Why Avoid Parry?

[duceTRE]

Katy Perry is the best Parry

[Jpec07]

What you think are magical attacks are actually physical, the game is weird like that at times but Parry only works on Physical attacks. I know what you mean but trust me when I say you haven't parried a single magical attack.

Quake III is physical?

The problem is that it's RNG based and extremely unreliable. The scaling is so bad it's best to rely on skills that boost Parry chance rather than the parry stat itself. Parry is negated by Critical hits and you have to wrap your head around the idea that one of the best ways to mitigate damage in this game is to kill whatever is hurting you faster. Giving a boost to a stat that gives you a more sizeable boost to damage is more useful than a stat that MIGHT give you a small boost to your defense. On top of that most big fights are scripted so big reliable mitigitations are far more important than RNG mitigation.

I don't agree with this logic. Tanks in general contribute the least to group DPS (with the exception of Warriors in Deliverance). This is by design. The tank's job is to hold hate and to survive - dealing damage is an incidental aspect of tanking gameplay, but the vast majority of damage responsibility lies with the pure DPS jobs. Based purely on potency, +50 DTR will give more DPS to a damage job than it will to a tank.

A parried attack results in 20% mitigation for that attack, since 3.0. With a parry rate of 25%, that translates to (roughly) 5% total mitigation of incoming damage, plus or minus to account for RNG. Hypothetical numbers time. Even if it takes 250 Parry to get +1% parry rate (+.2% mitigation), isn't that worth it? The only way to tell is by determining if +250 of some other stat will help the enemy/enemies die fast enough to where their total damage output is more than .2% less (more likely for trash, less likely for a boss). And from a tank, I'm less inclined to believe this would be the case.

I also don't buy the RNG argument. Crit is also RNG based, so why is crit > parry, scaling aside?

EDIT: Another thing is Reprisal, which Procs on parry and gives a few seconds of -10% damage output. So then wouldn't DRK have even more reason to get Parry on their gear?

[fm_fenrir]

Not sure how accurate this is. I've seen parry come up on a number of magical attacks, and based on what I've seen from other posters, it seems to affect both physical AND magic. Evidence is purely anecdotal, though.

As far as I knew, you could only parry magical "auto" attacks, like ice sprite Blizzard casts. I'm also not sure that was confirmed, or if it still works in Heavensward--I tried to get some parries with Keen Flurry against a sprite, and didn't get a single parry out of a 6 minute encounter.

Anyway, stacking parry is bad because you could have determination or crit rate instead. Instead of a chance of 20% mitigation (massive nerf from 2.55), you can have a 100% mitigation by getting rid of the source.

[Ralvenom]

but won't it help to smooth out incoming damage when there are a lot of hits coming in? And to that end, isn't Parry then the best stat a tank can get?

There are no boss fights where there are a lot of hits coming in, so why bother. On large dungeon pulls (literally the only time you get hit a lot), you should be using several CDs anyway, which means you don't need a lot of parry to deal with that (common) situation. Hell, if you really do need mitigation for physical attacks, WARs just pop Raw Intuition, PLD pop Hallowed Ground, & DRK can pop (although they rarely would) a Dark Arts enhanced Dark Dance. My point is, if you actually NEED lots of mitigation, then you basically have it via defCDs.

The current boss design is such that parry doesn't help, because the damage is predictable (and therefore easy to deal with, if you just pop the correct CDs). As such, it is more beneficial to have the minimum HP required & then just stack crit, which allows you to add damage to the group.

[Iagainsti]

Katy Perry is the best Parry

^^^ Matthew Perry was also funny in Friends.

On point; Parry is unreliable, while you are going to mitigate some damage, your healer is not going to bank on that and use heals disregarding the chance to parry, thereby the final result of your mitigation was nothing more than an overheal.

[Jpec07]

Anyway, stacking parry is bad because you could have determination or crit rate instead. Instead of a chance of 20% mitigation (massive nerf from 2.55), you can have a 100% mitigation by getting rid of the source.

DPS is not viable mitigation unless the change in damage output from killing the mob sooner is greater than the damage that would be reduced by putting those stats into mitigation. It's not 100% mitigation, it's only the amount of damage that you shave off the end of the mob's life (and in my experience, tank DPS doesn't help with that in 99% of the encounters in this game). If 250 Parry mitigates .5%, but you killing it faster cuts out one auto attack that would account for .3% of the mob's damage output, Parry is the superior stat for tanking.

