Why Avoid Parry?

[Risvertasashi]

The cap on parry is better than what foresight offers lol. That said, parry isn't all that great outside of Raw Intuition.

Actually no, Foresight is better. Foresight offers a 20% boost to p.defense, which translates to about 8% p.damage mitigated for its duration. This is not really useful for tankbusters and yeah it's a weak CD, but it helps smooth incoming damage just a bit.

Parry (the stat)... it's difficult to even get to a 1% difference for the encounter and it's active full time.

Now obviously the CDs that give very high boosts to parry/block are good, but the stat... well, see my post above.

[Twilite]

Actually no, Foresight is better. Foresight offers a 20% boost to p.defense, which translates to about 8% p.damage mitigated for its duration. This is not really useful for tankbusters and yeah it's a weak CD, but it helps smooth incoming damage just a bit.

Parry (the stat)... it's difficult to even get to a 1% difference for the encounter and it's active full time.

Now obviously the CDs that give very high boosts to parry/block are good, but the stat... well, see my post above.

Oh of course...I came late to the party when SE decided to nerf/cap parry(I'm bit of a fan of the concept in combat). I'm never thrilled when I get a piece of gear with parry on it. And wow this thread exploded since page 1 @_@.

[duceTRE]

Katy Perry is the best Parry

[Iagainsti]

Katy Perry is the best Parry

^^^ Matthew Perry was also funny in Friends.

On point; Parry is unreliable, while you are going to mitigate some damage, your healer is not going to bank on that and use heals disregarding the chance to parry, thereby the final result of your mitigation was nothing more than an overheal.

[Ralvenom]

but won't it help to smooth out incoming damage when there are a lot of hits coming in? And to that end, isn't Parry then the best stat a tank can get?

There are no boss fights where there are a lot of hits coming in, so why bother. On large dungeon pulls (literally the only time you get hit a lot), you should be using several CDs anyway, which means you don't need a lot of parry to deal with that (common) situation. Hell, if you really do need mitigation for physical attacks, WARs just pop Raw Intuition, PLD pop Hallowed Ground, & DRK can pop (although they rarely would) a Dark Arts enhanced Dark Dance. My point is, if you actually NEED lots of mitigation, then you basically have it via defCDs.

The current boss design is such that parry doesn't help, because the damage is predictable (and therefore easy to deal with, if you just pop the correct CDs). As such, it is more beneficial to have the minimum HP required & then just stack crit, which allows you to add damage to the group.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

OP perhaps you should go check out the various testing people have done on parry.

A tank with 0 parry equipment only parries like 4% less than someone stacking it (it's like 7-8% without parry gear, 11% with full Parry). Meanwhile a tank that stacks Crit/det does way more damage than one with just parry gear.

As others have pointed out. You can't parry everything, and a lot of tank busters or raid wide damage is magical (Hyper compressed Plasma, Discoid, Holiest of Holy, etc). Go ahead and test it if you want. Take a WAR and have him use Raw Intuition on a bunch of moves. Only attacks treated as physical can be parried.

And in this game, the best mitigation is to kill whatever's hitting you faster. 900 parry won't save you. Pushing 100-300 more DPS to skip phases or meet DPS checks will

[Ralvenom]

Honestly, what Square Enix should do is make such that Parry Percentage is increased by Strength. In other words, Parry as a stat on gear should disappear. Rather, more strength = more parry, and we get more parry the better our gear gets. No more stacking Parry, it just is like 30% of your Strength. Design encounters with this in mind, so that a tank who doesn't have the minimum recommended gear to handle an encounter gets knocked flat by auto-attacks.

Side note: I also think that SE should rethink Fending/Slaying gear. Fending gear should have BOTH Strength and Vitality (but less strength than Slaying gear, without tanks feeling like they're getting the total short shaft). Slaying gear should be limited to dragoon & monk.
Note that right now, most jewelry is wearable by everyone. So there's no incentive for a tank to use gear that has both strength and vitality once they have enough HP to not need pentamelds. As such, when you get to where you don't need pentamelds, you just go Slaying anyway.

[Dante_V]

All raids, bosses, etc are scripted fights. There is a set rotation. The majority of cooldowns and heals are used proactively, not reactively. Because of this structure, it's pointless.)

This pretty much sums it up logistically. I the content where parry would be relevant (raids) the events are scripted and good healers precast. The healers know hen the damage is coming and start their cast before it arrives based on their knowledge of the incoming damage so the damage is healed almost instantly as it's taken. Often times the parry leads to an over heal and wasted mana in that case. Also the mitigation properties of dps shouldn't be understated. Moves like souleater and cool downs like bloodbath give back health at much larger rates with higher damage output.

[Kosmos992k]

This pretty much sums it up logistically. I the content where parry would be relevant (raids) the events are scripted and good healers precast. The healers know hen the damage is coming and start their cast before it arrives based on their knowledge of the incoming damage so the damage is healed almost instantly as it's taken. Often times the parry leads to an over heal and wasted mana in that case. Also the mitigation properties of dps shouldn't be understated. Moves like souleater and cool downs like bloodbath give back health at much larger rates with higher damage output.

Hold on, the logical conclusion of your thoughts here would suggest that a Dragoon could be a viable tank since healers can pre-cast everything in scripted fights and you're leaning heavily on dps output as a form of mitigation by proxy.

Since there is no gear variety outside of Diadrem now. I hope in the future we can choose our statistics so I can stack more proper stats.

Many tanks do not seem to understand this, but damage is sustain. Doing more damage means the fight lasts shorter and more enemies die faster, which equals less damage to you. Stacking critical rate gives you more sustain then stacking parry does, just by making the fight shorter.

I'll go ahead and say it....If this is the future of tanking in FFXIV, I'll be hanging up my sword and shield, and focusing on WHM and Bard in future. Which is a real pity since I actually enjoy tanking, but if it all boils down to superior DPS == tanking, I'm gone.

[Dante_V]

Hold on, the logical conclusion of your thoughts here would suggest that a Dragoon could be a viable tank since healers can pre-cast everything in scripted fights and you're leaning heavily on dps output as a form of mitigation by proxy.

Actually no, that's not a logical conclusion at all, that's an informal fallacy. Tank viability isn't /solely/ on dps at all, nor has anyone or myself proposed that it was. We are specifically discussing secondary stats in conjunction with tanking in regards to parry vs other secondaries. Context seems to be a little hard for you to grasp but either way your conclusion isn't "logical" in any sense of the word. Dps synergy with certain TANK moves and cool downs was what we are saying, the increase in damage secondaries in conjunction with these abilities is greater mitigation than that from stacking parry. This isn't an opinion, it's been tested many many times. Because you choose to misrepresent the argument due to your inability to either understand or compose a counter argument doesn't change that. If you want to get upset and foot stamp off because parry isn't a good stat then that's fine with me, go play Bard. Either way it isn't going to stop anyone from researching or discussing the issue at hand. If you want parry then stack it until you are blue in the face, it won't matter or affect me one iota. Good luck.