Why Avoid Parry?

[Kosmos992k]

Your logic is sound and I understand where you're coming from, the only problem is that it just doesn't work like that in actual combat. Heck, thanks to bloodbath (in the case of WAR) critical and damage can actually offer far superior mitigation than parry. You just have to wrap your head around the idea that killing stuff faster is just way better than reducing damage by marginal amounts.

That is the point of Warrior though, is it not? It's a race to kill it before it kills you, so for a Warrior, moar dps is by design. Of course thanks to encounter design, they had to also give War mitigation almost comparable to PLD so that War can survive encounters. which goes back to the idea that PLD is the mitigation tank being a moot point since all 3 tanks can mitigate reasonably well.

However, what you outlined above is a great explanation of how Warriors are supposed to function as tanks.

Now I kinda agree that the degree where some people do give it importance is a bit... crazy, seeing as I don't think I'd ever give up a higher ilvl piece of gear since primary stats >>> secondary stats, specially after all the nerfing in 3.0.

But I have seen numerous raiders prefer lower ilvl gear just because it has parry.

If they've done any research they should know how much of a folly that is.

I remain quite surprised that there has not been a greater outcry about the modifications to Parry and Blocking, they go to fundamental aspects of all 3 tanks, PLD in particular.

I can understand coming from a tanking background that the desire to be as tough as possible is there, but FFXIV is different - here the ideal tank gets tough -enough- and then does more damage. Paladins are encouraged to swap to sword oath for more dps as often as possible as long as their healer can take it, and that -20% damage taken that you give up from not having Shield Oath is worth far more than any amount of parry stacking.

You made a lot of great points, but I wanted to say something to this point in particular.

That makes sense in end-game content and raiding where there is a premium on DPS, but it makes much less sense to players from that traditional tanking background, or who don't play at the end-game/raider level. People pick Paladin for numerous reasons, I assume some for the look and some because they want to be the rock-like anchor of the group protecting everyone else. For those players in particular, it's a paradigm shift in their view of being Paladin. I honestly hate the 'moar DPS' meta, and the fact that it spread from end-game into every other aspect of the game.

I'm not sure who it is that is encouraging Paladins to swap to Sword oath for more DPS, but they'll get no where with me on that score. Don't get me wrong, I understand the need in the raiding environment for the additional DPS from the tank. Outside of that, I honestly think it's out of line for anyone to pressure tanks of any kind to play in a particular way, unless the tank is literally failing to do their job well enough to hold hate.

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.

Oh come on, why not just make everything scale of Strength and drop every other stat in the game? You can't just keep scaling everything of STR just because Warriors focus more on STR for DPS output anyway.

The more we scale everything else of 2-3 primary stats, the more homogenized everyone becomes. I didn't sign up for this game to play a slightly prettier clone of every other Miqo'te Paladin.