Why Avoid Parry?

[Kacho_Nacho]

*snip*

The question though is the -degree- in which it is easier... and it's not much. The way the game works, you just don't have constant incoming damage or spike damage of the magnitude where the parry/vit/shield tank's overall toughness makes any real difference to the success of a group. However, the strength/crit/det/sword tank will be pushing 30-40% more DPS than the turtley tank... and in -most- cases nowadays, that extra dps is just far far more useful.

No one is FORCING tanks to avoid parry or focus dps 100%, but the hard encounters the game currently has basically -suggest- it, and groups where a tank cannot contribute a meaningful amount of dps simply have much more trouble clearing it. There's no disputing that Parry/Vit makes a tank easier to heal, the fact of the matter is that it just DOESNT REALLY MATTER with the content we have given how dependant everything is on proper cooldown rotations.

By all means play the parry stacking "brick wall" tank, and in 4man dungeons and content where DPS checks arent especially important then the success of a group wont really be affected - heck, if your healer is undergeared or new then it might actually improve the chance of success. But for any meaningful difficult content tanks simply cannot ignore the fact that the benefits gained from Parry are virtually nothing, but the benefits gained from increasing the damage output can have meaningful improvement on group success when it comes to pushing phases, skipping mechanics, and hitting hard enrage timers.

I appreciate you so much, Sapphida!

You don't talk down to us tanks more accustomed to a turtle tanking paradigm. You also take the time to explain why STR tanking works in the current content. Thank you!

Something occurred to me earlier while I was thinking about this thread. Please bear with me, I am having a BAD fibromyalgia day. I might not be completely clear. Mind is foggy as hell.

ANYWHO...

Couldn't a tank going balanced STR/VIT also be good strategy? That would mean the tank would require less healing but still put out decent damage. The extra MP the healers save would allow them to dps more.

Or is this a case where the extra dps a full STR tank provides trumps the extra dps the healers would provide above?