Serious discussion: 3.2 Materia slots, Tanking, Parry and You

[Grux]

Fellow warriors of light,

I'd like to bring back some discussion on a type of materia most unused - the yellow materia (elemental materias have seen more uses in SBing, so yeah).

So entertain me on this thought.

Historically, we know that the Bladedance was the worst melded materia into your accessories.
Why? Because the mitigation % was too low.
But was it because the mitigation % was too low compared to Crit / SS etc?
Or was it the case that there are only a few open slots for pentamelding parry into your accessories that made it not as worth as the other two?

As we know it, by 3.2 we will begin to meld substat materia slots on gears.
Well this opens up 17 materia slots in total.

So from a previous post: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...gated%29/page8

It would seem that:
1) Base parry is 10%
2) With tanking gears - you'll get around 12-13%

So parry rate is at 23%.

The consensus is that 35point of parry ~ 1% of parry.

With 17 slots open, we're looking at:
If we use Bladedance IV - 17*9 = 153 points. 153/35 ~ 4% additional parry.

With current gear, it brings us to 27%. 27% chance to reduce incoming damage by 20%.

If we use Bladedance V - 17*12 = 204 points. 204/35 ~ 5.82% additional parry.

With current gear, it brings us to close to 29%. 29% chance to reduce incoming damage by 20%.

Not a bad deal. Don't you think? Especially when combined with the additional health from vit gear (thanks to vit adding damage to tanks come 3.2).

With vit gears and perfect melded Bladedance, our effective mitigation will be substantial.

Am I right?

[Violette]

Accidentally deleted the post I just wrote, so I'll blaze through the math for you:

Current parry rate at 23% would give you a rough passive defense over unlimited attacks of 4.6% (0.23*0.2=0.46).
Increasing that to 29% parry gives you a rough passive defense over unlimited attacks of 5.8% (0.29*0.2=0.58).
That's an increase of 1.2% for 200 points of parry. (Against physical attacks only).

150 points of crit would give you roughly 22 points of strength (effectively) (almost 2 weapon damage, so difference of wpn damage of 2 ilvls on tanks. AKA HUGE) (Assuming crit is worth approx 0.153 of 1 str, 150*0.153=22.95)
More crit > bloodbath heal more, IB/SE returns more, Clemency/Equil heal bigger (assuming crit)
More det > same, but lesser (though more predictable)
More SS > More often, less effective for BB than others.

Tl;DR Crit/Det/SS give more to tanks defensively over time than parry.

Parry is trashtastic.

[Grux]

I think I somehow assumed the 6% increase in parry rate to be an overall mitigation.
Guess I was blinded by the large chunk of parry points we could add (153-204) to our current parry (750ish).

Thanks for the clarification.

[Launched]

Not worth it. You're better off adding acc/det/crit/skillspeed depending on what's missing from that piece of gear and the accuracy cap. Guaranteed damage will always be better than a low chance at a small amount of mitigation that only works on physical damage.

[Kuwagami]

snip

Thing is, a 6% increase in parry rate doesn't mean a lot :

=> stuck to 20% because strengh don't matter anymore
=> works only on physical hits (so it doesnt mean anything in magic heavy fights like Ramuh. Hopefully we won't have them back any time soon so let's say physical hits happen 70% of the time)
=> factor in enemy critical rate. Seems to be roughly 10-15%.

With only that, you're looking at max ~0,756% of damage reduction over a fight. Ignoring the RNG which WILL mess you up.

Meanwhile, your crit or det materias will give you more damage and more return on bloodbath, equilibrium, clemency, etc...

[SpookyGhost]

One day they'll fix Parry. One day...

[Jpec07]

The thing about Parry is that the longer the fight, and the more physical hits you take (not necessarily the damage, since it's calculated on hit), the more reliable it's going to be. But the biggest problem with Parry isn't necessarily the stat itself (which functions in a similar fashion to how it has in other games - a chance to reduce some of the incoming damage), but with how poorly it functions in FFXIV.

