For griefing co-op partners trying to make ranged attacks or heal party members, obviously.
Yeah, the fact that it blocks the vision of your allies for that 1 round of it's useless existence only adds insult to injury. It feels like at best it's bad, and at worst it's counter-productive.
It's just so weird, because for those 2 AP, I could run a long distance for cover, I could throw an actual Smoke Grenade, I could attack the enemy and actually do damage, I could drink 2 potions to protect myself from whatever damage I would be able to avoid with the Smoke Cover (which isn't much, especially when taking AoE effects that can be casted outside of it but still hit you inside), I could do Cloak and Dagger for 1 AP and literally teleport without breaking stealth, and then 1 AP more to simply turn invisible for
two turns with Chameleon Cloak, or I could just use Chameleon Cloak to begin with, for 1 AP, and then drink a potion for the other 1 AP.
And that's just the beginning. There's
so many different options, and they're
all far superior to Smoke Cover.
It's like they designed Smoke Cover before Sneaking in combat was nerfed into the ground, or from before they straight-jacketed Action Points, and then they never actually returned to it.
And on top of it, it has a 5-turn cooldown, so you can't even employ it reliable and consistently if you wanted to.
There's a few other extremely circumstantial but still useful Skills floating around (Breathing Bubble comes to mind) that seem to predate the current system of limited memorization slots, but at least they're usually cheap, but Smoke Cover must take some kind of prize when it comes to being useless.
I just don't see
any situation in which I'd use it effectively. It's just plain weird. Somewhere, there's a designer that thought to themselves
"This'll be cool" or
"This could be useful when...", and I just don't understand what they were thinking.
