Is cover REALLY nerfed, or nah?

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

That's not at all what is happening to cover because cover is no longer in the equation to get the 20% mitigation which is the whole reason you used cover. How do you not understand this?

Before the change if a mob is about to use a tankbuster on the MT I can cover them and it reduces the damage taken by 20%. If I provoke the mob before the tankbuster I am taking the full hit unless I use mitigation. (Cover is the better option).

After the change if a mob is about to use a tankbuster on the MT I can cover them and it reduces damage taken by 20% at the cost of 50 gauge. OR I can just provoke the mob before the tankbuster and reduce the damage taken by 20% at no cost AND can use sheltron because I didn't waste my gauge on cover. (Provoke is the better option).

So in the same scenario before and after the change cover is no longer the more effective option, in other words COVER'S EFFECTIVENESS HAS BEEN REDUCED. Even without the gauge cost post-change cover is, at best, on par with just provoking the mob which is still less effective than pre-change cover which is BETTER than provoking the monster.

Cover will be mostly as effective in ShB as it is now, you will just need to wait 22 seconds into a fresh encounter before you can use it. As Izsha has stated, it is simply shifting around tooltips in terms of mitigation, if it continued to have both the traited cover and the new tank mastery trait, it would be busted, it would mitigate around ~38% before any other mitigation was accounted for. (might as well have Sentinel active every time you cover someone)

Cover has been used to cheese a tankbuster so to prevent a tank swap or delay a tank swap in SB (o2s was a good example of this, where you would cover the MT after he gained 2 stacks from Catastrophe, and have cover transfer the third stack onto the PLD), just as much as it will continue to do so in ShB, the only difference is now it will cost 50 gauge but the mitigation value is mathematically the same.
Cover will still help ease CD usage of other tanks like in o12s with the tank share, using cover to bypass the magic vuln debuff, meaning if you blow 100 gauge on cover + sheltron you've saved your co-tank a CD or 2 and you haven't lost anything of major worth since what else are you gonna spend gauge on. It will still work in the same ways to maximise uptime as in o11s to abuse mechanical situations.

Also as a little tip you could also have you're co tank use their intervention equivalent on you to boost the mitigation on the dmg going through cover if you were short some gauge for sheltron.

[Izsha]

That's not at all what is happening to cover because cover is no longer in the equation to get the 20% mitigation which is the whole reason you used cover. How do you not understand this?

Before the change if a mob is about to use a tankbuster on the MT I can cover them and it reduces the damage taken by 20%. If I provoke the mob before the tankbuster I am taking the full hit unless I use mitigation. (Cover is the better option).

Again semantics. All you are telling me is that they buffed the provoke option, not nerfed the cover mitigation.

Today: 100k tabk buster incoming.
You use cover take 80k.
You provoke you take 100k.
You do nothing mt takes 100k ot 80k (stance dependant)

Shadowbringer:100k tank buster.
You use cover and take 80k.
You provoke and take 80k.
Do nothing mtntakes 80k.

Tell me the part where cover got worse? Nerf means it is worse. What they did was BUFF provoke via passive mitigation. They BUFFED the MT eating busters. If war does 5k dps and drk does 4kdps then shadowbringers comes out and war does 5k and drk does 6k, war didnt get nerfed. Cover is just as effective as always and provides thenexact same result from using it just as this 5k war example is the exact same before and after the example drk buff.

Tanks got better at taking damage. Cover remained the same. Yes, that means cover will be used less often (as I said). And it HAS to relatively less powerful to keep pld from OT for 2 years. But they did it by buffing everyone and everything around it. This is what people mean when they say balance through buffs instead of balance through nerfs.

[Galactimus]

You said it yourself.

Doing "absolutely nothing" is now the same as using Cover.

Both will take 80k damage, so why bother.

Hence, how often you use Cover has been greatly diminished.

Therefore, it's been nerfed in usefulness.

