Why Avoid Parry?

[Sapphidia]

It seems like a lot of people forget a Parry/VIT stacking tank can also stance dance and optimize their DPS rotation while maintaining higher defenses.

Yes, they can. But as soon as you start stance dancing and optimising DPS, you're accepting that DPS is important. And as soon as you accept DPS is important and sacrifices can be made, you realise that you -never- need the minor mitigation boost from stacking parry, and you don't need a huge cushion of Vitality (just enough to be comfy).

As soon as this realisation is made, that 100% mitigation/vit focus isnt needed, then you start crunching numbers to work out the best balance of pushing your DPS whilst not dying.

And the best balance is to stack Crit/Det instead of Parry, and use as much Strength as you can instead of Vit.

Having +400 Parry on your gear is roughly +10% parry chance (figures quoted above said about 40 for 1%). 10% parry chance is very roughly 2% less physical damage taken. That 400 Parry could be 400 crit, which I believe has the same percent return per point, so that's +10% crit chance (and a slight increase in crit damage).

So when deciding between Crit and Parry, you're weighing up at the large values something like a 2% physical mitigation boost vs a 5% dps output boost for equivalent stat budget. That's the major reason Parry is rubbish, even outside of its unreliability on mitigating tankbusters.