Parry: How would you improve it?

[Violette]

I feel that unless warrior gets a parry-driven proc, it will lag behind any changes made to paladin or dark knight in the MT role.

As an out of the ballpark idea to go along with warrior getting a parry driven proc (say, a minor bubble like the original storm's eye that could be proc'd after parry), that parrying effects also have a change to activate after auto-attack based on the parry rate (i.e. 50% of parry rate = activation rate).

[Brian_]

I don't think there is a way to fix parry. It's an antiquated stat that doesn't work in FFXIV. Any change you would make to it would basically be a complete rework. This is probably why they are tabling any changes until a later time when they have more options to address it.

The problems really boil down to a few points. None of these points are really related to the effectiveness of parry.

The first is that it's a passive mitigation stat. As such, it's boring and flavorless. Many game developers have come to this realization regarding passive mitigation and instead opt for active mitigation. To be fair, SE has tried to make parry a more active stat by tying it to skills like reprisal and lowblow (and they made another passive mitigation stat, block, more active through shield swipe). And, when I play DRK, I do genuinely want a parry to occur and feel excited when one happens. The obvious issue is this dynamic is exclusive to DRK and the stat itself is still devalued by dark dance. For PLD and WAR it's still a really boring stat.

Just to prove a point, imagine if every time a WAR parried an attack, it activated fell cleave for a short window. Parry would instantly be every WAR's best friend. They need to find a way to make parry an active stat for every tank class. That said, skills like raw intuition heavily complicate this task.

The second issue actually runs in opposition to the last point which makes parry such a complicated design problem. Even if you find a way to make parry a more active and engaging stat, it's still only relevant while you are getting hit. SE designs fights with forced tank swaps and split MT up-time. I doubt this is going to change. When a stat is dead weight for larger portions of every fight, it's a little hard to justify its value. As such, it becomes difficult gating any real value behind parry because it only serves to widen the disparity between MT and OT effectiveness. We already have DRKs lamenting their lack of utility when OTing and the tanking trinity suffering from the pigeon-holing of tanking roles based on their job. It doesn't need to get even worse.

So I think SE will probably be looking at the versatility of the stat, its relevancy across different content and roles, and how engaging it is.

Personally, I think they need to take a long, focused look at WARs and realize they hit a home run with their design and base everything on them. For example, vengeance and raw intuition are defensive cooldowns that still retain some value even when you aren't taking damage -- and rather crucial value because they allow WARs to triple FC. Parry needs to work in the same way. There needs to be some way to funnel the stat into a different, equally impactful function while OTing just like how WARs can repurpose vengeance and raw intuition as ogcd stack generators. Maybe you go with something straight forward like funneling parry into crit / det while in SwO / deliverance / blood weapon are active.

After you make parry a valuable stat even when OTing, you open your options for increasing its impact while MTing. Perhaps while in Defiance every parry has a chance of generating a stack of wrath. Perhaps for PLD a parry will remove the GCD cost of SwO or activate RA much like a block activates shield swipe. Maybe you buff reprisal, low blow, or give DRK some more parry gated perks.

[Lyth]

I feel that unless warrior gets a parry-driven proc, it will lag behind any changes made to paladin or dark knight in the MT role.

Interesting that you should say that. WAR actually does have access to such a skill as a cross-class: Haymaker. It just doesn't get used because it's linked to a dodge proc (and most tanks tend to trust dodge even less than they do parry), and because it remained on GCD even after Shield Swipe was switched over to oGCD.

It would be interesting to see what happened if they made it oGCD in keeping with Shield Swipe. Featherfoot doesn't boost evasion as much as DA DD, but it has an interesting synergy with Haymaker, and there seems to be a broader selection of attacks that you can actually dodge after Heavensward. This is something that you could potentially even implement in this expansion series with a few tweaks.

[Violette]

Interesting that you should say that. WAR actually does have access to such a skill as a cross-class: Haymaker. It just doesn't get used because it's linked to a dodge proc (and most tanks tend to trust dodge even less than they do parry), and because it remained on GCD even after Shield Swipe was switched over to oGCD.

It would be interesting to see what happened if they made it oGCD in keeping with Shield Swipe. Featherfoot doesn't boost evasion as much as DA DD, but it has an interesting synergy with Haymaker, and there seems to be a broader selection of attacks that you can actually dodge after Heavensward. This is something that you could potentially even implement in this expansion series with a few tweaks.

........So they don't have access to a parry-driven proc.
While Haymaker on a Dark Knight could be usable, on warrior it's got no place compared to provoke/conv/awareness/internal release and flash/second wind. Dodge itself is not a rewarding defensive statistic, unless it's possible to be stacked past 50% (aka where it becomes comfortable), at which point it plain outstrips every other stat. And Shield Swipe is a gcd.

So yeah, not really. As Gray said, passive defensive is pretty boring to play with (hello 1.0 paladin), so adding ANOTHER ONE to the mix to depend on will exacerbate the issue.

