Paladin needs some changes

[Rithy255]

Why would you want to make an iconic PLD skill a role action? Should we give deployment tactics to every healer? Should we give mantra or tempra grassa to every DPS?

Like please let classes have unique utility

Unique utility that has 0 uses vs a ability thats actually useful and fun.

for cover to actually be useful paladin would need to be required.

I'm not against classes having unique useful utility but the idea that cover makes paladin unique or stand out is a joke, its a skill you shouldn't even have on your hot bar.

[Supersnow845]

Unique utility that has 0 uses vs a ability thats actually useful and fun.

for cover to actually be useful paladin would need to be required.

I'm not against classes having unique useful utility but the idea that cover makes paladin unique or stand out is a joke, its a skill you shouldn't even have on your hot bar.

Cover had plenty of uses, honestly if you genuinely think cover is a useless skill then you might be the problem here (no offence)

Cover is easily the best or second best (alongside deployment) unique utility in the game

[Rithy255]

Cover had plenty of uses, honestly if you genuinely think cover is a useless skill then you might be the problem here (no offence)

Cover is easily the best or second best (alongside deployment) unique utility in the game

Can you like name instances where cover has actually been useful for it's intended purpose in a fight? I haven't done anything recent so maybe its changed? but i highly doubt cover has a genuine use case that isn't already fulfilled by intervention.

[PyurBlue]

for cover to actually be useful paladin would need to be required.

Why would that be the case? I find situational skills to be much more interesting then forced skills. Tank LB3 is rarely used outside of the fights that force a usage, yet I find all of those moments forgettable. It's an obligatory button press without meaning. They can't compare to the handful of times I've used tank LB3 unplanned and on reaction successfully.

Cover being situational is a success story in FF14. The real problem it has is from being too strongly undertuned in an attempt to balance it when it was at its peak.

I'm not against classes having unique useful utility but the idea that cover makes paladin unique or stand out is a joke, its a skill you shouldn't even have on your hot bar.

Absolutely not true. Not having cover available is objectively making you less useful as a PLD. Cover can very easily save runs.

[Carighan]

for cover to actually be useful paladin would need to be required

That'd be how you take the fun away from fun abilities. Plus you misunderstand how required abilities work I think, as they by definition offer no player agency and hence might as well be automated passive procs at no less of combat gameplay depth.

[DeathNoodles]

God no, leave paladin alone

[jomas_45]

.
I also like to use it when I notice we have a struggling sprout

As someone who always struggles the first time she does content, I love Cover, or as I jokingly call it "the Tether of Shame". I have said "I didn't get tethered!" as a moment of pride doing first time content. I'm so very sorry to all the healers and their Pals.

And then, sometimes, I get to pay it forward, which makes me very happy.

[Rithy255]

I'm going to make a response to a lot of the general feedback i've got into general points.

• I do think niche abilities do sometimes have their place on a job, a great example of this is ironically already on paladin which is clemency which has pretty much the exact same use case a cover (aka to save people in situations where that player was low hp due to lack of healers up at the time). I think clemency serves that purpose way better and is in general way more flexible as a option.
  
  A lot of cases where cover could be useful in hard content like savage, theirs usually mechanics such as debuffs where cover unironically messes up and causes your death, where you rather would just use a skill like intervention or clemency.
  
  I do not think a cool mech like cover should be just restricted to niche emergency situations, I would love them to actually utilise it in fights where it would be very useful, though this is hard without making it either required or not useful outside "emergency situations" which i think PLD without cover is already useful.
  
  Niche and unique for the sake of it isn't really a good excuse, people still argue shield bash is a unique and "interesting skill" all I see it is a reason to hold back paladin as it's a "bloat" skill, I don't think cover is quite as useless as a skill like shield bash.
  
  Lastly I do not think making cover a role action that is often used for fights is automatically a bad thing because "homogenization" while yes it's plainly homogenization that doesn't mean it's automatically a bad thing, I do think ff14 has a tendency to make bad homogenization changes and needs to walk back on a lot of changes but not all homogenization is bad, What we quite honestly need with job design is less homogenization and simplification but that doesn't mean sometimes you can't turn something like cover that to me is a bland and uninteresting skill with barely any use cases into something better (though theirs cases of giving it some other utility to make it slightly better as a unique to paladin generalist skill, I think it's full potential would be as a role action.

I'll stand by my opinion personally even if it's not popular here, I'm not against the larger issue at hand with poor job design though.

[PyurBlue]

I do not think a cool mech like cover should be just restricted to niche emergency situations, I would love them to actually utilise it in fights where it would be very useful, though this is hard without making it either required or not useful outside "emergency situations" which i think PLD without cover is already useful.

That's essentially what original cover was. You could use it as mitigation as a cotank. As OT I'd sometimes use cover immediately on the MT when the first TB came up. This still works even now, it's just more costly and less effective. It was also a way to provide knockback protection to phys range before they were given Arm's Length.

Despite Cover's current weakened state I get far more use out of it than Clemency, which has MP cost and a GCD cast time. Intervention is the most straightforward to use by far but has much less mitigation potential. It can't save someone with a bunch of vulns on 10% HP.

Cover was hit too hard when it was rebalanced and it should get one of its old perks back, either 20% damage reduction or zero Oath cost. With either of those changes it should become less niche without being turned into a boring scripted solution to one dimensional mechanics that exist only to force the player to press the designated button.

[Shistar]

As someone who always struggles the first time she does content, I love Cover, or as I jokingly call it "the Tether of Shame". I have said "I didn't get tethered!" as a moment of pride doing first time content. I'm so very sorry to all the healers and their Pals.

And then, sometimes, I get to pay it forward, which makes me very happy.

Hahaha, so cute! In my FC we call it "The Leash" for extra ego damage. No need to apologize! Your death makes us supports' game more fun :P