Please replace Cover with something useful

I have never found a single situation where cover was useful. Nobody stays 6 yalms close enough at any given time to have the effects stay on and it only protects against physical attacks.

TL;DR, this move blows, and could be easily buffed to be more useful or replaced outright.

Why not have the move cast on all party members regardless of distance but absorb 50% of all damage(both physical/magic). This is how it works in LOTRO and it works great for Captains in that game.

Or why not bring back Divine Veil from 1.0? I've never played it but from the description it seems pretty awesome, much more helpful than crappy Cover.

Thanks.

CM last boss where you can't get hate from the add - Use cover on the targeted team mate.

If I lose hate I might use cover while trying to get it back.

I agree Cover needs major changes, as it's current form it's just too fiddly to bother with. The only vague use I could see this being used for is to protect a DD like BLM who happened to be too close to the mob, but even then that's a vague use and too overly complicated to work with.

Unfortunately Cover is a traditional ability for the PLD Job throughout the series so we're kind of stuck with it - if it was more like Cover materia from FFVII it would work far better. Really, it just needs alterations to make it useful, as it stands, it's worthless practically.

think of it as a back-up Provoke (interms of practical usage). imo its an emergency tool i.e. extremely useful albeit only when confronted by the situation.

after all, like provokr, you will almost never use it if you held hate well all along, but in the scenario you lost hate/didnt do a good enough job/died and you have 2 separate mobs pounding on ur party members, provoking one and covering the member the other mob is hitting, while building up hate on the voke-ed one seems like a classical situation where cover is put to good use. rare, but it would be frustrating if cover wasnt there.

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Originally Posted by Shuon

think of it as a back-up Provoke (interms of practical usage). imo its an emergency tool i.e. extremely useful albeit only when confronted by the situation.

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Not at all. Again, the ability stops working if someone moves 6 yalms away from you even if the icon is still on their status bar. The only time I would ever use it is on a healer who grabbed threat but they never stand next to me so the ability has zero purpose. It's a useless move, in any given situation and even when I do use it, it never functions cause nobody should be close to you at any given time. Also how is it anything like a backup provoke?

Cover is a useful ability, you just haven't done any content where it's actually useful yet. In any situation where there's 2 tanks and one of the tanks no longer needs to tank (IE: turn 4 after the first dreadnaught, after one Caudeceus split dies) cover is useful.

Would be nice if you could keep it up on a party member indefinitely. Of course it would have to be a percentage blocked instead of all damage for that to work.

Cover is even worse than you say. Because you need to be so close, you need to run to the person you want to cover. This turns the boss you are tanking, probably moves it out of position, and allows cone or aoe attacks to hit the rest of the team while you're trying to save one person.

I like the idea of turning Cover into a general damage redirect for the whole party, which is a common emergency tank ability in other games.

I agree that Cover has some good use for offtanks, but that's a very narrow use.

Cover just needs a 20 yalm range and a 40 second cooldown. I have no idea why they made the cooldown so high on it, completely unjustified for what it does.

With that said, it does have some really pro uses, so scrapping it seems excessive.

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Originally Posted by IndigoHawk

Cover is even worse than you say. Because you need to be so close, you need to run to the person you want to cover. This turns the boss you are tanking, probably moves it out of position, and allows cone or aoe attacks to hit the rest of the team while you're trying to save one person.

I like the idea of turning Cover into a general damage redirect for the whole party, which is a common emergency tank ability in other games.

I agree that Cover has some good use for offtanks, but that's a very narrow use.

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This is another great point I forgot to mention.

Nice to see us war's aren't the only one with a worthless move. *looks at Mercy Stroke* /faceplam

The idea behind the ability is that a party member will come to you as you go to them and then you use cover, IE: 2 party members need to work together a PLD cant go running after someone and expect to use Cover easily. That said, I find the targeting system a bit tricky to really use this ability effectively. I'd prefer that they just made the range longer OR made it so that when you use Cover, it automatically covered the person with hate (of the mob you are targeting).

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Originally Posted by LilSmalls

OR made it so that when you use Cover, it automatically covered the person with hate (of the mob you are targeting).

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/ac "Cover" <tt>

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Originally Posted by Faction

Cover is a useful ability.

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Mark your calendars people, Faction and I agreed on something.

While I agree that it would be nice if the range was a bit further, situationally this is a very strong ability. You can also use it in conjunction with Hallowed Ground for even more protection.

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Originally Posted by Rattleh3ad

Also how is it anything like a backup provoke?

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because it allows you to take damage in anoyher person's place even though you dont have a higher amount of enmity. if you were freshly raised and voke is not up, is there a better alternative than cover?

and re distance, it is called cover for a reason. alluding to ffxi, pld had to be in front of a another member before Cover is effective, because you are suppose to cover another member from incoming damage.

again, this is situational, and probably will never come to use if you are in a perfect party where no signs of danger ever surfaces - but the same could be said abt provoke, benediction, second wind, thrill of battle etc because they are all oh-shit-this-situation-aint-good skills

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Originally Posted by IndigoHawk

you need to run to the person you want to cover. This turns the boss you are tankin.

