Rescue is Griefing

[Packetdancer]

In my opinion as long as it is better than death and does not remove agency from the player when they're alive and kicking (even if their death is one clipping away), it's preferable over current rescue. What you propose if I understood correctly, only triggers when the player would've straight up died.

Correct; the hypothetical "Salvation" buff would only proc if you dropped below 1 HP (e.g. would have died). Even if you got clipped and got a vuln/damage down, if you wouldn't have died, Salvation wouldn't proc.

Because honestly, healing in this game has enough potency that unless you've collected vuln stacks like you're trying to complete a pokedex, one vuln stack is not generally a huge hassle for me. (And if it gets to the point that you have enough vuln stacks that every raidwide becomes a one-shot... well, there's always the Nuclear Esuna; for the low price of 2400 MP, I can convert all of your debuffs into one single Weakness!)

The big inconvenience to a healer is having to slow-rez someone... especially if there's other damage happening. (As one of my static says, "Tend to the living!") It's a honking great pile of MP -- a quarter of your full bar -- and a painfully long cast time. Rescue lets me avoid that, but it's hardly a perfect tool. Or, really, even a good one. Unfortunately what it is, at present, is the only tool to avoid having to rez someone in certain situations.

I think the alternative proposed by Midareyukki and my comparison to Thresh's lantern would even be preferable because it's more interactive for the DPS as they'd get to time when to be yoinked.

It's a cool idea, but...

Rescue's timing is janky enough even when we do get it off early enough; given the way this game works, and the reality of server ticks, I cannot see Thresh's Lantern being a viable option. You'd need the healer to drop the item within reach of the DPS, and then the DPS to click it to use it in time. Even if it was just applying a buff and putting something on, say, Duty Action II which zips you to the healer a'la Aetherial Manipulation -- a lot more likely to be survivable -- that's still got more round-trip traffic to/from the server than Rescue would.

With Rescue, I use it and the server processes it, and moves the character. With the Lantern -- even if it were a buff and a Duty Action, you need the healer to put it on the person, the person's client to receive that the buff was applied (and make the Duty Action available), and then when the person wants to use it, it needs to tell the server they've used that action...

Sure, it would work sometimes. I just think it would be even more janky and unreliable than Rescue timing-wise, unless that Lantern had a fairly long lifetime. Which probably would work, but if you could apply it ten seconds ahead of time and it allowed movement without consequence, I also would be willing to lay solid odds on a bet that the Lantern would almost immediately be cheesed six ways to Tuesday for uptime in savage.

Conversely, "Salvation" can't be cheesed (at least, not without consequence), and by virtue of it being a buff that procs, the proc is handled on the server side at the same time damage is applied, making it considerably more reliable than Rescue has ever been (or ever will be).