Parry...

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Originally Posted by ZDamned

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No group can be perfectly consistent with their numbers. One attempt, you can have healers get Shrieked all day. Another attempt, you can have your Monk get it over and over again. As I said, there are many factors that go into it that you can't possibly take into account. I'm not "requiring" anything of you. Just saying that these numbers don't mean as much as you think it does. The means of measurement is flawed and the results are unreliable. I'm not arguing against your stance on Parry vs Det/Crit because, as I said, I agree with the point you are trying to make. Just not your means of proof.

On top of all this, the merits of Parry vs Det/Crit/SS go a lot deeper than simply your personal damage dealt and damage taken, but I think I'll stop right here for now.

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Originally Posted by bokchoykn

No group can be perfectly consistent with their numbers. One attempt, you can have healers get Shrieked all day. Another attempt, you can have your Monk get it over and over again. As I said, there are many factors that go into it that you can't possibly take into account. I'm not "requiring" anything of you. Just saying that these numbers don't mean as much as you think it does. The means of measurement is flawed and the results are unreliable. I'm not arguing against your stance on Parry vs Det/Crit because, as I said, I agree with the point you are trying to make. Just not your means of proof.

On top of all this, the merits of Parry vs Det/Crit/SS go a lot deeper than simply your personal damage dealt and damage taken, but I think I'll stop right here for now.

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Like I said, you have a very valid point. I don't disagree with what you said in the least either man. We can chat in game some about it too, but I dunno if there ever will be an accurate way to measure this. In the end, I feel though that I will be saying good bye to parry until I start getting hit for 3K consistently. =P

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Originally Posted by ZDamned

Like I said, you have a very valid point. I don't disagree with what you said in the least either man. We can chat in game some about it too, but I dunno if there ever will be an accurate way to measure this. In the end, I feel though that I will be saying good bye to parry until I start getting hit for 3K consistently. =P

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Yeah, there's no perfectly accurate way to measure it, but I think DPS is a more appropriate measurement than Damage Dealt. Damage Dealt is influenced by all the other members of your party. If they deal more damage, the fight will be shorter and your Total Damage Dealt contribution will be less. If they deal less damage, the fight will be longer and your Total Damage Dealt will be more. DPS, on the other hand, is not influenced by the performance of the other players, since it divides time out of the equation.

Also, I think the value of Parry can either be better measured by Parry percentage or DPS the enemies did to you personally, for the same reasons listed above. Time needs to be removed from the equation so that the total DPS of other members of your party don't skew the stats. Even if their performance was the same and they didn't get any gear upgrades.

Yeah, I'd love to talk about tank stuff in game. We seem to see eye to eye on tank itemization, instead of the consensus Parry >>> All that so many tanks religiously believe in.

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Originally Posted by ZDamned

If people don't want to take my results into account, I'll just do the most obvious test, and show point per point what my Rage of Halone combo can do exact number wise, with and without the Crit/Determination gear. I'll get all the statistically high and low numbers in , without any buffs at all.

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Alright. I did my own testing. I went in no stance, no buff, on dummy 50, and i used fast blade (no halone combo or anything, just fast blade) repeatedly. I did this until i had what seemed to be max and min, after about 50 use, so while i could miss one point at the beginning or the end of the range, i think i got it all overall. I discounted crit and SS for now, just watching the effect of det and str:

Test 1: Str 364, Det 211: range 153 - 169
Test 2: Str 377, Det 211: range 157 - 173
Test 3: Str 372, Det 266: range 161 - 177

The progress from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 is about 4/160 = 2.5% increase overall, and 5% from 1 to 3.

A 13 str increase corresponded to a 2.5% increase, which means 5.2 str would improve my damage by 1% overall, or that each point of str is a bit less that 0.2% increase in dps.

You can also see that 13 str increase my dps by 4, and 8 str and 55 det increased it by exactly 8, which means that 26 str is roughly the same than 8 str and 55 det, or that 18 str is roughly the same as 55 det. So 3.05 det is roughly equivalent to 1 str. It would thus take 15.86 det to increase damage by 1% according to this test.

Now regarding skill speed, 10 to 11 SS reduce your GCD by 0.01, which is an increase of 0.4% in your dps. So you need about 26 SS to increase your dps by 1%.

Regarding crit, you need about 14.5 crit rate to increase your crit % by 1%, which increase your dps by a bit less than 0.5%. So about 30 crit rate are necessary to improve your dps by 1%.


The difference of gear you proposed is trading:
115 parry (115 / 13 = 8.84 parry % chance, assuming you are a pld and block 21% of the time with weathered noct shield, and parry for 24%, comes down to a 1.68% damage reduction)
and 1 str (0.18% damage)

to win

24 SS (0.92% damage increase)
46 Det (2.9% damage increase)
45 crit (1.5% damage increase)

The four damage chance compound for a total change of 1.015 * 1.029 * 1.0092 * 0.9982 = 1.052, so a total of 5.2% increase in damage, which should come to about 6 dps increase if you are hovering around 120 to 130 dps.


