Parry...

[Menae]

You completely missed my point. Parry IS equally effective on a paladin if not more effective purely because it theoretically gives a very small chance for the paladin to never take a straight hit.
You need to throw away the blocked attacks to find the parry chance, your not doing that, because once an attack is not blocked, it has the exact same chances of being parried as the warrior does. The warrior doesn't suddenly get a boosted effect from the same chances, he is just missing the first chance to reduce damage.
You literally read my post, and then changed what I was saying in your head. My point was NOT the blatantly obvious "Block comes first" statement. It was that you need to throw away blocked hits, and then re-run the Paladin Parry numbers.
Say you did a 100,000 Hit test, and 3000 were blocked, then you need to keep going until you fill in those 3000 hits with non blocks in order to see the actual parry chance.
The only thing what you said proves is that paladins effectively will gain a small chance to NOT take a straight hit if both Block and Parry are theoretically high enough.

What value does looking at it like that have? How does ignoring that block happens help us determine the relative worth of parry? I understand that a paladin has the exact same chance to parry a non-blocked attack as a warrior has to parry a non-blocked attack. The difference is that the warrior will face more non-blocked attacks, because they cannot block. At the end of the fight, the boss doesn't think, "Gee, that Paladin blocked 30 swings, better hit him until he hasn't blocked 30 strikes to make up the difference!" No, he hits you in the face for a specific number of times based on your raid dps and strategy, and for every swing a paladin would block, a warrior would get a chance to parry that the paladin would not.

If you block an attack, you know what all your parry itemization did for you? Nothing. It didn't even get a chance to fire. In that case, it's wasted stats.

Look at it this way: If a paladin had a 99% chance to block, and a warrior zero, who gets more out of itemizing for parry?
Alternatively: Parry on warrior is a chance to reduce damage on every single incoming physical attack. Parry on a paladin is a chance to reduce damage on 70-80% of incoming physical attacks. Who gets more out of itemizing for parry?
Alternatively: A new stat called guts comes out that gives an x% chance on physical hit to shrug off 20% of the damage. However, for warriors, it's only x/2% chance. Who gets more out of itemizing for guts?

You are saying that parry reduces damage taken and number of damage spikes taken by the same amount for Paladins over about 12500 swings as it reduces damage taken and damage spikes taken for warriors over 10000? I absolutely agree with you! And that's why it's a better stat for warriors!

And to Pizza: I'm not sure whether you can realistically gear for anything else, but I just like theorycraft. It's fun.

[subteraneanbird]

Regardless of how good or bad parry is, what else would you gear for? Speed requires more than you can realistically get to make a noticeable change. Crit is nicer on WAR to be sure but for PLD, base crit rate is so crap that you're gonna need a lot to see a big impact. Determination is good but takes a lot to add a little. Parry is 1) readily available on most tank gear and 2) itemized to a large amount of the accuracy pieces. Whether it is a meaningful form of mitigation isn't important, if your raid needs more damage, it shouldn't have to rely on the tanks to carry the dps check.

I'm pretty sure exactly zero people are suggesting that tanks should gear to help pass DPS checks, because that is silly. More that in the grand realm of theory, being able to gear your damage up to shave a reasonable amount of time (like 30 seconds) off a battle could be more mitigation than parry if it turns out parry really is as ineffective as has been suggested. Obviously the bad itemization in this game makes that unlikely anytime soon, but who knows!

[ZDamned]

@Menae: If you want to think that way, then fine, keep being unrealistic. But the reality is that Parry works equally on both, and it's not like your taking it away from a warrior anyway, so I don't understand why the comment is even being made in the first place.

Finally, Pizzaparty, Accuracy is WAY easier to gear for at ilvl 110 with DPS gear, Parry gear gives issues, and you can't get the best parry pieces because of accuracy, even with food.

[Menae]

@Menae: If you want to think that way, then fine, keep being unrealistic. But the reality is that Parry works equally on both, and it's not like your taking it away from a warrior anyway, so I don't understand why the comment is even being made in the first place.

I'm not the one being unrealistic; that said, I'm running out of ways to convince you that my methodology is right, and I don't know that any further debate between us will be productive. We've made our arguments; I suppose we'll have to let the folks who read them think for themselves and decide for themselves who made the better case.

As for why this was even brought up, I remind you that a few posts ago I stated I enjoy theorycraft, and I direct your attention to this post:

Parry is even better for Warriors, because they don't have blocks to lower their parry. Pld parry x% of the hits they dont blocks; Warrior parry x% of the hits, period.

Somebody disagreed with it, I disagreed with them, and you disagreed with me, and that's how we got here.

I wish you the best of luck in all your future tanking endeavors, Z.

[SwordCoheir]

@Menae: If you want to think that way, then fine, keep being unrealistic. But the reality is that Parry works equally on both, and it's not like your taking it away from a warrior anyway, so I don't understand why the comment is even being made in the first place.

She isn't wrong, basically what she's getting at is the more factors you have in place that works in tandem with Parry (block, evasion, movement, position, etc.) the more it effects the relative worth of parry. From a mathematical standpoint yes Parry standalone will give you even returns, but for every dodged attack, for every block, for every time a monster uses a magical move, poor position, etc., it reduces the mathematical weight that stat carries. Most of the time it can be impossible to properly apply such theories to paper, especially since we cannot entirely predict the flow of every fight or every instance.

