Paladin is the new hotness!?

So yesterday I was messing around in A5N (Fist of the Son) on Paladin because I got pretty bored of it and had another Paladin who wanted to main tank the boss. I'm used to MT, so I was like huh, I wonder if...

So I tried it.

Tank got Headache, boss rears back a fist, I popped Cover. Not only do I then take the damage I would have taken had I provoked, I ALSO got knocked back according to the direction the boss was facing.

Further, you can Cover + Sheltron and get a free Shield Swipe proc every time. The best part? Each tank buster is ~2 minutes after the previous one, meaning you can do this for every one of them, without ever having to use Provoke.


I would love to test this out in Savage and see if you can just Cover the MT to eat the damage (and obviously have the party stack on the MT if it's a stackbuster) without having to deal with Provokes.


This couples very well with A7N (Arm of the Son) where you can simply Cover the MT for Uplander Doom to eat the stacks (since the stacks don't apply to the tank if the tank takes 0 damage) and then it'll fall off and let the MT resume tanking without any janky swaps mid-cat nonsense.

I was the main tank in this (Tsukige Malqir) and he covered me for all of those except the one at ~6 minutes, where he provoked for the stacks and then let me take it back, since Cover wasn't back yet.


tfw Cover is finally useful for something other than saving a Warrior's ass after Akh Morn. ;-; Yay, Paladin!

PLD are quick to volunteer for main tank position and so they don't often get to use cover this way.

From reading forums, I think peoples main issue with cover are:

1) short range
2) not working for magic damage
3) cooldown a bit longer than people would like

I haven't experience much of the raiding content yet I've seen off tank PLD use cover in titan EX. Good to know it has other opportunities.

I'm trying to remember, but I think cover at theee stacks is even cooler. You get one, no one gets knocked out, more dps uptime. Keeps provoke available for emergencies. Can be tricky to time the second set with the snake adds. ( with a co PLD MT, hallowed that one is complete cheese.

"Cover is useless because everything is magic damage."

"Cover is overpowered because it bypasses a boss mechanic."

The 24 hour patch cycle is a cruel mistress indeed. ;)

i will say, be careful to think things through fully with cover though... for that exact reason! On Sephirot NM, I covered our healer who didn't do the jump mechanic to avoid the auto kill, didn't think things through fully though... i got killed, she lived... didn't think about popping my HG. It can be an amazing feature, it can also cause a big "whoops!" moment.

Back in 2.x people would do Titan Ex without tank swaps because Cover would just eat the stack instead. It was fun times.

It not even worth swapping on nm. The MT can blow a cool down before the stun and mitigate the attack regularly having it healed thru on the backside.

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Originally Posted by Ragology

PLD are quick to volunteer for main tank position and so they don't often get to use cover this way.

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This is mostly the reason I made this thread. Cover is really useful if used properly. Fewer swaps means fewer times you need to swap stances which means overall higher dps (at least for the OT PLD).

And those three issues are pretty major. I still kinda wish it was a gap closer that brought you to the target and then had you in the shorter radius to keep the cover going, but meh. It also makes sense to not work for magic damage, though I won't say I don't wish it did. And I think - with the way it works - the cooldown is already nice. If it was much shorter, it'd be pretty OP.

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Originally Posted by Astrelle_hyperion

I'm trying to remember, but I think cover at theee stacks is even cooler. You get one, no one gets knocked out, more dps uptime. Keeps provoke available for emergencies. Can be tricky to time the second set with the snake adds. ( with a co PLD MT, hallowed that one is complete cheese.

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The stacks last 3 minutes - the punches happen every 2.

If you provoke in this way, the stacks won't wear off before he starts again, which will result in the main tank taking 1 -> concussion -> 3 more stacks while concussed. It's a LOT more incoming damage on the tank. If you cover after the concussion, you'd just end up getting concussed, too, which works fine, since the MT's will wear off before he gets punched, but Cover might not, and you won't be able to move to break the line.

It's a lot safer to just cover the punch. I like it since it means less stance-dancing as the OT - I never turn Shield Oath on, since I get to provoke > RoH every add I need to grab and never have hate issues even without turning ShO on.

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Originally Posted by Dante_V

It not even worth swapping on nm. The MT can blow a cool down before the stun and mitigate the attack regularly having it healed thru on the backside.

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Less damage taken from the tank buster = fewer heals used up by the healers = more overall dps from the group = faster kill all the way through.
This was intended to be a discussion of optimal strategies, not sub-optimal ones.

A tank swap's not even needed for A5 imo. Whenever I offtank it, I just let the MT eat the hit without taunting. However much the crunch is, the healers always have him topped off again in like two seconds.

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Originally Posted by JackFross

This was intended to be a discussion of optimal strategies, not sub-optimal ones.

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The healers don't care who takes the hit. You're talking about shaving seconds off of a loot pinata match that most of us are going to pug. That sort of optimization for a duty finder group is comical.

Just fought all of Midas Normal as OT PLD & cover was fun (even saved a wipe in A8 with Clemin's when both healers died, till SMN raised 1) all this with SOLO-QURRY Duty Finder (doesn't mean some of my teams weren't a group thou) I mean we can't expect the skill bar to raise higher if we don't start showing it ourself right? (not saying I'm uber Savage raid skilled, cause I'm not haven't done 1 savage ever... haven't even beat all EX primals or T9 of Coil for that matter -_-!)

@JackFrost, often when I've been doing the cover on 3 truck in pugs with double PLD, the MT pops HG on second set, so stacks drop off with problem. Don't know if I've just been lucky with pugs that do the right thing given what I've done.

This hasn't changed at all. It was actually a common way of avoiding tank swaps back in the day. It just got a little less common now, because SE took a hiatus from Tank swaps in the recent Trials + Raids. It's nice that they brought them back, but that doesn't mean that we get to use cover any more than we were before.