Now you have hard numbers. While some of these numbers are not 100% accurate, they are close enough. Could there be a 20% difference from what i said ? Sure. Here you go. There might be a 7 dps increase from your 130, i'll even give you 8. Could there be a 400% difference to go from 5% increase to 25% or something. Nope. Nope. Nope. Sorry, just no way.

I urge you to do the test yourself and post your results back in there. Use your 2 sets (you obviously have more leeway on dps gear, i don't have that many options), go on the lvl 50 dummy west of coerthas, get the whole range for unbuffed unstanced fast blade with both sets, and provide your numbers. We should be able to tune a bit more finely the equations i used. In any case, i am quite doubtful you will come to a different conclusion than me. I don't know how you obtained the result you posted, but there seems to have been a massive bias somewhere.

Now the question of wether 1.68 % DR is worth 7 dps is up to you. For me, it is, all day long, but it is only my personnal opinion here.

I would like to forego parry for dps in an ideal scenario, but until accurate testing can be done on the dps gear, I have to agree with casper. We shouldn't all jump on the dps train until we have some facts.
And 1 parsed fight, with missing info is not enough to declare parry sucks.

I would also like to point out, it may be that its best to just go for a mix of stats and get the most of everything you can.
Parry Crit gear, Parry det gear, Crit Det gear, avoid SS and = win.
This would give you a balanced mix of dps and parry and probably be the best rounded tanking experience.


To the point about ending a fight sooner = to taking less damage. While yes you would take less overall damage, the spike damage you would incur would not be affected and in fact you would take more spike damage.
Healing isnt about running out of mana in this game so length of fight is not really a mana healer issue. Healing is about keeping the tank alive during large spikes of damage. If we reduce those then healing is easier, so parry might still be the better argument here.
Now specifically Turn 6 or 7 (dont remember which) with its 7 minute hard enrage, it certainly makes sense to gear for more dps to push you through it.

While I do agree ending a fight earlier means less mechanics do dodge, and less chance of a wipe. Def not arguing that point.
But if we are strictly talking keeping a Tank alive, it is about how much damage per second are you taking, not how much damage do you take over the course of the fight. Just some more food for thought on this whole issue.

I would like to personally thank casper and zdamned for the this discussion, it has been quite thought provoking and these are questions we should be looking to solve.

After all had been said and done, I personally will be going with Determination and Crit almost entirely because those stats work 100% of the time, as opposed to parry working only 50% or less. If you honestly want to mitigate damage, just use a Buckler shield. =P
Parry is not working well enough in my case. The fight ended 9 seconds faster in my DPS gear, but like people all pointed out, there are too many variables. However my damage output difference is a massive show of how much the Crit/Det can add.
It's entirely possible that my groups DPS got shriek more often in my DPS Set, and it's entirely possible that my groups Healers all got Shriek consistantly in my Parry set. In both cases the damage dealt can vary... But 9K is a large number for variance to totally explain.

I brought up the thread entirely for the sake of discussion, not to change anyone's entire motive behind tanking.

ALSO! I mixed up a number in my head. the fight started at 6:18 PM, not lasted that long. It's an 11 minute enrage, and we beat the fight in 9 minutes and 23 seconds with my DPS Set on.

The Damage I took per second differently between the 2 was exactly 13 higher in DPS gear. If you calculate that out, it's roughly saying 10 points of parry equate to 1 less DTpS,
IMO Thats too low to spend point on for my personal taste.

I would just like to thank everyone who did join in this discussion for being civil, and humoring my theory. =)

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Originally Posted by Casper

Now regarding skill speed, 10 to 11 SS reduce your GCD by 0.01, which is an increase of 0.4% in your dps.

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Skill speed only increases your damage output for Weapon Skills, not auto attacks. It would actually be less than 0.4%. It also consumes your TP at a faster rate, so in a fight where you can run out of TP, its value is somewhat diminished.

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115 parry (115 / 13 = 8.84 parry % chance, assuming you are a pld and block 21% of the time with weathered noct shield, and parry for 24%, comes down to a 1.68% damage reduction)

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1.68% damage reduction against attacks that can be parried. Not all attacks can be parried. FYI, 25% of the damage our Paladin took in Turn 8 this week came from unparryable sources, and these are the sources that are most likely to kill him.

Also, because of the unpredictable nature of parries, the DR is actually nearly useless in terms of increasing your Effective HP, since this extra 1.68% may or may not occur when you're about to get one-rounded by a sudden burst from the enemy. You can't rely on Parry to help you here. You can only rely on MOAR VIT. For that reason, 1.68% DR from Parry is much less valuable than a constant 1.68% DR. Because Parry DR works this way, its only benefit is saving MP for your healers in the long run. Not for actually increasing your effective HP. This is very, very important to realize about Parry and block.

Anyway, whether I would rather take a 5.2% increase to damage output over a 1.68% damage reduction from Parry depends on the fight and what role I'm playing, but for most content in the game, I would honestly probably take the damage.

