Tanks: parry becoming important?

[Omni-Vocational_Ryan]

Are they making parry a key stat now?

[Donjo]

There's been no mention of changes to Parry as far as I'm aware. With new Tank skills coming that will guarantee Blocks and Parries, though... it is explicitly necessary for something to be tweaked with it or it will become completely irrelevant.

[SirTaint]

There's been no mention of changes to Parry as far as I'm aware. With new Tank skills coming that will guarantee Blocks and Parries, though... it is explicitly necessary for something to be tweaked with it or it will become completely irrelevant.

^ This.

The more they guarantee Blocks/Parries the less important the stat becomes. I'd be all for an overhaul to make it worth its slot on gear.

[Launched]

As long as parry is random, it's a useless stat. They haven't said anything about changing it.

[Rbstr]

As long as parry is random and tank survival mostly depends on mitigating specific attacks, it's a useless stat. They haven't said anything about changing it.

It's very easy to think about how a random occurrence can be quite beneficial. You just have to give it enough opportunities to be useful that statistics take over. On the attack side, you have Crits, which are clearly valuable to damage.

In an extreme: If tank damage was completely based on autoattacks and it was consistently at a level high enough it required constant healer attention, you're going to end up with the healer slowing getting behind on damage or running out of mana. Adding a decent percentage of parrying will produce meaningful results. That's really tight balance, and once you're beyond the minimum gear it gets quite easy to deal with.

A different example would be if "tank killer" attacks were composed of many separate, parryable, hits rather than one or a couple big hits.
Instead of "Ultima" that hits for 20k in one hit, where parry is useless because it's unreliable, it could hit 100 times for 200damage. In the latter case parry would put a decent dent in the total damage taken.

[Kerwin]

I I roll full parry on my PLD. Combining it with Block Rate, the damage mitigation is 10 fold then what warriors can mitigate. Including Bulwark to the list and stoneskin, you will be set.

Of course people will argue otherwise, but it comes down to tanking styles. End game bosses usually do magic damage so parry is usless but mass pulling dungeon mobs who only have melee? That's when you see your parry shine.

[SpookyGhost]

Either:

1.) Parry needs to change as a stat or
2.) Encounters need to encourage Parry stacking over Det/Crit stacking for tanks.

If one of the two occurs, parry may become more relevant than it is now. If not, back to Det/Crit we go.

[Whiston]

It's very easy to think about how a random occurrence can be quite beneficial. You just have to give it enough opportunities to be useful that statistics take over. On the attack side, you have Crits, which are clearly valuable to damage.

Unfortunately Parry is not very comparable to Crit in a defensive sense.

Crit is a chance at dealing 150% damage of a skill. Crit will deal the extra damage and it is always beneficial as it is a consistent drain at a static pool of HP of the enemy.
Parry is not the same, because the tank's HP pool is a constantly fluctuating amount. Parry would be amazing if a tank had 150k HP, and could not receive heals. Then the stat would be very worthwhile taking as there would be many opportunities to reduce the amount of HP you lost from a static pool.

[Dante_V]

Mathematically speaking it would be more useful in situations were the tanks is subjected to multiple attacks from multiple enemies at the same times that can be parried. Like a speed run for instance. As far as single target encounters are concerned it's negligible but I think this has more to do with the way healing is done more so than the viability of the parry stat in and of itself. Personally I am more in favor of DET/CRIT myself but my statics MT has a Parry/Det setup and does just fine.

[Dante_V]

I have to agree that the introduction of guaranteed parries or blocks and push for tank dps that seems to be coming in the expansion further marginalizes the parry stat.