The problem has never been Cover's utility. The problem is how little we actually get to use it. We don't neglect using it because the mechs don't allow for it. We neglect using it because Pld's are almost exclusively pigeon holed into the MT position (even when they really shouldn't be). Out of all of my runs in Midas so far, I have only been OT once. Almost every run, I'm being placed in the MT position by default. That actually includes my first ever run, in which I had no idea what I was even doing:

-"Pld in the party? Great. He can MT."
-"But I'm new here."
-"No problem, just watch out for x,y, and z. Ready check? Go go go."

Cover gets no use in that spot, so it might as well not be on my hotbar.

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Originally Posted by JackFross

Tank got Headache, boss rears back a fist, I popped Cover. Not only do I then take the damage I would have taken had I provoked, I ALSO got knocked back according to the direction the boss was facing.

Further, you can Cover + Sheltron and get a free Shield Swipe proc every time. The best part? Each tank buster is ~2 minutes after the previous one, meaning you can do this for every one of them, without ever having to use Provoke.

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The only issue I take with this tactic (which is admittedly a pretty badass tactic) is that if it isn't communicated, it will lead to wasted cooldowns. I experienced this yesterday in A5N - the OT (whose only communication with the group was a pull countdown macro fired when 3/4 of the group was still getting to the Fausts) decided to start using Cover on me halfway through the fight, without any prior instances. If they'd communicated that they were going to eat the tankbuster, I would have been more liberal with my cooldowns during the non-tankbuster phases, and wouldn't have wasted Sentinel+Sheltron on it.

The moral of the story: COMMUNICATE WITH THE OTHER TANK IN YOUR GROUP.

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Originally Posted by Dante_V

It not even worth swapping on nm. The MT can blow a cool down before the stun and mitigate the attack regularly having it healed thru on the backside.

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Sorry to inform you but that mitigation is useless, the buster ignores almost all mitigation except Shields and maybe HG. Sentinel, shadow wall, rampart, vengeance...all useless.

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Originally Posted by Februs

Almost every run, I'm being placed in the MT position by default.

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1. Use sword oath
2. Just stare boss
3. If someone says pull dont answer anything
4. Eventually other tank will pull when you dont respond anything
5. OT spot guarateed \o/

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Originally Posted by Carstien

Sorry to inform you but that mitigation is useless, the buster ignores almost all mitigation except Shields and maybe HG. Sentinel, shadow wall, rampart, vengeance...all useless.

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Maybe I just haven't done NM enough, but the buster in Savage does set damage that can be mitigated. Do you mean with the concussion debuff it ignores % mitigation?

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Originally Posted by Jpec07

If they'd communicated that they were going to eat the tankbuster, I would have been more liberal with my cooldowns during the non-tankbuster phases, and wouldn't have wasted Sentinel+Sheltron on it.

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You can't Sheltron the buster unless you're the OT using cover. You also still would have wasted Sentinel, because it doesn't have any impact on how much damage you take from the tank buster in A5N - it seems to bypass defense and all that jazz when Concussion is active.

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Originally Posted by Synestra

1. Use sword oath
2. Just stare boss
3. If someone says pull dont answer anything
4. Eventually other tank will pull when you dont respond anything
5. OT spot guarateed \o/

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In any content that you can solo-queue for via the Duty Finder, you can tank safely in Sword Oath. Literally all of it. I use Shield Oath as an on-demand 20% mitigation cooldown with variable duration when I tank Midas Normal on PLD. It goes up and stays up for the bigbulge biggerbrain segments of A5N, I use it to mitigate a 3-stack tank buster on Brawler (in addition to a cd), It gets turned on at the start of Uplander Doom and goes off when he does the shock attack after the stacks finish, and there's really nowhere in A8N that it's needed unless the healers are struggling, since there's no significant damage that you have to deal with in the entire fight as a tank, assuming swaps happen in p1 and your OT knows the final phase.

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Originally Posted by JackFross

You can't Sheltron the buster unless you're the OT using cover. You also still would have wasted Sentinel, because it doesn't have any impact on how much damage you take from the tank buster in A5N - it seems to bypass defense and all that jazz when Concussion is active.

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This is false. Defensive cooldowns absolutely mitigate the tankbuster, you just may need to time some of them (like Sentinel, Hallowed Ground, and even Sheltron, if you know how to use the magic pixel). If you try to use it while you're concussed, it won't work, but I've been able to successfully mitigate the damage multiple times. The trick is to use it just before the fourth stack. In my experience, the cooldown will last just long enough to shave off some of the incoming damage (I can say this as fact for the first few times I ran it when I didn't get the cooldown off in time, and wound up taking substantially more damage).

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Originally Posted by Jpec07

This is false.

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Or, rather than killing yourself irl by trying to pin-point timing a cooldown to the nanosecond to mitigate a hit that does 80% of your health, you could just assume the OT will provoke it or cover you and take 5k instead and use your cooldowns for whatever else you'd use them for, like how I pop Foresight for the first Bombs Away and Rampart for the second during each baby phase, since I always yell at my healers to stop being lazy and go be a monkey.

I just never noticed Rampart actually working when I tried, so I assumed~

And yes, I put it on before the fourth stack.

I've been a PLD for a while. Coming from FFXI, I'm used to MT. Has nothing to do with what I DON'T want to do.

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Originally Posted by JackFross

Totally missed the point

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My point was you use DPS stance as an hint that you are going for OT spot instead MT, thats how the DF usually works so you just abuse the "norms".

i usually ask the other tank to MT in M1. then i can handle busters, adds and bombs myself and don't have to rely on others, because... we all know the DF xD