Parry...

[ManaKeKz]

the ONLY argument you had for not taking parry was to mitigate damage through DPS.

No. There were 2 dominant arguments I've seen in this thread:

- Parry is unreliable mitigation. Especially with maximum values of way below 50%, it will likely not mitigate that one big hit when you need it to.
- Parry gain is very small. While 13 parry may be 1% parry chance, at 23% parry strength that is only ~1.8% statistical, unreliable mitigation per 100 points.

Neither of these two points apply to the 30 vit debate, it isn't unreliable and the effective gain is a lot higher. Unlike parry, vit actually increases your eHP and that is what you want to gear for, after all.

Edit: Many of the more frequent contributors like ZDamned and Casper have stated since the very beginning that dropping vit for DPS was never up for debate, only the secondary stats were being examined.

[Kitru]

Unlike parry, vit actually increases your eHP and that is what you want to gear for, after all.

eHP isn't everything. Parry would be an absolutely amazing stat if the returns on it weren't so low, which is the problem. The first argument (RNG mitigation) is only a factor because of the second argument (very small returns). It's not a question of mean mitigation not being a valuable aspect of tanking to improve, but rather, potentially, the improvements to mean mitigation not being worth the opportunity cost paid to tank DPS.

Personally, I haven't seen all that much of a significant increase when geared for det/crit compared to straight up parry which really just tells me that the comparative value of all of the secondary stats is equally miniscule. If they're all equally miniscule, then I don't really see a point in gearing for damage rather than mitigation since mean mitigation *is* a higher priority for tanks than damage is (the basic priority in burst heavy scenarios that the ARR devs seem to prefer is eHP>mean mitigation>damage).

As to STR v. VIT, VIT should still be your priority because it doesn't suffer from any of the flaws that Parry does while simultaneously operating on a higher priority goal for tanks. Even if you want to make a case for STR contributing to mean mitigation by increasing parry effectiveness, the contributions of 30 STR aren't going to make nearly the difference than 30 VIT is (not to mention that increasing STR actually increases your relative spikiness, interestingly enough, whereas more Parry decreases your spikiness).