Why Avoid Parry?

[braneri1]

Couldn't a tank going balanced STR/VIT also be good strategy? That would mean the tank would require less healing but still put out decent damage. The extra MP the healers save would allow them to dps more.

Or is this a case where the extra dps a full STR tank provides trumps the extra dps the healers would provide above?

It can be useful to have a balance of str and vit. This depends on the content you're doing and your gear, like if your left side gear is not so great you may want to still have maybe 2 vit accessories and even use some cheap food like kaiser rolls (a low level HW recipe with cheap, easy to get mats that gives you about as much vit as if you were to swap your attribute points to full vit). As for tank busters in raids, make sure you have enough vit to survive it in combination with proper mitigation, with a bit of room left for any potential auto attacks that may follow after it. Play around with it and see what you can manage while still remaining reasonably comfortable.

It also varies depending on the type of pulls you are doing. If you get into a dungeon and do not have a strong group composition for aoe (like double melee or newer players with less gear), you may be better off doing smaller trash pulls with a heavier str setup so that you can help kill stuff faster without putting undue stress on your healer by doing larger pulls [which you would normally do with a stronger group comp] that will take far longer to kill, thus you will run out of defensive cooldowns when there are still a lot of enemies left. Dungeon bosses do so little tank damage however, that you can easily go full str and even drop tank stance once you have solid aggro, and just pop a cooldown to mitigate what few higher damage skills the boss has. In most cases, maintaining a regen and tossing you an occasional cure is all the healing that is necessary.

Also, having more vit doesn't mean you require less healing. Firstly, it will mean that it would take 1-2 gcds longer before your healer has to start healing you, which is a non-issue because any large pulls you do should be combined with using one of your higher mitigation skills as well as a stoneskin, adloquium, or nocturnal aspected benefic, which will easily provide the extra amount of time for healers to put out dps before having to switch out. (On a side note, having more vit as a drk can be counterproductive if you end up having to use living dead, as if walking dead is triggered, your healer will have to heal more hp to remove the effect, which can end up increasing your risk of death, depending on what burst heals your healer has available and ready to use.) Vit does not provide direct mitigation, it only does so in combination with certain skills that are based on it such as thrill of battle or divine veil. Incoming damage is the same regardless of how much vit you have; vit is an entirely separate stat from defence/magic defence.

Secondly, having more vit will mean that your self-healing will be weaker, thus making your own contributions to mitigation in that way weaker. Clemency, bloodbath, soul eater, inner beast, equilibrium, second wind, storm's path, dark arts abyssal drain...these will all provide smaller returns if you have more vit and less str.

As for the last part of what I quoted, being a full str tank does not in any way make healers incapable of putting out dps. If the tank and healer both know their jobs well, both of you can put out great dps easily while surviving anything. It all comes down to the ratio of incoming damage to incoming heals + self healing.

Having more str is also not only useful for higher dps and better self-healing, but stronger enmity generation as well. Enmity is calculated based on the amount of damage you do, times enmity multipliers of the skill, times enmity multipliers of your tank stance. So the more damage you do, the faster you are able to generate enmity, and this can get to the point where you only really need to, for example, start a boss pull on tank stance for 1-2 enmity combos, and then drop tank stance for the remainder of the fight while never losing top aggro.

I hope all this helps!