Thread: Serious discussion: 3.2 Materia slots, Tanking, Parry and You

The thing about Parry is that the longer the fight, and the more physical hits you take (not necessarily the damage, since it's calculated on hit), the more reliable it's going to be. But the biggest problem with Parry isn't necessarily the stat itself (which functions in a similar fashion to how it has in other games - a chance to reduce some of the incoming damage), but with how poorly it functions in FFXIV.

Enemies in this game hit incredibly slowly. In general, in a minute-long fight, barring any cast abilities, an enemy will get off 20 white hits - one every three seconds or so. 20 hits is a remarkably tiny sample for this, so let's spread it out to a Primal-length fight that goes poorly: 30 minutes. That's 30*20 = 600 white attacks total, barring cast attacks or mechanics. For a stat that is so heavily based in RNG, 600 hits is a remarkably tiny sample size. With 30% parry, you could conceivably only parry 100 of those hits, or you could get extremely lucky and parry 300 of them (and really, given how finnicky RNGesus is in this game, it would not be outside the realm of possibility to see a 30 minute window with no parries).

Some people argue that parry leads to overhealing, or that DPS stats make bosses die enough more quickly to compensate for the overall mitigation they'd lose from not choosing parry. I don't really buy into those arguments, and will probably be a "bad" tank who overmelds Parry onto his gear (depending on what SE does to Paladins, anyway, and whether or not my healer disagrees). I personally would rather take ~3% less damage over the course of a fight and give the healers some ability to relax their throughput so they can DPS than boost my own DPS contribution a marginal amount and make them work harder.

I actually asked a similar question a few months back, as to why people tend to avoid it: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/272049 . There's a lot of impassioned discussion in there, but it will give you a sense for why the community opposes it so much. For the most part, it seems like it's all because it's RNG, and because it's only a chance at 20% reduction to a fraction of incoming hits. It's up to you to decide whether or not you agree with that consensus, but for me, mitigation is mitigation, and I'll be taking as much parry as I can get.