Enemies in this game hit incredibly slowly. In general, in a minute-long fight, barring any cast abilities, an enemy will get off 20 white hits - one every three seconds or so. 20 hits is a remarkably tiny sample for this, so let's spread it out to a Primal-length fight that goes poorly: 30 minutes. That's 30*20 = 600 white attacks total, barring cast attacks or mechanics. For a stat that is so heavily based in RNG, 600 hits is a remarkably tiny sample size. With 30% parry, you could conceivably only parry 100 of those hits, or you could get extremely lucky and parry 300 of them (and really, given how finnicky RNGesus is in this game, it would not be outside the realm of possibility to see a 30 minute window with no parries).

Some people argue that parry leads to overhealing, or that DPS stats make bosses die enough more quickly to compensate for the overall mitigation they'd lose from not choosing parry. I don't really buy into those arguments, and will probably be a "bad" tank who overmelds Parry onto his gear (depending on what SE does to Paladins, anyway, and whether or not my healer disagrees). I personally would rather take ~3% less damage over the course of a fight and give the healers some ability to relax their throughput so they can DPS than boost my own DPS contribution a marginal amount and make them work harder.

I actually asked a similar question a few months back, as to why people tend to avoid it: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/272049 . There's a lot of impassioned discussion in there, but it will give you a sense for why the community opposes it so much. For the most part, it seems like it's all because it's RNG, and because it's only a chance at 20% reduction to a fraction of incoming hits. It's up to you to decide whether or not you agree with that consensus, but for me, mitigation is mitigation, and I'll be taking as much parry as I can get.

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

@jpec -

The biggest reason why parry suffers in this community also has to do with the ridiculous amount of it you need to equal 1% more parry. Why put 35 points into parry for an abysmal 1% growth, when you could add the same amount of CRIT to a PLD and get a growth of 5 in your main stat (for damage purposes)? While yes Parry is RNG based, it scales horrifically, and there are wiser ways to spend your limited number of slots.

[Jpec07]

@jpec -

The biggest reason why parry suffers in this community also has to do with the ridiculous amount of it you need to equal 1% more parry. Why put 35 points into parry for an abysmal 1% growth, when you could add the same amount of CRIT to a PLD and get a growth of 5 in your main stat (for damage purposes)? While yes Parry is RNG based, it scales horrifically, and there are wiser ways to spend your limited number of slots.

That 35p:1% conversion is off (covered in the discussion in the thread I linked). This may have changed, but we haven't seen extensive testing yet in Heavensward as to exactly how effective the stat is, and that number comes from 2.2 when people first tested it when working on the Anima weapons (so they could prioritize which books to get).

And it all comes down to damage vs mitigation. I don't subscribe to the notion that slotting Crit will allow me to provide enough DPS in a raid context to reduce the amount of damage I take in greater quantity than the damage I would avoid by slotting Parry. The aggressive paradigm was essential in early clears of Alexander Savage due to extremely tight DPS checks being the prime cause of failure. SE have said that the new boss encounters will be heavy on physical damage, and "less difficult," which we can assume means they will rely on challenging mechanics instead of DPS checks to ensure group competency. To that end, every scrap of mitigation becomes more valuable to me. It could be a 100p:1% conversion, and I'd still choose it over Crit (which contributes nothing to Paladin mitigation as of 3.15).

[Alphras]

@jpec -

The biggest reason why parry suffers in this community also has to do with the ridiculous amount of it you need to equal 1% more parry. Why put 35 points into parry for an abysmal 1% growth, when you could add the same amount of CRIT to a PLD and get a growth of 5 in your main stat (for damage purposes)? While yes Parry is RNG based, it scales horrifically, and there are wiser ways to spend your limited number of slots.

The main reason why parry suffers is the boss design of the endgame encounters. Parry (and block) are good for a steady stream of incoming damage, where healers can work with it. In this game, where bosses do huge amount of spike damage and good healers plan every heal on the tanks beforehand, a parried attack will just end up as overheal most of the time.