Artifact aremor (Chest + Legs) are better than VA, right?

[Syzygian]

I personally would love to see Parry removed and replaced with a more effective secondary defensive stat. Such as Versitiltiy currently found in WoW. That secondary Increases total damage and increases flat damage reduction.

You're like the 45987209385702345th person to have this thought. This perfectly highlights the biggest problem with Parry which is that it doesn't really increase damage and no defensive stat will ever be valued unless it is "free" kinda like Piety or unless people can have their cake and eat it too (hybrid offensive and defensive stat). Parry could proc 100% mitigation instead of 20% and people would still hate it because its not damage and the playerbase of this game is conditioned to think that way.

I'd still love to see MT DRK math on Parry. Its the only instance of parry providing a DPS return.

[xvshanevx]

You're like the 45987209385702345th person to have this thought.

Jesus, calm your fuckin' tits, and stop being such a drama queen.

[Ashkendor]

Parry could proc 100% mitigation instead of 20% and people would still hate it because its not damage and the playerbase of this game is conditioned to think that way.

Eh. If it was 100% mitigation would make it better but still not really usable per se because of the RNG factor.

People don't like it because it's unreliable. If it was reliable, it would actually be viable.

Jesus, calm your fuckin' tits, and stop being such a drama queen.

The irony in this post friggin kills me.

[Syzygian]

Eh. If it was 100% mitigation would make it better but still not really usable per se because of the RNG factor.

People don't like it because it's unreliable. If it was reliable, it would actually be viable.

The individual procs are RNG, but the total mitigation over the course of a given fight at a given parry rate would always be somewhere between x and y value with a few random outliers. Its not random whether or not parry will mitigate damage in a fight with consistent incoming physical damage, its just random as to when. But this isn't a flaw, technically. This is what parry is designed to do. Provide random spike mitigation. And it is reliable in that context.

I can go into A2S and based on my previous farms and parses safely say that I will mitigate 100-150K of damage over the entire fight at a given parry value, hypothetically. The only thing RNG has to tell us is whether or not a specific hit will be mitigated by parry, but this extends beyond the realm of what the stat is very clearly designed for. And this pretty much is why I stick to my argument that it is because it is not damage, rather than because it is RNG, that it is not valued. The RNG factor does not hinder the stat in what it was designed to do, what hinders it is that it competes for a slot on your gear with things like crit and SS.

Think about it. If you go into a fight with physical AA, regardless of if cleaves or TBs are physical or not, you are statistically guaranteed returns from parry. If you manage to not parry for an entire 10 min encounter of that design you may wanna get checked for cancer. It almost certainly reliably will mitigate damage, just not when we want it to, but we already have CDs for that, so that's a moot point. It was never designed to work when we want it to.

So, even if you mitigated the statistical highest amount for a given parry rate in a given fight it would still not be all that great because its not damage, as I said before.

[SpookyGhost]

I can go into A2S and based on my previous farms and parses safely say that I will mitigate 100-150K of damage over the entire fight at a given parry value, hypothetically.

Just throwing this out there: This statement says nothing at all about the stat, Parry. For a proper indication of how much the stat matters, you'd need to compare a parse with a gear set that has as little Parry as possible with one that has as much as possible.

[Nezerius]

Parry could proc 100% mitigation instead of 20% and people would still hate it because its not damage and the playerbase of this game is conditioned to think that way.

The parry stat is disliked because it's random mitigation, something that can't be relied on when a boss is using tankbuster #378 that you'd use an actual cooldown on anyway. (Sentinel, Inner Beast etc.) Because you already used a cooldown to lower the incoming damage from said tankbuster, getting a parry would just be overkill, and will just result in overhealing from the heal that gets tossed to you moments later. It would be slightly useful against auto-attacks, but those are mostly negligible.
Also doesn't help that magic can't be parried, so that lowers the amount of attacks that could possibly be parried by a significant amount.

[Syzygian]

snip

This is another common saying, but I don't think it holds water. You don't even consider parrying when a tankbuster comes because you already have a CD rotation for it, of course. Its kind of a null-and-void discussion and doesn't even apply. No matter what a given tank thinks of his/her parry stat no one counts on it for a TB, so measuring it by that yardstick is not an effective judge of value because that's not what anyone hopes to utilize it for.

Auto attack damage is not negligible, its a huge percentage of the damage that you take in a given encounter, and parry mitigates hundreds of thousands of damage over the course of a fight now. Obviously none of it is anticipated by healers and it doesn't really change much, but it does happen. But the bottom line is, it didn't help you end the fight faster, and that is why it is undervalued. DPS is still the most effective mitigation due to raid design in this game. RNG has little to do with it unless the RNG was so extreme that you had a chance to go an entire phase of a physical fight without parrying. You actually parry quite a bit, its just not really helping anything in its current form.