[Izsha]

100k covered is 80k. Zero change. Zero nerf. Is cover nerfed because your MT war used vengence when you covered? You might as well have not covered your vengence warrior because now you will take MORE damage than doing nothing. Guess vengence nerfed cover, better call SE because the mt can mitigate damage equal or better than cover can.

[KatsuraJun]

Today: 100k tabk buster incoming.
You use cover take 80k.
You provoke you take 100k.
You do nothing mt takes 100k ot 80k (stance dependant)

Shadowbringer:100k tank buster.
You use cover and take 80k.
You provoke and take 80k.
Do nothing mtntakes 80k.

You can't really look at it this way, because cover should be looked at in the context of how much more damage you block compared to the MT doing nothing.

SB: 100k tank buster incoming.
You use cover mitigate 20k damage more than the MT would by doing nothing
You provoke you mitigate 0 damage more than the MT would by doing nothing

ShB: 100k tank buster incoming.
You use cover mitigate 0 damage more than the MT would by doing nothing.
You provoke you mitigate 0 damage more than the MT would by doing nothing.

That's a clear nerf in effectiveness when considering using cover on the other tank, which constituted the vast majority of its usage.

[Cabalabob]

Again semantics. All you are telling me is that they buffed the provoke option, not nerfed the cover mitigation.

Today: 100k tabk buster incoming.
You use cover take 80k.
You provoke you take 100k.
You do nothing mt takes 100k ot 80k (stance dependant)

Shadowbringer:100k tank buster.
You use cover and take 80k.
You provoke and take 80k.
Do nothing mtntakes 80k.

Tell me the part where cover got worse? Nerf means it is worse. What they did was BUFF provoke via passive mitigation. They BUFFED the MT eating busters. If war does 5k dps and drk does 4kdps then shadowbringers comes out and war does 5k and drk does 6k, war didnt get nerfed. Cover is just as effective as always and provides thenexact same result from using it just as this 5k war example is the exact same before and after the example drk buff.

Tanks got better at taking damage. Cover remained the same. Yes, that means cover will be used less often (as I said). And it HAS to relatively less powerful to keep pld from OT for 2 years. But they did it by buffing everyone and everything around it. This is what people mean when they say balance through buffs instead of balance through nerfs.

I like that you’re claiming the person presenting actual differences in scenarios is arguing semantics then saying things like “well cover didn’t get worse, other things got better, that’s not a nerf”.

[Izsha]

The fact that a MT can mitigate more damage than cover provides just means MTs are better off. Cover's relative effectiveness is entirely based off the mitigation of the target you are covering. That has always and still is the case. Cover a healer? mitigate lots of damage. Cover a Drk in grit using shadwall? Your literally taking more damage than doing nothing. Cover never changed (except in cost). War doing 5k forever isnt nerfed because Drk used to do 4 and now does 5. There is nothing semantic about the effect that cover provides. 20% less damage than an unmitigated target. The target's mitigation has always been the variable that makes cover effective as a mitigation tool or not. That was, and is still true. Covers effect is identical for how it deals with mitigation. It also still has the menagerie of other uses besides covering the MT that are also unchanged. Something doing the exact same thing at 2 points in time isnt semantics. Its the definition of identical. If you choose to make everything a relative game to decide if something is nerfed then every time a tank has tank stance on or uses a CD youre 'nerfing' cover which is a strange logic to apply to a skill. "Trick attack got nerfed because a non-ninja job got a 90 sec CD instead of 60" "Pld does more damage than War now, war got nerfed" That logic doesnt have an end point and is entirely arbitrary because its fundamentally all relative. Have fun trying to build a consensus on anything for job changes when you cant pin an actual definition to the goal. Tanks are simply better at mitigating damage because they have tank stance for free. Cover wasnt 'nerfed' if you were paried with a tank that used tank stance now, but because moving target definitions its a nerf now. The thought process is fundamentally flawed.

[Shougun]

Covers effect is identical for how it deals with mitigation.

