When is an i100 item better than an i110? - I.E. ST Hands

[Donjo]

Regarding whether i100 > i110 in any situation

Look at the name of your role. Look at the color of your lovely blue square. It's blue, and it says Tank. This means, as many in this thread have said, that your first priority is to survive. Trading Vit, Defense, and Strength(not necessarily for damage, but for the potency increase on Block/Parry) for a literally negligible increase in damage is not worth it. Even if you're an OT Tank in a fight that only needs a single tank, your job hasn't suddenly shifted completely to "maximize damage". Remember that you're the one who has to take the boss if something crazy happens that kills the MT. If you're operating at a loss to survivability because of increasing your damage, that crazy thing is going to kill you too and then it's a wipe.

When your gear, your party, and especially your healers are ready, only then can avenues of increasing Tank damage be pursued. Those avenues are accessories. Only accessories. You're taking a big HP hit by doing this, so you need your left side to make up for it by providing other mitigation. Putting on a full compliment of DPS accessories can increase your STR by 70+, and that is not insignificant. That being said, Coil is the place you must be most careful in doing this. It's not a decision to make alone, as you need a party that can handle a squishier tank.

Regarding the thought that Parry is useless

I've seen three criticisms levied against Parry in this thread, and I'd like to discuss all three. This is not a treatise to claim that Parry is secretly a godly stat and you're all blind. This is simply a treatise to say it's not useless.

1. It doesn't increase your Effective Health Pool by much: This is more a matter of opinion unless SE decides to comment on it for some reason, but I don't think increasing eHP is the purpose of Parry at all. I once separated the concept of Mitigation, to "decrease the severity of something", into two camps. The first is "Active Mitigation", consisting of actions you intentionally perform to decrease the damage done to you. These include cooldowns, your movement during battle, etc. The second is "Passive Mitigation", things that increase your survivability by merely existing. These are Defense(for obvious reasons), Parry/Block(As they're slaves to RNG), and Raw Health(as a 500 damage attack is less severe if your max health is 8000 than if it is 2000). Active Mitigation through cooldowns is the act of manually increasing your eHP for a short while, making attacks during that time less severe because you technically have more health. Passive Mitigation mostly works to help your Raw Health, the base for the eHP equation. Defense directly increases it like a good little stat, but Parry is by definition unreliable and therefore exists only as an occasional good omen. As it serves no other purpose than to reduce the damage of single attacks at random, it's the kind of thing that is often ignored or taken for granted in the grand scheme of things but is only noticed when it's gone. It exists to make you go "oh, that's nice" whenever it happens or make you thank RNGesus occasionally when you Parry an attack so big that you reduced it by 1000 or more. Your eHP isn't much higher for it, but you just might have saved your healers 133 MP, and that's pretty okay to me. Besides, it's the only secondary stat we have that can help with mitigation, so it'd be a shame not to at least try to use it

2. It has very low returns: What was the number Valk dug up? 0.075% rate per point, with a base of 10%? That would mean that 1% Parry Rate = 13-14 points of Parry. That is, every 13-14 points of Parry beyond your base of 341(Why we even have these bases if they don't do a thing is beyond me). This means that, if you were to have 600 Parry, which is perfectly possible in the i110 tier of gear, your parry rate would be approximately 29.4%. That's decently close to 1/3, so one can hope that they're Parrying one of every 3-4 attacks for WAR, and one out of every 3-4 attacks which are not blocked for PLD(If the whole "Parry is checked only if Block fails" blurb is true). This, of course, assumes you're being blasted with attacks which can be parried in the first place. Again, more opinion, but that seems like a decent number to me. If we were to increase the per point allocation to 0.1% or something, that Parry rate would jump to 35.9%. Even the far smaller increase to 0.080 jumps to 30.72, an over 1% increase. The fact that Parry isn't super high gives us room to neglect if it we so wish. If it were to be buffed to allow for us to reach a rate of 50%(I feel like that's a minimum rate at which it will actually visibly matter for eHP purposes), for example, what complaints people currently have about how useless it looks would be swiftly be replaced with whining that Tanks no longer have a choice in how they wish to gear and that they must stack Parry or nobody will want them. As it is now, the stat won't make or break a Tank, but it's not going to hinder survival either.

3. Too many attacks at endgame cannot be parried: This is factually false. Of all of the encounters I've tanked in what could be called the endgame, I've encountered exactly 2 fights in the endgame where zero parryable attacks existed: Ultima HM and Ramuh EX(addendum: I've heard healers complain about how Tanks take tons of damage in these two specific fights. Food for thought?). All other encounters use either all physical or a mix of both, but more attacks that directly target the Tank are usually physical. Examples:

Siren: The funny example. For some reason, her songs are physical. It amuses me every time I parry one.
Garuda: Autoattacks, Wicked Wheel. I think I've parried a Slipstream before, but I may have been hallucinating. Unparryable attacks are Mistral Shriek, and plumes exploding, both of which can be avoided and don't directly target the Tank.
Titan: Autoattack, Mountain Buster, that swing he does before a Mountain Buster. Unparryable attacks are Plumes and Bombs, but those never directly target the Tank(well, except plumes if lots of the party is dead x.x).
Ifrit: Autoattack, Swipes. Incinerate is an unparryable attack that directly targets the Tank.
Levi: Rare enemy that directly targets the Tank with more magic than physical. Autoattacks are physical. Slams and dashes are parryable, but don't directly target Tanks.
Mog: All attacks that target the party are magical. All attacks which target the tanks are physical.
Twintania: Autoattack, Plummet, Death Sentence, Divebombs. Fireballs cannot be parried, but don't always target the tank.
Rafflesia: Autoattack, Bloody Caress. Slugs only use physical. Spit, Leafstorm, Acid Rain, and Rotten Stench are magical but don't directly target tanks except for Acid Rain sometimes.
Melusine: Everything she and the first two sets of adds do is physical except for Fireballs. Everything the final add does is magical. I don't think it even autoattacks.
Avatar: Autoattacks are parryable but Diffusion Ray is not. Everything Dreadknights do is physical. Nothing that targets the party except for a brainjacked tank is parryable.
Turn 9: All of the important attacks that you really want to mitigate can be parried(Both claws, beak, autoattacks). I've never seen a parry on Blight, so I'm assuming it isn't.

Conclusion: It is incredibly rare to see Parry become useless due to an encounter that either uses all magic or uses magic more than physical.