Quote Originally Posted by Jpec07 View Post
And I will rebut the comments made on the first page here: RNG is not the problem with parry. Parry's problem, as others have said, is that there simply aren't enough physical attacks being made on tanks for it to make a difference. Bosses in this game have an extremely slow white damage tick; and at least in 3.0, that tick also hits about as hard as a wet noodle. If encounters are designed to trigger at least more frequent physical damage (say 2-3x as many hits in a fight as there are now), Parry would suddenly become more useful again. We'd also need encounters that don't rely on DPS checks so heavily, but that's a different can of worms I'd rather not open.

Saying that it's not useful because it's RNG is inane. It is damage mitigation, plain and simple. Sure, Parry won't save you from a tankbuster, but it will smooth out incoming white damage ticks a little bit, and make it so you can soak more damage and require less healing. And frankly, anything that can be done to make yourself easier to heal, even if only a little, is very worth doing (and no, "killing it faster" doesn't make you easier to heal, it just means the healer will be healing you for a shorter amount of time while cursing you for making their jobs that much harder - especially if you're paired with a low-throughput healer like SCH).
You realize that if you increase the number of physical hits in a fight, you are effectively negating the RNG aspect of parry, right? If you have 3 times as many hits per fight, it's 3 times as likely you will parry something so your returns on parry will be much more consistent.

And, the point about white damage not being significant is not only false but also ignores all the non-auto-attacks that can be parried and deal significant damage. Auto attacks in A3S hit for ~2.5k, crit for ~3.5k and are mixed with cleaves that hit for 8k+. All of that can be parried. But, despite that, you have people avoiding parry like the plague.

Why? Because it is RNG. Outside of certain CDs, there is no way to guarantee you will parry or block something when you need to. There is no way for a healer to react to a parried hit because they are not healing in a reactionary way. You are not easier to heal with more parry and in most cases are not soaking more damage because you require the same GCD commitment to heal. When you repeat the same exact sequence of events hundreds of times in progression, you develop a set GCD usage that does not change just because your tank parried something during 1 attempt.

If you converted block and parry into actual mitigation rather than evasion based mitigation, then you would start to see an actual debate about it rather than the small minority of clueless people who support parry currently. If block and parry just straight up reduced all physical damage by a flat % (probably around 10~12% based on the current average) people would prefer that much, much more.