Why Avoid Parry?

[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.