Tanks: parry becoming important?

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Originally Posted by Whiston

Parry is not the same, because the tank's HP pool is a constantly fluctuating amount. Parry would be amazing if a tank had 150k HP, and could not receive heals. Then the stat would be very worthwhile taking as there would be many opportunities to reduce the amount of HP you lost from a static pool.

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Fluctuating HP has little to do with it. The same holds true even if you include healing, it simply makes the pool larger. Healers are limited in both rate of healing (the amount per second of healing) and total amount of healing (They can heal at X rate for Y time, based on mana). Parry, on average, both reduces healing rate and total healing required.

It's the current structure of the encounters that makes parry a poor stat. That is, a parry is unreliable against spike damage and that's the true threat to tanks.
I outlined two situations where parry would make a meaningful impact on the total healing required.

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Originally Posted by Dante_V

Mathematically speaking it would be more useful in situations were the tanks is subjected to multiple attacks from multiple enemies at the same times that can be parried.

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On average, over long times, it does the same thing no matter how many enemies are attacking. A high rate of attacks just means it reaches the long-time steady state more quickly.

It's an issue of stocasticity: If you have a parry rate such that you parry 90% of incoming damage averaged there's no guarantee it'll parry any specific single attack. In the example of 20k in one attack or 20k in 100 attacks. In the former you'd live most of the time, except when you didn't parry and you'd just die. In the latter you'd always take about 2k damage total +/- some varriability.

Hmm? but Parry and Block stats only improves the chances of parrying and blocking happening, dont they?
If that is so, then a skill that guarantees a 100% chance of Parry or Block does nothing for the specific stat... in either a possitive or negative way :/

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Originally Posted by Arkenne

Hmm? but Parry and Block stats only improves the chances of parrying and blocking happening, dont they?
If that is so, then a skill that guarantees a 100% chance of Parry or Block does nothing for the specific stat... in either a possitive or negative way :/

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The idea is that if you can guarantee blocks and parries often enough then there is really no need to stack the stat that makes it happen more often at random. When you need a block or parry, you'll have a button to do it for you. When you don't need one, then you'll just do a tiny smile when it happens and move along.

You're right; it doesn't make the stat any better or worse in a purely numerical sense. In a situational sense, however, being able to guarantee the action the stat merely makes more likely makes the stat less relevant in situations it previously could have been.

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Originally Posted by Donjo

Guarantee against chance

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Yup, Im not saying anything against that :v

I mean, its the same as Perfect Dodge, it only allows you to 100% evade one physical attack, and tho it does nothing outside its 5 seconds of effect, it gives you control over a single enemy attack to a certain degree. So it really doesn't improve or nerf your character's chances to evade outside of its effect.

They will only allow you to perfectly parry or block that one attack you want to parry or block, but the rest will still be on lady luck's whims. :v

TL;DR we are in the same channel, as far as I know :/

Personally I think all tanks should have two sets of accessories: one for MT (vit, parry, acc) and one for OT (det, crit, acc). It also gives you options to mix and match as well to create a hybrid.

In ARR parry is very underwhelming for warriors since most attacks in raids are magic and therefore, can't be blocked or parried, and the rate of parry is far too low. Since War are considered the OT they most likely won't be tanking and if your not tanking then you are doing damage. Case and point: T13, where the war spends almost the entire fight, apart from the adds and soaking ankh morn, off defiance.

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Originally Posted by Rbstr

Parry, on average, both reduces healing rate and total healing required.

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I absolutely agree with the second part you said about reliability of parry, however this quoted line is absolutely untrue, and it's the reason parry has little value as it stands due to a tank's significantly fluctuating hp pool.

There is no single instance in this game where the ability to parry negates the requirement for healing. If a tank parried an auto attack down from 4200 damage to 3100 damage, this does not yield less of a healing requirement for the healers. Instead this damage taken must be healed up, and in nearly every scenario, parry will only contribute (even more so) to overhealing.

Even if you could quite reliably parry a lot of damage, the healer classes in this game cannot choose to heal 800 damage instead of 1200 damage. They are large bulks of hp healed at once.

But to the core of the topic, all things indicating that each class has a new guaranteed block or parry skill does further diminish the value of the stat. Additionally if group dps becomes more of a focus in the new raids, the other secondaries will contribute quite a bit more in comparison anyways.

It's becoming more useless imo and from what SE has released, it seems that DET/CRIT and soon maybe skill speed are becoming more of the go to stats for tanks after acc is capped. Never understood why people keep trying to defend it, but to each their own.

Don't get me wrong. I don't advocate for having parry in any current fight. But it's really easy to conceive of situations they might implement in the future where parry is actually reliable and useful mitigation - like spike damage being dealt via many smaller hits instead of one big hit.

Even with many smaller hits, while Parry as a stat becomes stronger, parrying itself is still RNG. As an example, if Bahamut's Claw persisted throughout all of T9 then Parry would be stronger as a stat in terms of parrying those hits potentially - but not "reliable". You can't rely on a parry to save you in that situation, you're still going to want to pop a CD that will allow you to live through all the hits assuming that you won't parry one. The same goes for healing, you're not going to account on your tank consistently parrying that sequence because they could easily parry none of it.

So even if you parry something in a tank buster thats split across multiple attacks (like Claw), you're still going to get the same amount of healing and use the same CDs. For tanks, Parry will never be useful for tank busters (you'll still be popping the same CDs) - however, if a tank buster were to have time enough in between each hit for the WHM/SCH to assess how much healing needed to be done for each hit, then Parry would be useful for the healers. On the chance that that is the direction they go, then Parry will give you a higher chance to save healers MP... but I don't think that's going to happen, personally.

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Originally Posted by Rbstr

Don't get me wrong. I don't advocate for having parry in any current fight. But it's really easy to conceive of situations they might implement in the future where parry is actually reliable and useful mitigation - like spike damage being dealt via many smaller hits instead of one big hit.

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That is definitely a possibility too. Something like Bahamut's Favor as a regular tank buster, or if some bosses had a Barrage type skill that tripled (or more) their auto attacks. That would definitely increase the value of parry for progression in those sort of situations for sure.