First off... I'm a console player so i have not played the game yet so I dont actually know how it works and also i dont want to tread on any toes of folks who have played it and know how it works....but the way i see it is maybe Cover provides some kind of damage mitigation against ranged weapons, 

Yeh i can understand people running round cover after all you dont turn invisible simply because you are hiding behind a pipe or a box or a computer console, they still know you are there, so can still find you.

Also yeh i can understand grenades being thrown over it, kinda makes sense to me that.. it's not a 50 foot wall after all, taking cover behind a post / pillar i would expect the grenades to bounce off that, or maybe go past it... maybe...Missiles as well... yeh i see them going over it if fired in an arc..

As i say I've never played it, so i really dont know...it's just my idea of how it works, but damage mitigation sounds likely to me..

 Ta

- this is an ARPG, not a tactical shooter, running to cover, and hiding behind cover, is time spent not killing mobs, it's the antithesis of a fast paced ARPG

- cover is too weak, it just breaks pretty fast

- it does not provide any relevant benefit

I for myself tried it out one or two times back in alpha, and have not even thought of using it ever since.
Though (idk if fixed, likely not) if you teleport a lot, you will learn to know what is cover, and avoid it, as you will get constantly stuck in it otherwise, and if you do, the game crashes. -.-

The idea of cover and its implementation in this game are about as good as:
- the Power Rating system which is a cheap excuse for actual stats, and hidden additional grind at the cost of better itemization
- the pseudo starmap, that does not do anything but split the flat list of available missions into different screens that take many, many clicks and aeons of waiting time to get from one to another, and hide 95% of the missions you can do at any given time, and... many more bad things....
- their idea that "grind 50 missions and call it an event/feature" is actual content
- several bugs that make playing certain classes (like, turret crusader) completely impossible (read: not impossibly underpowered, but completely impossible to play), since early alpha (!)
- their idea that raisind the lvl cap from 50 to 70 without adding any new items, but rendering everything you had completely obsolete, so only generating pointless grind to then get the same items you already had at higher PR, is actual content
- the fully broken and (even if it would be working) not thought through and inherently flawed crafting system
- their badly designed skill trees (and alle the bugs and not working skills in them... mostly unchanged since alpha)
- ...
...there's so many things fundamentally wrong with this game, that you can rightfully say they would need to dump literally everything except the graphics and re-do it from scratch, to even have the chance to get this game anywhere within the next few years.

And I guess cover is the least of those problems.

To be honest - I do like the cover system, Martyr is a slower ARPG than any of the others I've played and it has tried something new.  The current build I use (Crusader - Heavy Gunner) uses cover to keep suppression in the green, deal extra damage and to mitigate damage, without any cover at all - I have to back off and find some, but I can do this quite effectively.  I use cover in the Warzone all the time, and its key to my progress.

As far as cover is concerned it took some getting used too - but now I am used to it, I personally would not want it removed.  I agree its not perfect - but then what is.

I do think they need to be a little tougher, but then it's fun to be forced to move rather than be a camping station.
Also think how the AI feels. I sent AoE slows over medium cover with no issue.  I bet the AI complains internally. ;)

anything relying on cover is not even 10% as effective as any "good" build out there.

But that's not the problem either, even if you'd fix the general problems with cover, and threre are many,
and then further buff it to be acutally viable, it still fails.

Why?

Because time spent running for cover is time not spent killing mobs, it makes the game slower,

whereas ARPGs are about the killing spree (and the item hunt, which this game incredibly fails at).

Not to speak of, that relying on cover means relying on good level design and cover placement, you won't find either here.

Cover in a game where 95% of the mobs are onehits or gone in seconds, is useless, full stop.

Think of that, and then see people doing 500+ WZ lvls in 5 minutes, then think of how you would need to scale this to make cover necessary even for WZ lvl 50, then look at WZ 500+ again and realize this is an equation without any solution.

To actually make cover "a thing" would mean to buff mobs to a point where it takes more than 10 seconds to kill most of them,
and where it is NECESSARY for ALL builds to use cover or be annihilated.
(Now you say what about a "tanky" class?! Well, if a class would be, in that system, tanky enough to not need cover, it'd need to do so little damage that it's not viable, or everyone would roll that class and ignore cover altogether again.)
Then look at the last paragraph again, no, this  does not work, at all.

Cover is the antithesis of an ARPG,

is it completely useless in this game, and changing this would mean to re-design this game from scratch,
and they don't even have the combination of skill and manpower to even fix small things or deliver actual content.

This game is a cheap work build upon an existing game, a quick cash grab, and actually... a scam.

But I guess they already got their money out of it, the WH40K license seems to just work too well for such things,
and you can rest assured that it won't take long for the  next one to do the same thing with a different game.

I do wish it was more useful however as another have said a good build doesn't need cover but if you enjoy using it in the game then cover still has much to be desired, I've also notice that for some reason in cover occasionally you tend to have a "delay" in actions you take i.e abilities they also seem to randomly miss fire if we're going to be using cover at all i'd like a cone visual to distinguish what you can and actually cant shoot at from that angle because right now its a bit buggy (will shoot at the target but completely miss at the same time).