Parry is useless. Can we change it?

[Zfz]

A quick look at current end-game gear options.

190 - only Alexander gear
180 - only upgraded Doman gear
170 - only Doman gear

Parry from the above three sets of gear are on:

• Head - no parry at all
• Body - 190
• Hands - 190, 180, 170
• Waist - no parry at all
• Legs - 180, 170
• Feet - no parry at all
• Neck - 190, 180, 170
• Ears - no parry at all
• Wrists - 190, 180, 170
• Rings - no parry at all

If the only aim is to get rid of parry, the best compromise is probably to downgrade to the 180 body armor and wear STR in neck and wrists slots. In total you give up 32 defense, 89vit, in exchange for 72str. Basically you drop your HP back down to full 170 set level, although note that your decrease in defense values is not big because all of the accessories together can only contribute 5 defense.

Current content probably have a negligible accuracy cap, and we don't know the Savage mode caps so nothing can be said about that. But seeing that a tank (using PLD because I only play the PLD) with 15k HP who knows the big hitters can clear A4 with no problems, it's probably a nice trade. The tank will easily get to 20k as he upgrades into 190 anyway, and 89vit is perfectly within the bounds of gear progression. You get into Alexander with full 170 anyway.

If you want to start slow and end your gear upgrades with this trade into STR, then you should get the STR accessories last---although by that time Savage is out and you may already be getting Savage upgrades.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Just for exercise, I looked into the case of trading away all the accessories for STR accessories.

You are trading away 40*4+36=196vit for 196str. That's quite a chuck of HP. Ignoring weapons slot and assuming two rings of the same iLv to simplify the analysis:

• Full tanking 150NQ adds 373 vit (unmelded)
• Full tanking 150HQ adds 412 vit (unmelded)
• Full tanking 160 adds 441 vit
• Full tanking 170 adds 477 vit
• Full tanking 180 adds 516 vit
• Full tanking 190 adds 576 vit

So at full 190 with full STR accessories, you end up with the gear adding only 380 vit, which is just slightly better than a tank wearing unmelded full 150 NQ vendor tanking gear. Of course, you'd have higher dps than a full 190 tank wearing only tanking gear, and you have practically the same defense values as a full 190 tank. So the end result is that your HP will appear to swing wildly but you are in fact taking in the same incoming damage as the full 190 tank (and add in the damage that you fail to mitigate with your lower parry rate).

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Just some quick lookups on xivdb so there may be errors. Feel free to jump in and correct me.

[Ryans]

You guys realize all the secondary stats are useless, right? They are all "balanced" to the point where it doesn't matter what piece of gear you pick. Ilvl has a set number of stat points to allocate and doesn't veer from that layout which makes it all incredibly pointless.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

You guys realize all the secondary stats are useless, right? They are all "balanced" to the point where it doesn't matter what piece of gear you pick. Ilvl has a set number of stat points to allocate and doesn't veer from that layout which makes it all incredibly pointless.

Not really balanced. If all that parry was determination... can you imagine how much base damage that would add? Like.. 4-5! that is a lot though. Even though it seems small, especially for a Tank.

I'd much rather have full determination then useless parry.

Or! Critical Rating... Hehe =P

[Ceodore]

Not really balanced. If all that parry was determination... can you imagine how much base damage that would add? Like.. 4-5! that is a lot though. Even though it seems small, especially for a Tank.

I'd much rather have full determination then useless parry.

Or! Critical Rating... Hehe =P

Determination was massively nerfed too actually. The best stats now for offense are Skill Speed and Critical Hit Rate depending on your class. I prefer Skill Speed on my tanks for building Wrath faster and using Royal Authority more within the duration of Goring Blade. Especially on boss fights, I only use my Rage of Halone when I need to reapply the str debuff. Otherwise, there's not an issue with enmity either.