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you only use cover when someone else has higher hate than you and you wish to protect that someone i.e. the mob is ALREADY turned. this is a situational skill we use to protect another member from incoming damage when all our tools are exhausted.

It'd be cool if Cover quickly teleported you to the target like that one warrior ability from WoW. But really this thread should be about Awareness. That ability is even worse than cover!

No, its good! The problem is people like to RUN AWAY from us when we got cover on them

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Originally Posted by Hachiko

Cover just needs a 20 yalm range and a 40 second cooldown. I have no idea why they made the cooldown so high on it, completely unjustified for what it does.

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I think it's potentially situationally useful even with the cooldown as-is (120 seconds corresponds to a lot of our mitigaton cooldowns) but I agree that the range is currently far too restrictive.
And the duration could do with being a little longer.

If a fight suddenly goes really pear-shaped with a sudden burst of unavoidable AoE damage or scores of ads, I'd love to be able to have the option to target the main healer and use Cover + Hallowed Ground...

Cover should be enmity transfer instead, don't we agree?

oops that Thief skill eh?

It's a great cooldown since it has a rather unique purpose. The only downside is the darn implementation. You get the buff on you even if your target moves out of range. There is no visual feedback to the usage that I can see and the game currently requires heavy movement to survive in a lot of cases, which works against the bug-all range on the ability. Fix those aspects and I'd love it.

Main place i find it useful is 2rook/spiders phase in turn4, good for AK aoe speedclearing too i guess if somebody's putting out more damage than flash can keep up with/you run oom.

I'd increase the range and that would already be much better... but if you'd also change it to an enmity redirect move like in 1.23, then I'd really like it. :P

Cover is great, it could use a buff (lower CD) but as it is I love it.

I use it on Garuda HM when the adds are coming, I always Cover my WHM since they have the tendency to be healing really intensive during those phases, I cover the WHM and proceed to get the adds if I'm OT.

Like the previous people said, during the last boss of CM its nice.

If you PuG Titan HM and are OT you can eat some of the Mountain Busters since you are only the OT and not really needed.

Cover is kind of a lore power. It would be more useful if people understood you could use it on them.


I might make mine into a macro like:

Covering <t> in 3 seconds stand close to me!
/wait 3
/ac "Cover" <me>

Or even just:
[Cover] <t> stand close to me!
/ac "Cover" <me>

I like the skill and I loved it in 11 since you didn't have as many prereqs for where your dps was in relation to the mob.

I use it in CM almost every run. However it is kind of a buzz kill since they have to be close by and the CD is a really long time. I don't mind the duration, but I would rather have an aoe defensive buff.

I would definitely like to see this skill stay in the game with some reworking. The way that the gameplay works now it's very hard to use especially with any ranged class such as mage or brd.

I wouldn't mind seeing a charge style aspect get added to cover. So I can use it as a movement cooldown to my party member that's getting attacked and gives me that dmg for the brief time, but it also puts me into a position I can pull hate. Seeing as Provoke doesn't actually hold threat for any extended period of time (which I'm okay with) giving us something to close distance on stupid ranged dps that try and kite things cause they're taking dmg because they blew every CD they had out of the gate on a mob we weren't even attacking... would be nice. Then again, I can continue to just let them die! ^^ I like letting them die more teehee.

Prob will be ok for PvP, can toss it on a team mate that is about to eat a limit break (melee LB).

Just increase the range and lower the cooldown and it's something I'd use more often. I do use it occasionally as it stands, but usually it's a healer who gets aggro and needs and if so, I'm never anywhere near them.

So far, cover/hallowed ground in a macro on the mt during titan just after heart phase is the only use I've had for the skill . . .

I use cover when off tanking. I use it on the main tank whenever it's up, or when something bigger is coming.

Not sure if it was mentioned at some point. Although the game ultimately crashed and burned, I really dug the taunt/guard mechanics in SWTOR's PvP. Taunt would reduce enemy damage output by 20% unless they were hitting the Taunter, Guard would transfer 50% of damage taken to the tank as long as they didn't break guard range. Cover has its niche uses at the moment, but aside from that it really is limited. I would like to see it improved somehow so that Paladins can actually shield people routinely from damage!

Cover is only useful when things don't go as planned, like aggro loss or pulling something you aren't supposed to. Still, despite being one of Pallie's weaker cd's, it still has its uses. Not all our cd's have to be rampart or Hallowed Ground.

The problem with that is that when things don't go as planned most people aren't nearby. If you do keep a mob near squishies then they run a high risk of dying due to aoe.

As it stands now, cover is incredibly situational. To the point that I use it maybe once a night at most. Unless I'm doing CM speed runs which actually lets me use cover on the last boss fight. That's really it.

in traditional FF games (I dont know why this one is so left field, and no MMO is no excuse sorry)

BUT cover in battle which i'm sure we all know, the Paladin or Knight or Cecil Harvey lol would just magically appear in front of hurt comrad and take the damage

Why should it be any different in this Final Fantasy game? just lazy