What if Parry was a rate like Block?

[Violette]

BY removing it in that way, you remove possible additional stat designed for tanks. Stat, that was designed only for tanks.
Spell speed/crit is for casters, piety/whatever for heaelers, crit/det for melee.

The stat's aren't as simple as that...

i.e. there are good arguments for piety builds for blm's, dragoon relies heavily on SkS (well, used to when the stats were lower), mch is crit/w/e (sks or det) but brd is crit/sks, drk and war like sks but paladin abhors it, etc. No stats were designed with one role in mind, so please don't perpetuate that idea.
Crit itself is only seeing a resurgence because of it's scaling being MUCH better than anything we currently have (until SkS gets gcd's under 1.6?s) such that the only class that doesn't really want crit is whm. But I digress.

We have 2 flat increases to tankiness, i.e. vitality and defense.

Parry actually hurts tank itemization. It pigeon holes a lot of builds into either taking only one set of items (i.e. all non-parry accessories) or taking stats which are undesirable in other roles.

If you're TANKING PHYSICAL HITS ALL THE TIME ALL THE TIME NEVER SWAPPING! then an argument can be made for parry given it's a small physical defensive boost (and stop doing DREX only you casual). But even if it is a flat defensive bonus (therefore making it the most desirable stat in the game), it's still only useful to 1/8 (maybe 2/8, your fight may vary) people.

Which creates a secondary issue.
Parry is a secondary statistic.
If parry's defensive bonus is negligible unless stacked to the nth degree, why would I stack 1 stat and force my build around that, when I could get multiple which all increase my damage. The investment and itemization around it may force some distasteful choices resulting in too much/too little of other stats to play my class effectively.

If parry's defensive bonus is noticeable when not stacked to the nth degree, as I said, it's a secondary stat. It instantly becomes the best secondary in the game for most classes, because it's meldable 4x on crafted accessories. Survivability is amazing in progression and while 12 crit isn't going to be missed much, if parry is noticeable even when not stacked to the nth degree (and given most dps accessories don't have parry on them), you can get 200+ parry along with 75 vitality on all your dps and healers, making them muchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh sturdier, which is very desirable.

Which outlines the two of the main issues with parry:
It forces tank itemization down specific paths (which sucks) and it has little wiggle room. On top of it being a boring defensive stat (who ever goes "fuck yeah I parried something" (unless it's followed by "REPRISAL BITCH")), it doesn't have much of a future.