[Marxam]

From a min/max perspective it is not useless. To casuals its just icing on the cake while to raiders its the make or break for caps. i.e acc, sks, pie, etc. Also we don't know what the savage/esoteric gear secondaries will be so we just have to wait and see. Atm there is way too much skill speed on tank gear and parry is only useful to DRK who has Low Blow and Reprisal procs. PLD has blocking and WAR has Raw Intuition.

[Voltyblast]

I think they should really make parry better, especially since it's one of the main stats for DRK due to their lack of block and having no hp boost like the warrior does.
I haven't leveled one up yet but I can already see that they're not on par in terms of a Paladin's defense, and not entirely up to a warrior either now.

Paladins have a shield so on top of parrying they can also block, in addition to have some of the strongests mitigations around.
Warriors can only parry but with the expansions they have far more mitigation chances with Raw Intuition and have a slight Parry boost thanks to the new defiance. But even without them, they have a constant 20% healing and 25% hp boost.
Dark Knights have dmg reduction but can't block. They have some dmg mitigation skills and a parry boost, but no healing or hp boosts. They can dish out damage but they're not as strong as a warrior in my opinion.

I think parry should be reworked indeed, especially in help for DRK.
Maybe on top of 20% dmg reduction they could have a boost on parry and the additional chance of parrying magic (like others have suggested): they would become excellent magic breakers and would make them more required on fights where magic damage is more constant.

[Noxifer]

I can already see that they're not on par in terms of a Paladin's defense, and not entirely up to a warrior either now.

Paladins have a shield so on top of parrying they can also block, in addition to have some of the strongests mitigations around.
Warriors can only parry but with the expansions they have far more mitigation chances with Raw Intuition and have a slight Parry boost thanks to the new defiance. But even without them, they have a constant 20% healing and 25% hp boost.
Dark Knights have dmg reduction but can't block. They have some dmg mitigation skills and a parry boost, but no healing or hp boosts. They can dish out damage but they're not as strong as a warrior in my opinion.

And your logic seems to have failed you. Yes, Warriors have higher HP and increased heal rate from incoming heals. Guess what? Our tank stance doesn't provide a flat 20% damage reduction. The increase in HP is instead of that. So that we take the same effective damage from a hit as a Paladin or Dark Knight. As for increased incoming healing... It's there to ensure it takes the same number of Cure II to get you up to max HP, so as not to put extra stress on your healers. (Give or take RNG with critted heals and actual number variations. We're also slightly nerfed at the moment since we don't get the 25% extra healing from "instant heals", since they don't count as spells at the moment but abilities.)

Example:

Base HP: 4000.

PLD/DRK: 4000
WAR: 5000 including their 25% bonus.

Incoming damage: 1000.

DRK/PLD get a reduced hit of 800 due to passive damage reduction.
WAR takes the full 1000.

Providing no incoming heals and no HP regain ticks, it would take all three tanks five hits to hit 0 HP. (800x5=4000, 1000x5=5000)

That said, I agree that Parry as a stat should be a lot better.

[SirTaint]

Offensive secondaries are not worthless, ask any progression group. The additional secondaries from crafted gear is why people were clearing FCoB week one. (Same ilvl more secondaries)

DET was nerfed and then given to us in greater quantities.

The fact that all secondaries all had their scales raised further separates parry from the others.

When parry took 13 points to raise 1% it was bad now it's around 34 points per %. (Needs more testing but 34 is close)

[Tam_Hawkins]

When parry took 13 points to raise 1% it was bad now it's around 34 points per %. (Needs more testing but 34 is close)

That much? It was alrady pretty useless so they needed they nerf it in two different ways just to make that more obvious it seems....

[Marxam]

When parry took 13 points to raise 1% it was bad now it's around 34 points per %. (Needs more testing but 34 is close)

Source for data? as of 3.01 Parry is only remotely useful to DRK who requires it for low blow and reprisal procs. I imagine with enough parry DRK can be like BRD with Bloodletter procs.