How would you improve the Paladin's Cover skill?

[Silver-Strider]

If you remove the gauge cost from Cover, doesn't the Oath gauge basically just become the Shelltron gauge?

In which does the gauge even need to exist at all? Like Shelltron is good, but its not so good that I don't think it couldn't be a standard CD skill, nor do I think its so broken it needs a gauge just for it.
Kinda the same with cover, like its okay, but I'd rather have Intervention, TBN, Nascent Flash, ect.

Intervention also uses Gauge

[nia_saeli]

If you remove the gauge cost from Cover, doesn't the Oath gauge basically just become the Shelltron gauge?

In which does the gauge even need to exist at all? Like Shelltron is good, but its not so good that I don't think it couldn't be a standard CD skill, nor do I think its so broken it needs a gauge just for it.
Kinda the same with cover, like its okay, but I'd rather have Intervention, TBN, Nascent Flash, ect.

Back to stormblood era oath gauge! Also conveniently get the benefit of homogenizing it with the rest of the jobs! (SAM's Shinten Gauge, WAR's Fel Cleave Gauge, SCH's Aetherpact Gauge, DNC's Saber Dance gauge, BRD's Apex Arrow Gauge, etc).

Sorry, that was a joke.

But seriously now, given how many jobs resources that are exclusively used by a single action, having Oath Gauge bethe Shelltron/Intervention gauge was pretty normal and fine. If improving cover makes the oath gauge unnecessary, that's a problem with the oath gauge, not Cover.

Side tangent on oath gauge: It's a shame that they removed generation oath oath gauge from HS instead of expanding on it. Generating resources from autoattacks is very boring and has the downside of being a worse cooldown (since you stop generating during downtime). It would be better to at least partially link oath gauge generation to skill usage in some way. For example: Lower or remove the generation on autos and give us something like 5-10 on HS/HC (double on DM) and 25-50 per Clemency to give us a way to generate it oathgauge during downtime.