Anyway, this test is a very extreme case where you're trading 113 points of Parry for the equivalent in offensive stats and not simply minor gear decisions here. The differences either way are minimal and there are merits to both. So why are people so obsessed with Parry-based BiS lists? I've been wondering this since 2.0.

Casper has concluded that he likes the all-Parry build. ZDamned concluded that he likes the all-Damage build. My conclusion is WHO CARES?! If the opposite ends of the f---ing spectrum equate to 1-2% DR vs 6-7 DPS, we are splitting hairs here. Strength and Vitality are what actually matter. Have enough Accuracy but not too much or else you're wasting stats. The rest is so inconsequential.

Thanks for doing the testing, Casper. This is great info. I'll try something similar on my Warrior.

@bok: "because of the unpredictable nature of parries, the DR is actually nearly useless in terms of increasing your Effective HP, since this extra 1.68% may or may not occur when you're about to get one-rounded by a sudden burst from the enemy": Sorry, have to disagree a bit here :) this is only true for pure burst like death sentence / mountain buster / swarm. In the new coil, those are almost inexistent (swarm is not frequent enough to be a problem or a significant danger and is almost the only case i can think of). For anything that is not that bursty, yes, you will feel the DR, because with ~30% parry and 21 to 40% block, you are bound to mitigate crap; we are not talking about a 10% chance here. I agree though that indeed some attacks can't be parried.


@Zdamned: A shame you drop the ball now :( i wanted you to go do the same test i did so we could compare numbers. Also, would like to point out: i think i have found the bias you had in T7. Most likely, in one run, you had songs from your bard that hit you to recover tp, while in the other run you had not. I noticed that if the bard was too far away when singing i could just get tp deprived as soon as at 75% of melusine. Even if you get a song a bit later on, having any kind of TP starve is going to impact the results a lot. I am pretty sure this is what happened, and would explain such a massive difference in damage dealt.

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Originally Posted by Casper

@Zdamned:... would like to point out: i think i have found the bias you had in T7. Most likely, in one run, you had songs from your bard that hit you to recover tp, while in the other run you had not. I noticed that if the bard was too far away when singing i could just get tp deprived as soon as at 75% of melusine. Even if you get a song a bit later on, having any kind of TP starve is going to impact the results a lot. I am pretty sure this is what happened, and would explain such a massive difference in damage dealt.

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I actually never ran out of TP on T7. =P Shield Swipe is a VERY important tool for Paladin TP Management. Once you get the 2nd RoH combo off, you should be using it every time it's up, with only 1 notable deviation for re-applying the RoH De-Buff.

In regards to that point, I highly recommend you macro Shield Swipe in, as the first action you use for both Fast Blade, and Savage Blade. It takes a little getting used to since SS is also a GCD, but once Enmity is established, it's always the best skill to use. (15 seconds into an encounter.)

Also in regards to Bard songs, we have to bards, but only use the Foe Req and Mages Ballad. Paeon only when someone calls for it.

I'll still do your tests on my end as well, as soon as I get the time. I was just summing up my thoughts, and conclusions that I drew, and giving everyone props for making this thread one of the non fail ones in this forum. =P

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Originally Posted by Casper

@bok: "because of the unpredictable nature of parries, the DR is actually nearly useless in terms of increasing your Effective HP, since this extra 1.68% may or may not occur when you're about to get one-rounded by a sudden burst from the enemy": Sorry, have to disagree a bit here :) this is only true for pure burst like death sentence / mountain buster / swarm. In the new coil, those are almost inexistent (swarm is not frequent enough to be a problem or a significant danger and is almost the only case i can think of). For anything that is not that bursty, yes, you will feel the DR, because with ~30% parry and 21 to 40% block, you are bound to mitigate crap; we are not talking about a 10% chance here. I agree though that indeed some attacks can't be parried.

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Ravensbeak in Turn 9 hurts a lot. Rotoswipe combined with Diffusion Ray in Turn 8 too.

Anyway, this is kind of besides the point. Look at it this way:

How does a tank die? Sometimes, the healers are preoccupied with someone else, they make an error, and the tank takes a sudden burst of damage and his HP drops to 0.

How does the tank prevent that from happening with gear? By increasing his effective HP. Effective HP represents the maximum amount of damage you can take without a heal before dying. Remember this definition.

How does the tank increase his effective HP? By increasing his HP (Vitality) or by increasing his damage reduction.

Parry/Block gives damage reduction. Does that mean that Parry/Block increases effective HP? No, it doesn't. It doesn't because when it comes to that burst that's going to kill you, the X% Parry that you get from gear may or may not occur during this period. It MIGHT save you. There is a chance that it will and there is a chance that it won't.

The bottom line is that Parry/Block does NOT increase the maximum amount of damage you can take without a heal before dying. The damage that would have killed you can still potentially kill you even if you added a ton of Parry (and nothing else) to your character's stats. Your Effective HP remains the same.

This is the point I was trying to make.