A Paladin's opinion on Parry

[Drakkaelus]

Like Donjo also said, if I'm flashing a big group to keep them from running amok, Crit is doing nothing, while parry could be saving me thousands of damage over the course of the pull.

What kind of witchcraft are you doing where you're parrying thousands of points worth of damage over a single pull?

[SpookyGhost]

You'll gain more out of Det/Crit on the bosses in the dungeon than you will on Parry on the trash pulls. You pull big, you pop a CD, the trash dies, you move on. Parry is more useful on the trash (Possibly? To me it seems kind of inconsequential, its not like stacking Parry gives you the ability to Parry... it just increases your chance), but you can't think of a dungeon as just sets of trash. Speeding up bosses helps a lot too, and unless you're outright dying to the trash packs or costing your healer Holys because the Parry/Block gods didn't like how little Parry you were stacking and you died, then Det/Crit is still better. Also Hallowed Ground exists. And Sentinel. And Bulwark. Um.

Anyway, as Donjo (and I guess the OP) said, secondary stats in general don't matter for dungeons - they're really only important for min/max world first raiding.

[SirTaint]

So you have 8 mobs on you, hitting you for 600.

8x35(shield)x25(decent parry build ~580 parry) = 1.3 parries per round.
8x35(shield)x7(no parry build) = .3 parries per round

600 damage x 1.3 is 780 x 27% (amount parried) = 210 HP mitigated per round
600 damage x .3 is 180 x 27% is 48

So you net 162 in parried damaged per round. What does Regen tick for?

[Donjo]

So you have 8 mobs on you, hitting you for 600.

8x35(shield)x25(decent parry build ~580 parry) = 1.3 parries per round.
8x35(shield)x7(no parry build) = .3 parries per round

600 damage x 1.3 is 780 x 27% (amount parried) = 210 HP mitigated per round
600 damage x .3 is 180 x 27% is 48

So you net 162 in parried damaged per round. What does Regen tick for?

First of all, 580 parry is about a 28% parry rate and base parry is 10%. This means that you'll parry 1.5 attacks per round with the parry build and 0.5 attacks per round with the no parry build. This brings it to 246 HP - 81 HP for a net gain of 165. From there it only goes up. Combine this with block and you're proccing on 4.3 attacks per round for 774 HP per round. Don't forget that both of these elements are working together here. Our parry Pally here is thus taking a total of 16% less physical damage per round with parry, versus 12% without parry and 9% with the shield alone.

Overall, in order to beat out the reduced damage to you with increased damage to the enemy, you need to deal 4% more damage per round on average without the parry than you were dealing with the parry. However, Paladins have three major things going against them for this juncture: Flash deals zero damage, Circle of Scorn is only usable every 25 seconds, and Spirits Within relies on your current HP to calculate damage and thus cannot be relied upon to deal consistent damage. Warriors can successfully make the trade, but Paladins just can't win this battle when fighting groups. Not with secondaries alone.

Now, when you're waltzing up to the boss you will most certainly deal more than 4% extra damage per round. No calculations necessary for that one. So, what we have here is a case of situational awareness. Are you tanking a lot of monsters? Use Parry. Are you tanking monsters who attack more than once per round? Use Parry. Are the monsters just dealing a lot of damage(you did lowball your own, after all)? Use Parry. Are you tanking monsters who aren't really using physical damage? Use Damage. Are you only tanking 1-3 monsters(boss or small trash pull)? Use Damage. Ultimately, the benefits of one over the other in dungeons is still really, really small. However, if you do want to maximize your min maxing, the best thing to do would be to carry more than one set of gear around with you and switch things around accordingly. For infrequent raiders like the OP who really only have the relic with which to mess with stats, though, they're literally dealing with percents of percents and no combination of stats will appreciably change anything at all.

[Gooner_iBluAirJGR]

You can't keep the warriors out! Personally I like having my parry stat above 500 on my Warrior. The mitigation comes up frequently enough for me to feel like its worthwhile and not a completely useless stat to have. One day I'd like to see what its like to have a full parry build.

[SirTaint]

Donjo - the shield is irrelevant since every build has it.

165 vs 163 makes zero difference. I was just using parse data for my calculation.

Just spammed cure 1 on my i124 whm the average was 2017 for non crits. So a WHM can't heal the difference between 340 parry and 580 even assuming 8 attack rounds which isn't realistic. The mobs would have to deal 1200 a hit or you'd have to have 16 mobs on you for the parry to start to matter.

[PROBOUND]

Donjo - the shield is irrelevant since every build has it.

