Since I see the idea coursing around a few times.

"Increase the tether range by X"

Allow me to say this as someone who uses / used Cover techs, if you were to extend Cover's range of the tether aka the distance before the tether stops working you'd actually make it more clunky for certain techs that would involve moving back and forth from your position to only get hit for a limited amount of hits.

While there have been no recent attempts to utilise techs with cover other than essentially trying to circumvent a provoke on P8Sp1's buster to keep the boss facing the same direction (I saw that recently and give me honestly a bit of a giggle), future-proofing Cover would be best by not extending the reach to avoid making usage of Cover more clunky.

Let's start simple by simply removing the gauge cost.