Are my mitigation numbers off ?

[eagledorf]

Eh, your conclusion is correct. PLD's unacceptable lower DPS is being explained with an outright lie that it provides superior mitigation and/or utility, but you're exaggerating the situation for physical damage.

Assuming physical damage (because Halone alone makes PLD substantially weaker on magic damage) and only working with smooth damage (because a 30% Sheltron for a physical tank buster is huge and it gets impossible to try to make generalized comparisons) for a kite shield in the game right now you get about 25% block rate and a 22% block strength so that makes for an extra 5% mitigation all over while you lose only 25% of your parry chance so for a 20% parry rate you only lose 5% (or 1% total mitigation). That number might be exaggerated a bit, but at the same time it's going to go up with gear so it's probably close enough. The Awareness trait also means that you gain an extra 10s on Awareness. For a boss that crits 10% of the time, Awareness is just under 5% mitigation so that trait difference is another 0.4% or so for the auto-attack damage (plus you can't parry/block crits). You also do have Stoneskin, which cancels but is an extra shield when you can time it to go off.

On the other hand, you also need to factor in that WAR gets the Foresight trait and Parry from Wrath if you want to be complete. All told PLD does not appreciably outperform WAR on physical damage in terms of mitigation. For something like A2, PLD does do somewhat better due to receiving much more effective heals (5% in general, 18.5% with Convalescence, 25% for Lustrate/Tetragramaton), but as we know getting bigger heals is not as good as or comparable to mitigation so it's comparing apples to oranges.

What's really inexcusable is when you break it up to magic and physical. WAR will perform basically just as well as the specialized tanks for both while DRK will fall way behind on physical and PLD on magic. At the same time it provides the most important utility of the tanks and is the most ideal OT for DPS while PLD provides the lowest DPS for no reason whatsoever.