Jesus, calm your fuckin' tits, and stop being such a drama queen.

Sorry my briefly stopping to call out your unoriginal suggestion had to send you into a tailspin of vulgarities and name-calling. Doesn't change the fact that its something that too many people say without really stopping to consider the core of the problem, which was the point of that post.

Such a stat still would only be taken for its DPS value, and if that value was higher than, say, DET, there'd never be a reason to use DET ever again.

Attaching defense to an offensive secondary just feels lazy. There should be more than one defensive secondary stat and it should be a choice, at least among most of them, as to what you choose, DPS or mitigation. And having something that just flatly reduces damage by xyz percentage, across the board 100% of the time does little to differentiate it from defensive stats that we already have (def/mdef). DPS secondaries all boost your damage, but in different ways. Det is more like a flat, across the board increase albeit very small, crit is RNG, and SS doesn't actually boost your damage outside of DoTs, but the rate at which you deal that damage. They really ought to come up with a creative, varied spread of tanking secondaries if they're going to do it at all, which I doubt, personally.

[Nezerius]

Auto attack damage is not negligible, its a huge percentage of the damage that you take in a given encounter, and parry mitigates hundreds of thousands of damage over the course of a fight now. Obviously none of it is anticipated by healers and it doesn't really change much, but it does happen. But the bottom line is, it didn't help you end the fight faster, and that is why it is undervalued. DPS is still the most effective mitigation due to raid design in this game. RNG has little to do with it unless the RNG was so extreme that you had a chance to go an entire phase of a physical fight without parrying. You actually parry quite a bit, its just not really helping anything in its current form.

Sure, parry can mitigate a lot of damage if you look at the total damage mitigated over the course of a fight. But like you said, it doesn't change much when looking at individual auto-attack parries, as a simple regen tick or a fairy heal will deal with that just as easily as if the tank were to tank a full auto-attack hit. It's also undervalued because parry just scales horribly, you need a lot of it to even increase you parry chance by a bit.

The RNG part was aimed at how it's not worth taking parry into account when it comes to tank busters.
Bottom line is, there's multiple reasons why parry isn't a good stat. The lack of a dps value isn't the core problem, it's just one of those multiple reasons.

[Syzygian]

snip

I addressed this a bit in the above post but I'll elaborate.

Even if you changed parry scaling to make the rate closer to 50% with modest investment and the amount mitigated like 30, 40, or even 90-100%, stop and consider whether you would really be swayed by that over crit, ss, etc, especially when they compete for slots on your gear. You probably wouldn't.

And again, the RNG argument is a judgement based on assuming parry is supposed to be doing something that was never designed to do. You have CDs for when you need reliable, guaranteed mitigation.

Could you provide proof on the "hundreds of thousands of damage"? Auto-attacks do indeed consist of a huge amount of tank damage but the "hundreds of thousands of damage" part needs to be proven. The problem, as it stands, is that it seems that the scaling of the parry stat is poor (apart from the RNG factor). But it is true that detailed studies have not been done in the matter.

I misspoke, currently this is not the case. A recent A2 parse showed that I mitigated about 40K in a 7 minute clear in a full DPS build (min parry on left side, full slaying). I'm not going to post that here because I don't feel like being banned but I am on FFLogs, you can find it. However, it used to be much much higher during progression on that fight, when I stacked more parry on my left side due the the 100% physical nature of that fight and the fight took longer due to less gear and me wearing more melds than slaying.

Still waiting for a math whizz to drop some numbers on that whole DRK MT thing.

[Nezerius]

Even if you changed parry scaling to make the rate closer to 50% with modest investment and the amount mitigated like 30, 40, or even 90-100%, stop and consider whether you would really be swayed by that over crit, ss, etc, especially when they compete for slots on your gear. You probably wouldn't.

And again, the RNG argument is a judgement based on assuming parry is supposed to be doing something that was never designed to do. You have CDs for when you need reliable, guaranteed mitigation.

If parry started making a significant difference in survivability, in a boss encounters that'd push tanks towards being more defensive rather than more offensive? Sure, I'd go for it.
Thing is, just changing parry scaling won't fix the stat. Like I said in my previous post, there's multiple reasons why parry isn't a good stat. Currently it's only good for reducing a random auto-attack by a bit, which doesn't change much.

And your side of the RNG argument is just as much of an assumption based on your conception of what the parry stat was designed to do.