Wind, etc. etc. to replace a healer? No, and I'm not asking for them to either. Realistically I expect DPS should always be more efficient at dealing damage, as healers should always be better at supporting the party and tanks should be better at surviving an onslaught of hits. If I advocate for RDM to get a personal mitigation skill, I'm not asking for them to replace a tank, because obviously that's not enough for a full role.
That doesn't mean I ascribe to the belief that any job should be excised of skills outside of their role so that only healers heal and only DPS deal damage.

Am I saying Drain was without fault, or even that it should be returned exactly as it was? God no. I'm only arguing for it to return in a significantly buffed state where it can provide the BLM with semi-worthwhile personal sustainability at a brief DPS cost. It doesn't even have to be efficient as long as it makes a difference and ain't trash like we're used to.
If you have a healer backing you, great! They'll heal better than you while you can damage better than them. You can feel free to ignore Drain while they feel free to not use their spare damage abilities. But in the pinch when they aren't able to help you or they face a healing check, you should have that option on hand, just as they can help during a DPS check.

[Cynfael]

*snipping long quote*

I didn't say about RDM and Vercure what you seem to think I said. I've been pretty clear in this thread about the distinction between using Vercure properly and using it just because the RDM thinks they are supposed to be a healer.

Afflatus Misery and such don't belong in this discussion. DPS is literally everyone's job, and healing uptime is never required at 100%, so that remains an apples and oranges comparison. A healer using supporting DPS while healing is not required is doing their job properly, while a DPS has virtually nothing useful or necessary to do except DPS except in the event of emergency.

Sure, we could have a buffed Drain that healed significant HP, but I doubt it will happen. If anything I could see a Second Wind sort of skill for the ranged DPS role, but I've gone so long without one that I never thought about it until this thread popped up.

[Archwizard]

I didn't say about RDM and Vercure what you seem to think I said. I've been pretty clear in this thread about the distinction between using Vercure properly and using it just because the RDM thinks they are supposed to be a healer.

Then you missed the point about what I said. I wasn't simply mounting a defense for Vercure, I was noting that your philosophy of "keep things out of the game that less-experienced players won't understand and will misuse" is neither universal, helpful to the growth of the game, nor highlighting anything particularly more harmful to the players themselves than they'd face elsewhere in their learning curve. Someone using Vercure in an attempt to heal allies when it's unnecessary for them to is little different than them fullcasting Veraero/thunder or using Scatter in single-target -- all things I have seen at low levels -- because it presents a fundamental misunderstanding of the job itself and its abilities.

It means they're a bad player. There's nothing you can do about them except educate them not to use those skills that way. It in itself doesn't amount to a defense against skills that require a little more understanding of when to use them, because at the end of the day that's literally what every rotation is built on.

Afflatus Misery and such don't belong in this discussion. DPS is literally everyone's job, and healing uptime is never required at 100%, so that remains an apples and oranges comparison. A healer using supporting DPS while healing is not required is doing their job properly, while a DPS has virtually nothing useful or necessary to do except DPS except in the event of emergency.

And I have all but explicitly said such healing tools would be for emergencies anyway.
The reason I brought up "Afflatus Misery and such" is that there doesn't necessarily need to be any kind of monopoly on healing or damage -- if a healer can have one of the highest potency AoEs in the game, I don't see why BLM can't spare a slot for a quick self-heal.

Sure, we could have a buffed Drain that healed significant HP, but I doubt it will happen. If anything I could see a Second Wind sort of skill for the ranged DPS role, but I've gone so long without one that I never thought about it until this thread popped up.

Two things.

First, again, two of the caster DPS jobs already have healing skills, which is I believe to be a large part of why the devs found Drain unnecessary, so I don't see such a role action in our future.

Second, I've also seen proposals for a revival of the Necrogenesis action for THMs that is essentially Bloodbath for spells. The major problem I've had with it, which is much the same as your Second Wind proposal, is that we already have Manaward for a no-risk survival cooldown. The intent of adding a spammable heal aside is so you can have an option for the other 83% of the time you don't have access to it, or for when Manaward simply... fails.

[Cynfael]

Then you missed the point about what I said. I wasn't simply mounting a defense for Vercure, I was noting that your philosophy of "keep things out of the game that less-experienced players won't understand and will misuse" is neither universal, helpful to the growth of the game, nor highlighting anything particularly harmful to the players themselves. Someone using Vercure in an attempt to heal allies when it's unnecessary for them to is little different than them fullcasting Veraero/thunder or using Scatter in single-target -- all things I have seen at low levels -- because it presents a fundamental misunderstanding of the job itself and its abilities.

It means they're a bad player. There's nothing you can do about them except educate them not to use those skills that way. It in itself doesn't amount to a defense against skills that require a little more understanding of when to use them, because at the end of the day that's literally what every rotation is built on.



And I have all but explicitly said such healing tools would be for emergencies anyway.
The reason I brought up "Afflatus Misery and such" is that there doesn't necessarily need to be any kind of monopoly on healing or damage -- if a healer can have one of the highest potency AoEs in the game, I don't see why BLM can't spare a slot for a quick self-heal.



Two things.

First, again, two of the caster DPS jobs already have healing skills, which is I believe to be a large part of why the devs found Drain unnecessary, so I don't see such a role action in our future.

Second, I've also seen proposals for a revival of the Necrogenesis action for THMs that is essentially Bloodbath for spells. The major problem I've had with it, which is much the same as your Second Wind proposal, is that we already have Manaward for a no-risk survival cooldown. The intent of adding a spammable heal aside is so you can have an option for the other 83% of the time you don't have access to it, or for when Manaward simply... fails.

I respect your position here, but I think I've already made my points and won't rehash them again except to clarify that my position isn't simply to cut things that might encourage bad gameplay. More specifically I think there is some onus on game developers to design in such a way that makes gameplay intuitive for the majority, and I think that the removal of Drain is simply a form of decluttering since the spell doesn't fill any necessary niche. Vercure, on the other hand, does fill a niche of sorts and also contributes to the RDM job identity, so I wouldn't suggest that it be removed even though I dislike the way many players use it.

Physick is a garbage spell for SMN and should have just been removed. I know very little about 5.0 SMN at this point, but in the past the job went through periods of being valued for both high DPS and high utility, so it's understandable why their Physick was never made to scale off their INT on top of everything else they brought to the table. Granted, like Vercure, a functional SMN Physick would be completely irrelevant in situations where everything was going right, but progression is still a thing, so I don't doubt that leaving Physick alone was a deliberate choice.

[YanderePrincess]

If anything I could see a Second Wind sort of skill for the ranged DPS role, but I've gone so long without one that I never thought about it until this thread popped up.

Ranged Physical already gets Second Wind. Ranged Magical are the only DPS that don't get Second Wind.

[Cynfael]

Ranged Physical already gets Second Wind. Ranged Magical are the only DPS that don't get Second Wind.

*sigh*. I left the word "magical" out. Since we're talking about BLM, I assumed the context would be clear.