Loss of drain on Blm...really?!

[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.