[LordLucavi]

I don't mind parry at all. 20% damage decrease for the hit is 20% less damage I take from that hit. Yes, it's deep in RNGesus's buttockal region, but still, it's damage reduction. Though if I had to change it, I'd rather they based more on an actual real life parry. I fence, and if I successfully parry my opponent's attack, their weapon doesn't hit me at all, plus I can immediately riposte. I'd like to see parry in game give you a dodge with say a 15 or 20% chance of an immediate critical counterattack. Failing that, increase the damage reduction to something like 75%.

[Violette]

I don't mind parry at all. 20% damage decrease for the hit is 20% less damage I take from that hit. Yes, it's deep in RNGesus's buttockal region, but still, it's damage reduction. Though if I had to change it, I'd rather they based more on an actual real life parry. I fence, and if I successfully parry my opponent's attack, their weapon doesn't hit me at all, plus I can immediately riposte. I'd like to see parry in game give you a dodge with say a 15 or 20% chance of an immediate critical counterattack. Failing that, increase the damage reduction to something like 75%.

That's effectively what reprisal and shield swipe are meant to emulate.

[Lyth]

........So they don't have access to a parry-driven proc.

You're right. Go ahead and wait for a parry proc oGCD then. Wouldn't want to lose out on trait-less Flash or Second Wind in favour of an extra oGCD. Axe-based combat should be all about finesse and parrying, after all.

I don't even think that this is an issue, to be honest. WAR most certainly doesn't need a dps boost relative to the other two tanks. But if you want to make use of an existing, underutilized skill for more variety in playstyle, it's already there. It just needs a bit of an adjustment before people can actually get some use out of it.

[Violette]

You're right. Go ahead and wait for a parry proc oGCD then. Wouldn't want to lose out on trait-less Flash or Second Wind in favour of an extra oGCD. Axe-based combat should be all about finesse and parrying, after all.

I don't even think that this is an issue, to be honest. WAR most certainly doesn't need a dps boost relative to the other two tanks. But if you want to make use of an existing, underutilized skill for more variety in playstyle, it's already there. It just needs a bit of an adjustment before people can actually get some use out of it.

Don't get snooty with me. For the same reasons parry is terribad currently, dodge is even worse (unless you are a dk where it's actually kind of on par in trash situations x>3 or 4 where x = no of physical attackers). It's not about "we need a parry proc oGCD", it's "if we want to give parry an offensive component" like I suggested, we need to shore up the weakness it war's kit (by giving it as I suggested, a near purely defensive ability).

Or return storm path's original bubble (woo) and make it give the warrior a buff for 5% damage down for x seconds, and make warrior's parry proc the same as reprisal (with lower damage to compensate). It's simply based around the fact that if they do change parry to make it useful, it has ramifications on the offense of Dark Knights (assuming block gets a similar change then paladin too), while leaving warrior in the dust. Of course, this would also be a chance to TAKE warrior's OT utility and give it to MT warrior's near exclusively, which would help disrupt the current balance of OT tank.

[Shurrikhan]

Just throwing this out there as a hopefully balanced measure for those who like the idea of offensive parry. Rather than auto-attacking back for a fixed potency or auto-critting a following attack, etc., have it boost attack power temporarily based damage parried over the last X seconds, and drain from that bonus based on potency you deal during it. The higher the attack power is raised, the more of the bonus can be consumed per potency. Each parry's contribution is averaged into a global tick, and each tick's worth fades separately. (The unspent portion of an AP bonus from the a parry received and merged to a tick X seconds ago will fade while another parry's bonus from X-3 seconds ago will still remain.) In that way you have a particular flow of wanting to maximize reactive damage to get the most out of a great parry, but it remains roughly lenient.

Even this I'd still imagine would be better served by in-class mechanics and falls short without more ways to manually influence parry rate (both saving and spending parry chance), but it has precedent (WoW, in this case) and should serve the needs that people seem to be wanting offensive parry for without varying so wildly in contribution, especially within the same tank job.

[Lyth]

Don't get snooty with me. For the same reasons parry is terribad currently, dodge is even worse (unless you are a dk where it's actually kind of on par in trash situations x>3 or 4 where x = no of physical attackers). It's not about "we need a parry proc oGCD", it's "if we want to give parry an offensive component" like I suggested, we need to shore up the weakness it war's kit (by giving it as I suggested, a near purely defensive ability).

Yeah, that was a bit of a low blow. <Parry> Low blow. <Parry> Low blow... that's it! Parry will overturn the old double WAR regime. We'll just stack parry after it gets upgraded and use low blow procs to boost DRK's MT dps. That will really show up the weaknesses in WAR's kit and leave it in the dust. Said no one ever.

If you wanted to make a parry based proc, you'd have some rebalancing to do with Raw Intuition and Defiance's parry rate bonuses. Tank equality is important, but sometimes there are reasons why skills aren't simply directly copy-pasted across the board. It's okay to occasionally not have something that another tank has. There will be other things that even it out.