Serious discussion: 3.2 Materia slots, Tanking, Parry and You

[Brian_]

The effect of Parry is cumulative over the duration of a fight. A good healer will never top you off all the way, and will wait to heal you until the full effect of their heal can be played onto your HP bar.

False. A good healer will top you off before many key moments in every fight.

Minimizing overhealing is the best way to conserve MP, which is absolutely essential for some of the marathon fights out there (how many 5% wipes happen because of healers going OOM?).

Absolutely none. Zero. The only fight where MP is an issue is A4S and that has absolutely nothing to do with parry, over-healing or the fight being a marathon.

In this case, the 400 less damage you take adds up for each 400 damage mitigated. Assuming your numbers are right and Cure I heals for ~3,000 HP, a Cure I can be foregone for every 8 parried AAs, which add up to 3,200 damage mitigated. I'll admit that this seems low - assuming a 100% Parry rate, this will take 24 seconds to be felt (barring any haste effects or specia attacks). However, when fights run 5-10 minutes long, getting 8 parried autoattacks becomes increasingly possible.

You admit it is low even with an assumed 100% parry rate. What happens when we're looking at reality and you don't have anywhere close to 100% parry rate? How do you say that and still not realize the flaw in your reasoning and how far are you stretching things to prove you are not delusional? Yea, you can save a GCD worth of healing if in that span of time that mitigated damage can accumulate into a sum amount that isn't disrupted by fairy healing, HoT ticks, self-healing (DA SE, IB, Bloodbath, Equilibrium, SW), or any situation where the tank needs to be topped off regardless. Is that going to happen in reality? No.

And especially since the aggressive meta is, by all indications, disappearing in 3.2 (and because healer DPS isn't calculated in the item-level-appropriate tuning of fights), it stands to reason that slotting Parry might be in everyone's best interest.

Except there is zero indication of that. From the most recent Famitsu interview --

Tanks: Buffs to job(s) that didn't meet the desired numbers for 3.2. No nerfs to any particular job's numbers.

WAR: Fell Cleave is definitely strong but it's NOT going to be nerfed.

Tank adjustments will involve making stance-switching equally convenient for all tank jobs

They are stream-lining tank stat scaling so that it isn't a counter intuitive mess that results in numerous god awful situations (tanks dropping millions of gil every time new meldable right sides are released, raid groups praying NOT to get fending accessories, novice tanks getting bashed for doing what seems logical).

Just because the DPS checks aren't going to be as tight or as punishing doesn't mean that every single competent tank is suddenly going to be resting on their laurels and not pushing their performance. What defines an elite tank is not changing.

I don't think the reason parry is bad is because it doesn't let your healer dps. Could just be me though. Could also be its low % damage reduction in specific situations, the lack of reliability, lack of ways to increase meaningfully (negative scaling and all) and lacklustre base line. It must be because it doesn't let healers dps.

You're right. It is just you. It's you failing to realize that everything you just listed off results in parry not changing how a tank is healed which was my opening point about parry.

Just look at Raw Intuition. It fixes your point about lack of reliability and when your baseline is 20% damage reduction with 22% up-time, it's suddenly not very lackluster. But, what is the actual meaning and result of this? Your healers will be able to heal you differently. That is the point.