Why Avoid Parry?

[Hitoseijuro]

One thing I think is also worth mentioning: quite a few of the raiding tanks here who are vehemently defending the "no vit, no parry, tank in dps stance whenever possible" meta are not necessarily fans of it.

I personally would LOVE if I could stack Vit, stack Parry, and walk into an encounter and just laugh as I shrug off damage barely needing any healing, and how my health pool was a direct correlation to my gear advancement. I don't -like- the DPS heavy meta because this wasnt why I chose to roll tank as my main. Obviously a lot of players DO like the current meta as it lets them have a more aggressive playstyle (particularly players who play tank who normally gravitate to DPS roles in games), but it's certainly not clear cut.

We're all waiting with baited breath to see what changes 3.2 brings. I fully appreciate the -desire- of Jpec07 to try and justify a mitigation-heavy setup. Reading between the lines of his posts I get the feeling Jpec07 is a similar tank-minded player to myself who is desperately trying to find some kind of nuance or statistic to cling onto to let it be viable to gear up to TAKE LESS DAMAGE, which is where a lot of the enjoyment of tanking comes from. That feeling that your gearing choices and gear advancement over time as you progress is contributing to making you harder and harder to kill.

Sadly, as things are now, Parry is just a garbage stat simply because 40 parry = 1% parry chance = 0.2% less damage taken by physical only, with added unreliability. With Crit being a similar amount for 1% crit, which is about 0.5% damage increase, it's just a much much bigger impact on your performance. I wish this wasnt the case.

Ironically, as I say this, I'm a raiding Paladin who has 650 Parry in their tanking set (even with full Slaying Accessories), more than any other secondary stat bar Acc, simply because the i210 tanking gear I've picked up has all been stacked with it and there hasnt really been any other viable option due to how gated Esoterics and Gobtwines are. So here I am saying just how much it sucks, yet the best gear I have available to me sadly is stacked with it.

I think on top of how parry scales, it also is stacked with very poor choice secondaries. You cant be an endgame tank and want to stack all the parry you want(Lets be in a world where parry was great)because your other stats would also suffer, on some classes you would probably have more than the desired skill speed you want, and outside of warrior, you would go dry very fast on pld/drk even with breaks. Not even going to mention the biggest factor, which is accuracy, fully stacked parry armor gives very little accuracy. Either way you're still forced to go hybrid(if you want parry). If parry came with more options of crit/acc/det on better piece choices one could make an argument for having more parry.

Ideally, as a paladin you want to be a bunker, that's the logical way every player views a paladin, I'm sure even SE which is why they want them dealing dmg on the lower spectrum of all 3 tanks, so having parry would be something a paladin would love to have or I should say work, but because of how block works and having sheltron, you diminish its utility.

Warriors don't have block so parry would be a nice average mitigation(like block does for pld) however(I'm not a warrior so bare in mind) I believe because of their self heals crit not only impacts them offensively but also defensively so having crit as a priority is also a thing.

This leaves us Dark, I am and always will be a dps tank, over 10 years and I don't see this every changing, but as I say that, I can see *merits* for a dark looking to add in some hybrid crit/parry in their set up due to reprisal/Dark dance(up 30% of the time). I'm not making an argument for parry on dark but I can see if someone wants to.


I made a few sets for each class, 1 being full parry as max as possible,1 being get as much parry as possible while achieving proper accuracy for AS4, 1 being a hybrid, having a good amount of crit while getting parry whenever possible while maintaining proper acc, and the last, full priority on crit/acc.

*note, these sets dont include melded/Diadem(more on diadem later), going to use Dervy's theorized parry : (parry-354)/(858*4)+ 0.05(this is just theory not accurate just using as a ref)

Warrior:
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4H9 - 9.1% crit, 580 acc(no food), 875 parry(20.1%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HB - 12.57% crit, 665acc, 753 parry(16.62%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HD - 13.3% crit, 669 acc, 625 parry(12.89%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HG - 17.21% crit, 677acc, 496 parry(9.13%)

Dark:
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HH - 6.72% crit, 552 acc(no food), 934parry(21.89%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HI - 9.77% crit, 654acc, 805parry(18.14%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HK - 13.01%crit, 690acc, 746parry(16.42%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HL - 15.83% crit, 782acc(....), 384parry(5.87%)

Pld:
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HM -6.72% crit, 580 acc, 912parry(21.25%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HO - 9.49% crit, 668acc, 848parry(19.39%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HP - 15.02% crit, 690acc, 641parry(13.36%)
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/S4HQ - 17.23% crit, 765acc(....), 413parry(6.71%)


So basically the first sets shouldnt really appeal to anyone, going for full parry will give you sub optimal dmg on top of not enough accuracy for endgame raids outside of probably As1 with or w/o food. This might be an obvious deduction but you'd be surprised what I've seen/read or heard.

For the next 2 sets, for pld you gain roughly 1% crit for a 1% loss of parry when you prioritize crit over parry in a hybrid. Dark is almost in that boat as it gains 1% extra crit with the 1 for 1 exchange. Warrior on the other hand gains 1% for a 4% loss.

The interesting part is the last set vs the others as with pld you gain 2% more crit with a crit focused build but lose 6.6%(half your parry% from previous set), Dark gains almost 3% more crit but loses about 10% parry for it. Warrior on the other hand gains 1% per 1% loss on parry, gaining 4% crit while losing 4% parry but still having a 3% parry over the other 2 over all.

So warrior gains 11% crit at an 11% parry loss, Dark gains 9% crit with a 16% parry loss, and pld gains 10.5% crit over a 14.5% parry loss. Ideally though those full parry sets are bad so perhaps we can look at the hybrid vs crit builds and get a better idea.

So lets look at a Crit/parry build(sets 2-3 on each class)against a more crit focused set. For war you gain roughly 4% crit while losing 7-4%(average that to 5.6%), Dark you gain 6-3%(4.5%) while losing 12-10% parry and finally for pld you gain almost 8% crit for a 12-6%(9%) parry loss.



For warrior going for a full crit build seems to suffer the least out of all the jobs when it comes to how much crit you gain over parry loss. Dark seems to be ok with going into a hybrid crit/parry. Parry does help with reprisal/low blow(not a case for stacking it but a bonus for having it). PLD on the other hand works well with hybrid but also well with crit focus'd builds due to the fact as I mentioned before of block and sheltron.

Again, the problem with all this is just parry doesn't function as great as you want or wish it did, But if you want to be more durable and feel like having more parry will help your healers then maybe checking out the 2nd and 3rd set for each class that I posted might be something to look and of course tweak around since I did not rip these sets a part 100% to get the min/max out of each set but generalized it.


The biggest wrench that was thrown with all this gearing for crit or parry is Diadem, if you're someone doing Diadem, then congrats, you can get the best of both worlds(very slowly) since you can try to farm your chance at getting something with crit, parry and accuracy on top of det.


TL;DR : Crit hybrid builds can work if people want placebo durability with more parry at a small loss of crit. Wars probably suffer the least from full crit builds(hence their OP status). Turtle tanking could be better if the defensive mechanics of the game were better but currently straight -% damage taken is still king of mitigation and anything else is just sprinkles(bonus). I think this post is beyond long and probably not read or approached due to its length.....