Shield Type does have some relevance. Tower shields favor parry more than Kite or Buckler shields. The more you block the less parry is significant yes. However, with Tower shields the Block Strength is much higher and Block Rate much lower. This makes it so that when you do block, they are Manly Blocks (Sentinel 2.0 40%), but if not your parry will make up for it. Parry Shines in these situations. You are not stacking parry to ensure you parry. Your stacking Parry to ensure that if you don't block you parry.

Donjo does a great job of laying it out in this post

The only reason it may not be relevant is due to the fact there are no i130/i135 Tower Shield Options in the game. If SE made it so that PLD's would have a choice between shield types of equal iLvl, this is where Parry sets/itemization would benefit. Here's hoping for more Shield options in HW.

IMO: All PLD's should have 2 sets and essentially 2 BiS. A set for Progression (Parry) and a set for Farm (Crit/DET).

TLDR:
(Tower Shield) Higher Block StR + Max Parry = Good. (Max parry will benefit from the shield)
(Buckler Shield) Low Block Rate + Max Parry = Bad (Better to go with Crit/Det)

[SirTaint]

The only reason it may not be relevant is due to the fact there are no i130/i135 Tower Shield Options in the game.

^ This.

Shield type is not relative for the time being. Parry needs a complete rework to be worth while. Tower,buckler,vultron none of that matters with the way Parry currently functions.

Yes Towers dilute less and bucklers more.

[AIex]

-Within the bounds of "light party content" the OP has given us-
I want to say that the debate over all secondaries is pointless in this content. Secondary stat tweaking is only relevant in 8 man content that require high dps, intensive healing, and proper cooldown management. All a PLD needs in light party content is the STR/VIT/Defense from their armor, the STR/VIT/Weapon Damage from their weapon, and some common sense that tells them. So if you like parry for some odd reason, go parry. If you like PIE/DEX for some odd reason, go PIE/DEX. Just finish your relic asap and get your STR/VIT/Weapon Damage. It's honestly just content that you run with 3 random people and requires little to no gearing preparation.

[Donjo]

-Within the bounds of "light party content" the OP has given us-
I want to say that the debate over all secondaries is pointless in this content. Secondary stat tweaking is only relevant in 8 man content that require high dps, intensive healing, and proper cooldown management. All a PLD needs in light party content is the STR/VIT/Defense from their armor, the STR/VIT/Weapon Damage from their weapon, and some common sense that tells them. So if you like parry for some odd reason, go parry. If you like PIE/DEX for some odd reason, go PIE/DEX. Just finish your relic asap and get your STR/VIT/Weapon Damage. It's honestly just content that you run with 3 random people and requires little to no gearing preparation.

That's why I stopped my part of the debate. We can circlejerk all day about which combination of stats is more meaningless but the fact is that they're meaningless. What was happening between myself and SirTaint was two things:

1. I took offense to his insistence on providing unusually choice numbers engineered not to prove any particular point but simply to try and make Parry look as bad as humanly possible. I was less trying to prove him wrong and more correcting his numbers. I did give up though when he said his i124 WHM averaged over 2k on Cure 1(A i124 WHM will hit those numbers... during Divine Seal) and 8 attack rounds(GCDs) isn't realistic for a pull(it'll only last less on average if you have 2 BLMs, 1 WHM, and 1 WAR all going ham. Random DF parties will definitely last longer than 8 on average.) since they were so obviously fudged numbers and situations. His bias against Parry is just so high that he's willfully blind to even the smallest possible benefit it can bring. Because...

2. This never really was an argument about secondaries. What it actually was is a conflict between ideologies. I look at a Tank, see that they have the most tools and viable stat combinations of any role, and find that the truest determinant of a Tank's skill and awareness is the ability to read a party and/or situation and choose the best tools for the job. There are no reasonable(ie. stats that have some use to a Tank) stat combinations that have absolutely zero use. My only exception to this is that there is a line a Tank can cross where they have abandoned the core tenets of their role to pursue damage over them and so they stop being a Tank and become nothing more than a DPS who happens to get getting hit in the face instead. Full Strength is therefore not the tool of a Tank but the tool of something else entirely. SirTaint here would obviously disagree as he prescribes to the notion that the only possible build for a "Tank" is Full Strength and there are few people in the entire community who are as cemented into that mentality than he.

And that's what happened. Someone who thinks that every build is viable, has a time and place, and therefore should be considered versus someone who thinks that there is only one viable build. The argument became circular, as most arguments on the internet tend to do. And then the thread got somewhat derailed. Again.

So that's my seven cents on the whole thing. The thread should probably end now. The OP made his point and people acknowledged it. Mission accomplished.