Now, if that autoattack would be more like 1%-2% of the total damage? Then okay, DPS stats are better.

[Merkava]

Quake III is physical?

If you parried it then yup, like I said the game is weird like that. "Parrying" magic makes less sense than blocking magic and it's already been said that Shields will never block magic.

I don't agree with this logic. Tanks in general contribute the least to group DPS (with the exception of Warriors in Deliverance). This is by design. The tank's job is to hold hate and to survive - dealing damage is an incidental aspect of tanking gameplay, but the vast majority of damage responsibility lies with the pure DPS jobs. Based purely on potency, +50 DTR will give more DPS to a damage job than it will to a tank.

The problem here is that your assumption not entirely correct (namely when it comes to warrior). A good tank can contribute a significant amount of DPS, heck I'm often top DPS in 90% of pug parties. Even if the tank is below a good DPS (which should be the case with a competent DPS) it is still a significant amount of damage that is being contributed, helping mitigation by killing things faster. A large pull is only dangerous when it takes too long and killing it fast is not only the responsability of the DPS, Tanks and Healers have to weight in as well.

A parried attack results in 20% mitigation for that attack, since 3.0. With a parry rate of 25%, that translates to (roughly) 5% total mitigation of incoming damage, plus or minus to account for RNG. Hypothetical numbers time. Even if it takes 250 Parry to get +1% parry rate (+.2% mitigation), isn't that worth it? The only way to tell is by determining if +250 of some other stat will help the enemy/enemies die fast enough to where their total damage output is more than .2% less (more likely for trash, less likely for a boss). And from a tank, I'm less inclined to believe this would be the case.

Have you ever tried bloodbath and zerk with overpower spam with a large pull? The amount of mitigation that offers is in a level of its own, the higher your damage the better it gets.

I also don't buy the RNG argument. Crit is also RNG based, so why is crit > parry, scaling aside?

EDIT: Another thing is Reprisal, which Procs on parry and gives a few seconds of -10% damage output. So then wouldn't DRK have even more reason to get Parry on their gear?

Your logic is sound and I understand where you're coming from, the only problem is that it just doesn't work like that in actual combat. Heck, thanks to bloodbath (in the case of WAR) critical and damage can actually offer far superior mitigation than parry. You just have to wrap your head around the idea that killing stuff faster is just way better than reducing damage by marginal amounts. Now I kinda agree that the degree where some people do give it importance is a bit... crazy, seeing as I don't think I'd ever give up a higher ilvl piece of gear since primary stats >>> secondary stats, specially after all the nerfing in 3.0.

But I have seen numerous raiders prefer lower ilvl gear just because it has parry.

[Iagainsti]

I also don't buy the RNG argument. Crit is also RNG based, so why is crit > parry, scaling aside?

At least when we're talking Warriors, Crit RNG can be manipulated with IR and Deliverance stacks, resulting in better self heals through IB, or higher damage bursts with FC. Parry mitigation cannot be manipulated. See previous post for end result.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

OP perhaps you should go check out the various testing people have done on parry.

A tank with 0 parry equipment only parries like 4% less than someone stacking it (it's like 7-8% without parry gear, 11% with full Parry). Meanwhile a tank that stacks Crit/det does way more damage than one with just parry gear.

As others have pointed out. You can't parry everything, and a lot of tank busters or raid wide damage is magical (Hyper compressed Plasma, Discoid, Holiest of Holy, etc). Go ahead and test it if you want. Take a WAR and have him use Raw Intuition on a bunch of moves. Only attacks treated as physical can be parried.

And in this game, the best mitigation is to kill whatever's hitting you faster. 900 parry won't save you. Pushing 100-300 more DPS to skip phases or meet DPS checks will

[Ralvenom]

The tank's job is to hold hate and to survive - dealing damage is an incidental aspect of tanking gameplay

Actually, a tank's job is 3-fold:
1. Keep hate.
2. Survive by using CDs when needed.
3. Contribute to party damage.

Some people like to forget #3 there.

Likewise, a healer's job is 3-fold:
1. Heal the party, especially the tank.
2. Contribute to party damage.
3. Don't overheal.

People expect healers to do #2 there. But, for some odd reason, they have NO ISSUE with forgetting #3 up in the tank section. It's as if some tanks feel that they're the special cookies who get to avoid having to deal damage, SAME AS EVERYONE ELSE. If you fulfill #1 & #2 as a tank, but you don't even bother to try to do #3...then I think you've failed as a tank, regardless of whether you're a WAR or DRK or PLD.