
Originally Posted by
RadicalPesto
PLD would lose enormous amounts of DPS and completely misalign its rotation with party buffs if it tried to pull, it would effectively put most of your burst out of trick attack range for huge chunks of the fight if you pulled as PLD, and even then, you would require extra levels of aggro babysitting due to the PLD MT opener just straight up generating pitiful aggro compared to WAR and DRK. PLD has no issues with mitigation now, largely thanks to them fixing the horrible cooldown on Sentinel, but its personal mitigation is still kind of unimpressive compared to WAR and DRK, since WAR has a much shorter CD immunity and two self-healing CDs, and DRK has TBN. You're not going to run out of CDs on PLD very easily now, but its self-mitigation is only describable as "functional", not amazing.
Cover was "broken" in that entire strategies relied on it. In particular, the standard cooldown rotation for God Kefka in O8S relied heavily on abusing Cover for Hyperdrives in order to save coooldowns for the MT, who would usually be a WAR, and would also abuse Holmgang for Ultimate Embraces. O8S was certainly doable without cover, but Cover made the fight a lot easier for both tanks and healers in a way that a DRK/WAR composition wouldn't have been able to. So no, it's not a matter of "doing an extremely poor job spacing out cooldowns", it was a matter of O8S having a lot of tankbusters with bleeds that could be trivialized by Cover, which would allow the MT to save their immunities to cheese Ultimate Embrace with them.