SE must be drunk.

[Sarcatica]

Let's put this to another perspective. Allowing yourself to be in DPS stance increases your damage by at least 50%. Cycling CDs is just a necessity to mitigate enough damage taken, so you can take it out of the equation. Having access to DPS stance is yet bolstered by the crit chance which plays the huge role of having huge damage parse. The more crit you stack, the more you get the chance while also having the upgraded scaling for crit damage. Hence why you are underestimating on how much crit as a stat actually matters. They are by no means flat scaling like det does which ofc sucks.


Here is one example on how much crit is able to reliably proc and thus increases your damage by a good margin:
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/ZTQH6...-done&source=1
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/zgGc6...-done&source=4

Let's compare the auto attacks here. 1st log has 9:51 and 2nd log has 7:28, The total damage for both are close but you are comparing 165 casts vs 136 casts. The big difference here is 2nd log features almost 50% total damage from the crit autos. If you solely count from the numbers alone, you are getting extra 500dmg off each single crit auto that amounts to about 24k bloat damage. This is also the fact that I was in DPS stance for the entirety of the fight for that 2nd log that helped me achieve huge damage from autos alone. And this is just for autos, mind you. So in total, I got extra ~24k damage from auto alone just because I had 1150+ crit.

Now, let's talk about parry. Theories often don't line up with how it actually works. ~4% damage is increase is very false. This is already proven in the previous sentence. ~5.5% less damage doesn't make your tanking any better. Why? Because parry is very unreliable, you don't count it to proc to save your life. Like what you mentioned, in a game where you use CDs to soften the hard hitting busters, parry almost always don't work and even if it works, it's gated by so many reasons like "if parry even procs", "redundant", "-20% flat", "the existence of better secondaries". This makes the parry stat a very "hollow" concept. Auto attack damage for the most part is very light feather, 20% off a 5k auto is still requires the same amount heals to top you up anyway, almost always leading to overhealing. Above all, this game doesn't just have physical attacks.

An example, removed Dark Dance for visibility:
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/ZTQH6...buffs=-1000744

Under the parried hit table from the yellow bars, you will see parry-able attacks have that flat -20%dmg. A freaking Regen on you will 100% overheal you for sure from each parried hit. ~5.5% less damage taken is not a convincing metric, healers don't have issue topping you. So what if you take ~5.5% less damage anyway, it heals just the same.

Note: Total damage taken from parry is hardly ever calculated by itself. When a cure1 is enough to top you up every single auto hit, parry becomes so much of a waste to stack. See below.