If you're in tank stance and you cover a healer wouldn't it be ~40% mitigation (shield oath + cover)? (In Stormblood)

[MrThinker]

If you're in tank stance and you cover a healer wouldn't it be ~40% mitigation (shield oath + cover)? (In Stormblood)

Actually, because these defense buffs are multiplicative, it would be more like 44% mitigation (1.2 * 1.2 =1.44).

Shield Oath increases your base defense by 20%, and the cover trait reduces damage based on the increased defense, not the 'out of shield oath' defense.

EDIT: Okay I was wrong, it doesn't increase defense but reduces damage taken. And it is effectively around 36% mitigation.

[Shurrikhan]

Seems that the enhanced cover trait was there, because tanks had no innate defense built into them, so it was seen as a buff.

Now that we have the new Tank mastery that gives us 20 percent mitigation always, it's not a nerf to remove that trait, right? Unless they increase auto damage and tank buster damage to meet that new mitigation....which would make the new mitigation trait...worthless? Right? Because you could just delete the trait, put the dmg the way it was again, and you'd essentially have the same thing...

So, I ask again, because that scenario seems pure lunacy, of them adding a useless mitigation trait that actually doesn't matter, Cover still has 20 percent mitigation baked into it, because all dmg to the PLD is filtered thru the trait, tank mastery.

The game wouldn't be able to tell which damage is going where, so it's impossible for them to raise damage "because tanks" because anyone could theoretically take those autos or buster.

It is of course still going to be a nerf to Paladin. Cover was essentially applying your half-duration Rampart onto an ally while also enabling your CDs to then affect them. Think Shake it Off, but with greater target specificity, no buff-stripping penalties, and perfect effectiveness of the applied CDs rather than that of a poor sacrifice.

Now, I've thought since we saw that trait that that skill was overpowered, and even as someone who thoroughly enjoyed and cheesed their way through pre-nerf 4.0 PLD... I'm glad it's gone. What I'm curious about is how it might be more subtly changed... without even getting an appearance in patch notes.

For instance, the design of Cover could be made to give one, two, or no opportunities for mitigation:

• It could transfer the mitigated damage of the target to the Paladin and then be mitigated again by the Paladin's own effects, allowing both tanks to survive off a mere Rampart what would otherwise require a stronger cooldown.
• It could transfer the direct, initial damage to the Paladin, bypassing the target's own mitigation and using only the Paladin's. OR, it could transfer the mitigated damage of the target directly to the Paladin, given the Paladin no chance to mitigate with one's own effects.
• Or finally, as per a Shared Fate debuff, it could transfer the initial damage directly to the Paladin's HP, denying both opportunities for mitigation.

Now, I doubt we'll get that last one, but we could end up with something new from among the first two. And a lot could change with that.

Tell me the part where cover got worse? Nerf means it is worse. What they did was BUFF provoke via passive mitigation. They BUFFED the MT eating busters.

A buff to all tank duos except those with PLD while PLD receives nothing compensatory is a relative nerf to PLD. I believe it's a deserved nerf in this case, but it is objectively a nerf.

Previous co-mitigation optimizations for PLD:

• Cover with CDs for mitigation value equal to your CDs plus a further, free Rampart-equivalent for 10 seconds.
• Use banked resource on Intervention as many times as you can between when Cover fades and when your CDs fade, for up 15-35% mitigation over 6 seconds each. Skill Speed dependent.

New co-mitigation optimizations for PLD:

• Swap in and use CDs. If Rampart and Sentinel usage are not otherwise enforced, use Rampart between 9-10 seconds before Sentinel; these can almost be treated as stacked dps cooldowns with tight sync timings.
• Have other tank swap in with 1 second left on your CDs. You will Intervention them at this point, giving them up 15-35% mitigation for their first 6 seconds.

You've lost a free 20% mitigation cooldown per 2 minutes. And you've given its convenience a resource cost of roughly 6 seconds of 30% mitigation, making it basically worthless in optimal play. It was grossly strong, and now it's not likely to see use at all. That's a nerf.