Cover should be a Role Action

[Ultimatecalibur]

Even though it was a minor thing I quite liked the bit in E1S adds phase where each tank had to interrupt their specific add's cast of Mana Boost in order to prevent the following cast of Mana Surge from wiping the entire party with a raidwide blast. Perhaps my liking of interrupts has to do with the fact that I played SWTOR before FFXIV, and interrupting of specific skills in PvP in that game was a very important thing, but I do feel that it's an under-utilized mechanic that could have at least a little bit more potential from a mechanical perspective in fights.

Considering one of the "major" changes in ShB was making the interruptible actions visible. I was expecting interrupting to be a lot more prevalent in ShB. It is kind of saddening that their inclusion in fights seems more an afterthought than a core factor. Both tanks having Interject should mean that fights like T1 ADS shouldn't be problematic anymore.

As for Cover, well, if SE were to make it a tank role action with something like a 90 or 120s CD then I think some sort of mechanic where a tankbuster gets targeted on a DPS or healer, rather than the tank, forcing one of the tanks (or both if two of them go out) to identify the target it was going on and Cover them to mitigate it would be neat. I can see that wiping pugs in savage constantly though.

Which might be exactly what the game needs to do to reintroduce tank "skill" back into the game. I'd rather have tank skill measured by healer/dps survival through use of Cover/Intervene/TBN/HoS/NF than by dps numbers.

This is true, but they could always change what it does.
As an off the wall example: what if instead of reducing damage to people behind you it blocked off orange AoE markers? Something as simple as that would definitely influence strats.

Cover is conceptually and mechanically fine as it currently stands. I was more disparaging the formulaic fight design that the devs have developed.