Paladin get's skills WAY too late.

[Loggos]

Yes, Cover is soooo awesome. I hear it every time yet it's used like 1 in 1000 runs. Super good skill. The only reason it exists it's cause it's like legacy skill. Pretty useless but it's there, but being a legacy skill doesn't make it good. Good skill is Fight or Flight or Rampart or Sheltron. Why? Cause they don't need specific scenario to be useful. They just are. Cover isn't.

Cover is a situational skill but that doesn't make it bad. The idea that skills are only valuable if they are not scenario-specific reinforces FF's overly scripted design philosophy. No thanks to that. Randomness (which we have far too little of in this game) is often the factor that spices things up but that also means that not every fight will feature every scenario. And some scenario will happen more frequently than others.

Situational skills allow for at least a little bit of job identity and gameplay moments that break out of the mold of FF's perfectly choreographed fights. If a fight goes well there are many skills that will never be used. There might be no res, no provoke, no shirk, no stun, no spell interruption, no invuln. Sometimes you don't even need big heals. See the issue of healers pressing 1 for the majority of an encounter.
Unfortunately that's the nature of FF's current battle design.

That doesn't invalidate the existence of skills that can be used in situations when a fight doesn't pan out according to its script, like when players make (repeated) mistakes.
Those occasional moments where you get to press your "oh sh*t" button make the 99 sleep-inducing runs where nothing happens more bearable.
I don't think the gameplay experience will really be improved if they cull the last traces of unique job flavour even further.

I'd much rather have have them create content that makes using cover (and healing lol) more meaningful again.


Also, that's your anecdotal statistics. Personally I both use cover and see cover used frequently enough. So whose anecdote is right?