Quote Originally Posted by Noldornir View Post
I don't think this is the case; OP is saying he HARDLY need to put them on (on pulls) while he does need it on DRK (uptime is not in question if he's not using the skill at all.

I think the shield is the think changing things here;

In FF XIV:

All tanks can Parry (with weapon) (a succesfull parry grants damage reduction on the parried hit)
PALs can Block (With shields) OR Parry (with swords) (a succesfull block grants an higher damage reduction on the blocked hit)

So if 10 enemies are hitting you (as DRK) and you have a 10% chance of parry you'll reduce 1 hit out of 10 (not much)

if the same enemies are hitting you (as PAL) you'll problably block one and parry another one

This works really well with flash (that blinds) especially on low level enemies (not immune to blind). Flash is (indirectly) a def CD if the enemyes are blindable (and you'd use it anyway at least once).


On the opposite side PALs dont get any decent DPS skill 'till lvl 60ish; you could argue that this is not as important as the lack of survival skills (on a tank) but usually fast-killing a boss pays better than the "play safe" from what i could see 'till now
It's not that simple. The fact that when OP pulled he HARDLY needed to put them on can be attributed to many things, none of them is: "PLD mitigates more than DRK/WAR without CD". They could have simply had better healers while on PLD.

First of all, you can't block AND parry. Since this game hit-table checks for misses, then crits, then blocks, then parries, a PLD will parry much less than WAR/DRK (their parry chance is reduced by the same chance% of their block). So in your example, if you block 10% of the time, you'll only parry 9%. But in reality, parry is negligible without a CD that forces it. Tanks have base parry chance of 5%. If PLD has 20% chance to dodge, they're already at 4%. My PLD which is in BiS has near 40% block chance (I have 100% chance to block with Bulwark up now), so my parry can't be more than 3% unless I abuse Anticipation usage, and even then, Anticipation gives my PLD only 22% chance to parry instead of 30% of total attacks. WAR and DRK will parry more than a PLD ever will. As a matter of fact, you should disregard parry's existence as a PLD. I mean even DRK and WAR do lol.

Second, RNG mitigation is available to other tanks. WAR gains more parry from its gauge, DRK can AoE blind with Dark Arts Dark Passenger. DRK and WAR also have abilities to heal through their damage to make up for any mitigation lost. For a PLD to heal, they drop their ability to block by casting Clemency.

Third, RNG mitigation is NOT reliable. As I mentioned in my earlier post, damage shifts from many attacks that add up to many smaller attacks that add up and certain abilities to watch for, and should your RNG mitigative tool "fail" to mitigate the one hit that matters, you will take very nasty damage.

Last but not least, the fact block is stronger than parry is already balanced by having longer CD on all their defensives. Bulwark is twice as long as Raw Intuition and 3 times as long as Dark Mind for example. Sentinel is 50% longer than Shadow Wall and Vengeance, and lasts only 66% as long as the latter. Hallowed Ground is limited to 1 usage per fight as opposed to "abuse for half the nasties" that Holmgang allows you to. List goes on.

One additional thing: Due to lack of good AoE damage options, AoE pulls with a PLD simply take longer than they would if you had WAR or DRK. Stretching periods of high damage longer than necessary. This alone makes PLD simply the worst tank in AoE scenarios.

For more details, there are many posts scattered here on the forums by me and other better tanks that show the major differences between the tanks' sources of mitigation, DPS and utility.