Why Avoid Parry?

[Sapphidia]

Quake III is physical?

Yep. A huge number of AOEs and abilities are Physical damage even though they may look like fire/earth. A lot of the stuff in Titan is actually Physical too, only some of his abilities are earth damage. If you can parry it, it's physical.

I don't agree with this logic. Tanks in general contribute the least to group DPS (with the exception of Warriors in Deliverance). This is by design. The tank's job is to hold hate and to survive - dealing damage is an incidental aspect of tanking gameplay, but the vast majority of damage responsibility lies with the pure DPS jobs.

This is why you don't understand the pointlessness of Parry. Just because you disagree with the logic doesnt make it false. Tank DPS is important in almost every raid encounter.

Tanks contribute less DPS than other DPSers but not by much. A tank who minmaxes their DPS will still be contributing a large amount of DPS to a party. Even if they put out 50% of the damage of a DPSer, that's still a large amount of total damage considering there's only 4-5 DPSers in a party. There are fights in this game that have very tough DPS checks and every ounce of DPS helps.

No, there's nothing inherantly wrong with having lots of Parry if the parry was -free-. But by stacking Parry you're giving up Crit or Det and thus reducing your damage output. Parry scales incredibly poorly and you need a huge amount of it to see even a few percent of increased parry chance. And when you consider 5% parry chance is less than 1% total mitigation against physical stuff only, you have to realise that Crit/Det is just the better choice.

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.

There's also the factor of the combat table. The way FFXIV calculates hits is a multiple roll system. First it checks if you dodge/evade. Then it checks if the enemy crits. If the enemy DOESNT crit, then it rolls a block chance check. If it doesnt block only then does Parry get checked for, so 30% parry chance doesnt mean 30% of incoming hits are parried, it means 30% of the htis that arent Crits, Blocks or Evades get parried. For paladins with decent block chance this reduces the effectiveness of Parry far more than Warriors/DRKs.

It sounds like you arent going to believe people though without understanding just how important tank damage is in the game. I'm not sure how we can get that across without having seen it in the flesh. We're in a tanking meta where tanks are expected to generally wear slaying accessories rather than Fending ones, tank outside of their tank stance as much as possible, and contribute as much DPS to a party as humanly possible, at the expense of mitigation. Tank damage is generally quite minor outside of scripted big tankbusters which are dealt with via reliable cooldowns and not RNG parry. You can't not pop a cooldown on Thordan's Heavenly Heel because you hope you'll Parry it, you need to ensure you have reliable mitigation. Parrying it is a bonus.

Maybe if parry gave a HUGE amount of bonus chance to parry for each point then it might be worth it on some encounters. But as it is, a tank who stacks parry might take maybe 2% less damage than a tank that stacks pure dps stats but put out 3-4% less dps. That's a no brainer decision.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

I'll put it this way: all tanks and healers are going to treat every fight as if you will never Parry anything.

If you happen to Parry, great. Won't actually change how people react. Healer will still throw the same Cure at you that they would've anyway.

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.

Also parry rate is not 25%. You can't possibly reach 25% with current numbers (aside from cooldowns). It's like 8%.

And your Crit/Parry comparison pales because Crit scales much better, AND affects the potency of Crits (parry is constant 20%)

[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.

[Syzygian]

People expect healers to do #2 there. But, for some odd reason, they have NO ISSUE with forgetting #3 up in the tank section. It's as if some tanks feel that they're the special cookies who get to avoid having to deal damage, SAME AS EVERYONE ELSE. If you fulfill #1 & #2 as a tank, but you don't even bother to try to do #3...then I think you've failed as a tank, regardless of whether you're a WAR or DRK or PLD.

This is a straw man argument. Literally zero people expect a tank to sit there and do no damage. It is in fact impossible to do so and keep hate. The arguments being posited are whether or not a tank's dps secondaries actually contribute -significant- increases to raid dps over a tank favoring parry, assuming they both have the same str and weapon damage.

[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]

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.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

I don't get it. In 3.x, outside of shields (which are an oddity to themselves), Parry is literally the only pure mitigation stat that we can stack. I understand that Parry isn't "reliable" because it's based on RNG, and that right now, with fights so focused on DPS output, putting any stats into mitigation is a waste.

But in general, don't tanks want to do whatever they can to take less damage? Sure, you can't rely on Parry to save you, 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?

So why should tanks avoid Parry, and why is the advice to new players to avoid it?

Well, why should you get parry?

Having 700 parry is literally the same as having a 4.69% chance to parry, and that is a lot of a stat to stack. When you add in RNG that is about... 0.938% physical damage reduction. Meaning it is pretty much worthless, it also does not work on magic attacks, only physical.

You get a lot more out of Accuracy, Critical Rate and Determination. Which should be on more tank gear honestly.

So, as others said.

Scales Poorly:
100=about 0.67% parry.

Does not prevent all damage:
Parry is only 20%, not 100%. Only works on magical attacks.

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.

[Velox]

Actually, a tank's job is 3-fold:
1. Keep hate.
2. Survive by using CDs when needed.
3. Contribute to party damage.

Some people like to forget #3 there.

Likewise, a healer's job is 3-fold:
1. Heal the party, especially the tank.
2. Contribute to party damage.
3. Don't overheal.

This is part of the reason there are less and less tanks and healers these days. SE needs to find a way to give DPS a 3-fold job to balance it out or remove DPS stances from tanks and healers and removing 1 item from each of those lists (which is honestly what I think SE needs to do).

[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.

[Lan_Mantear]

Actually, a tank's job is 3-fold:
1. Keep hate.
2. Survive by using CDs when needed.
3. Contribute to party damage.

Likewise, a healer's job is 3-fold:
1. Heal the party, especially the tank.
2. Contribute to party damage.
3. Don't overheal.

While I agree with your opinion. It is just that, opinion. At their core, at tank's job is to hold hate. A healer's job is to heal, and a DPS's job is to do damage. Everything else beyond that is icing and is part of what defines a mediocre player vs an exceptional player.

So long as player is doing their role's core function. They are not technically playing incorrectly. They are just being mediocre. It can be a struggle, but even mediocre players can clear content.