The reason some think the DPS stats carry more weight in some instances is because it's easier to eliminate or control some of the factors that work in tandem with our attacks. For instance, the need for capped accuracy to ensure hate control also eliminates the opportunity for a monster to dodge, and sense most mobs don't have the ability to parry or block it removes another factor that works in tandem with our attacks leaving much less room for mobs to reduce our damage input.

[ManaKeKz]

@Menae: If you want to think that way, then fine, keep being unrealistic.

Actually, Menae is looking at the realistic scenario. If a PLD and WAR in equal gear tank the same content, taking the exact same amount of hits, the warrior parries more hits. Always. Why? Because he doesn't block. Sticking with the going example of 25% parry for both and 25% block for the pld, on a sample size of 10.000 incoming hits, the WAR will parry 2500 times, the PLD will parry 1875 hits.
You can't just say "ignore the blocked hits" because that's not how combat works, the boss hits 10.000 times on either tank, no more, no less.

[Lord_Zlatan]

guts

Excellent star ocean reference ^^

[LoganNinefingers]

Just mentioning briefly that Parry very likely has diminishing returns, just like Critical Hit Rate.

All of the evidence I've seen so far say "13 Parry stat = 1% parry chance" or "29 Parry stat = 1% parry chance", but only give two data points (i.e. naked vs full parry gear available) - before posting your linear rate, please run a parse with half your max additional parry also.

If that's anything like Crit Rate, it'll give much larger increases at first, dropping off as you stack more and more.

Came to this thread as I've nearly geared my WAR for 2.2 content and was hoping to find some good math. Even if a few people posted their data with different amounts of parry we could collate a multi-point data set and get a bit more insight.

I ran Crit Rate parses at three data points today, adding two more then posting the results in the healer forum tomorrow, after hopefully establishing a decent polynomial fit. Not sure if this'll be the same for attacks as it is for heals, so was planning on doing 3+ data points on BRD to confirm either way. Guess parry testing's next!

Initial guess if diminishing returns: Acc cap then parry's worth stacking up to 20-25% parry rate, then other secondary stats start to win.
If not: get to Acc cap and Parry away!



Also, re: DamageTaken decrease versus DPS increase,

Arbitrarily assume you can tweak your parry spec such that you mitigate 2% more damage.

This can be equated to increasing your DPS such that the boss dies early enough that his total damage to the tank is 98% of what it would have been in your mitigation build.

If we can assume for most fights that the boss's rotation repeats often and is fairly smooth (i.e. not just a huge spike every 3 minutes, in which case you just want to kill it before the mega ability makes its n+1th appearance), taking the boss's average DPS on the tank is a decent approximation. To take 98% damage with constant boss DPS, you need to decrease the time the boss is alive (and thus doing damage) to 98% of the fight length in mitigation gear.

As an example, take a boss that has 1 million HP, killed in 10 minutes (600 secs) - party DPS is 1666.67.
To kill him in 588 secs (98% of the time) you'll need 1700.68 DPS, which is an increase of 33ish DPS that you'd need to obtain to equal the benefit of 2% straight mitigation.

Obviously that's just an arbitrary example, but it's somewhat close to the DPS requirements of nu-coil, so isn't too far-fetched.

Clearly fight-specific mechanics aren't taken into account here, but it's the best guess we can make for general gameplay.

If someone can parse their next T6/7/8 run to give some real numbers it'd be more insightful, but using this as a fairly broad approximation, if Parry scales linearly and Casper's numbers are right, [13 Parry = 1% parry chance = 0.23% mitigation for WAR], it's gonna be way easier to get 2% mitigation (around 115 parry) than 33 extra DPS...

[MythToken]

Um no to everything you just said in the beginning of your post, nothing in this game has diminishing returns. Every single test ever run confirms this. The exception being Speed, and ACC for different reasons.
Crit being the only stat that might have an argument for diminishing returns, even though I still have not heard a good one.

But I do agree with your mitigation argument. It is easier to get than DPS, and why this is even an argument is beyond me. Tanks are here to mitigate damage.

If you want to add dps and speed run through things, then just bring an extra dps and 1 less tank. Thats the only real way that actually works.

[ZDamned]

SNIP

Because with my DPS Fending gear on, I still parry quite often, block a ton with my Buckler, AND gain 25-30 DPS. My Turn 7 clear last night had me clocking at 136 DPS in Shield Oath on the boss, and I never came close to death, since the largest hit the MT takes in that fight is 1800. Adding in the parry gear instead drops me down to a meager 90 DPS. Take that same exact number set, and apply it to the 2nd tank in the group, our warrior, and his DPS also sees a large gain, and your adding in nearly 70 DPS to the fight, which has a decently strict Enrage timer, where the entire group gets struck for 11,000 damage all at once.

Most fights don't allow you to run with 1 single tank, due to stacking Debuffs that get you hit for greater than 130% of your HP level, so a Tank swap is required mid fight. Once that happens, your parry is rendered worthless, and you basically are a Rage of Halone de-buff. With added Crit-Determination gear, you can at least dish out some decent damage.

The incoming damage in the new coil on Tanks is so low, that 2-5% damage reduction is not actually making enough of an impact on the healers. If it were in the realm of 10-15%, I would care, but even my healers are telling me to stay in my Crit/Determination Fending gear.