What does Heavensward actually bring to the table as an expansion?

[Kosmos992k]

I clearly stated in my post that I was referring to DPS.

My apologies, unfortunately 'DPS' has two meanings in this forum, it either means damage per second or damage dealing jobs. I took it to mean damage per second, you were referring to damage dealers.

Tank is the only thing in the game that gets 2 choices, DPS or mitigation/hp. However, in terms of secondary stats, it's widely accepted that Parry doesn't do anything worthwhile. No other stats provide mitigation, so again it comes down to DPS.

That's the current picture but parry was (once upon a time) much more useful which is why it's dripping off all the tank gear. The fact that SE, in their infinite wisdom, nerfed the crap out of parry (and block) is a mystery to me. I believe the official excuse is similar to the one used for dropping Granite Skin from WHM, damage scaling. Personally if the damage dealt by enemies scales with their level and mine, my mitigation should scale too. You'd have thought that this was something that the designers would have seen coming and considered in their original design rather than changing some fundamentals of jobs to fit their new content.

Ignorance is not understanding that adding X stat provides a DPS increase of 2% where Y stat provides a DPS increase of 3%. Neither stat provides anything OTHER than DPS, so choosing Y over X is obvious. Choosing X over Y is ignorance.

I also feel that I was clear that I WANT secondary stats to be more appealing and offer other things than DPS. Unfortunately, as the game is now, it's designed to only focus on DPS. IMO it makes all 2ndary stats worthless as game code.

Since there is only 1 stat that boost damage done, then the relics do in fact offer opportunity for some side-grades to secondary stats, even if it's just boosting VIT or PIE a bit for more HP or MP.

I absolutely agree about secondary stats, and the nerfing of parry and block really bugs the hell out of me because that's kind of where Paladins are coming from, blocking and parrying for maximum defensive benefit. And yet now, we're by no means the best at parrying, parry itself has been made worthless as a secondary stat, and our ability to block damage has been nerfed considerably. You'd think that since we are by far the crappiest damage dealer in the game, we would at least have been left with superior parry and block capabilities....