Understanding a Warrior's Parry  

So I was thinking about Parry, and I'm wondering to myself why more folks dont push for it? Seeing it as a nicely balanced stat I couldn't figure out why more folks aren't worried about thier parry at all. I figured it was worth a bit of research so I delved into it a bit. Here's what I found:

Why Parry is awesome...

I knew a couple things about parry, which made me think it was pretty darn awesome.

1. When you parry an attack the remaining time on your current swing is reduced by 20-50%, meaning you hit faster, and as we all know, hitting faster means more threat.


2. Parry is like dodge because it's a complete reduction of the damage that would've happened had the attack landed. Unlike block, you cannot "partially" parry. Simply stated, If you parry none of the damage hits.

Combine these two facts and you have a very appealing stat, one that helps both with survivability (through avoidance) and threat, but there's more to the story. Read on.

Why it's not...

Simply put, dodge is more easily acquired without sacrificing other statistics. Also other statistics like agility can be nearly equivalent or possibly better.

For those of you who love math:

Parry % = ((Defense skill - Attacker's weapon skill) * 0.04) + 5% base chance + contribution from parry rating + contribution from talents

490 defense would give you 5% chance to parry (against a level 73) + 5% base chance + 5% from talents (optionally), after that every 23.65 Parry rating = 1% chance to parry.

490 defense would also give a player a 5% chance to dodge, and a players base chance to dodge is usually somewhere between 0-3% depending on race and class, so you can see that the base chances are going to be relatively similar to parry. However, dodge only requires 18.9 Dodge rating to generate 1% chance to dodge. When you compare that with 23.65 parry rating for 1% of avoidance... well I think you get my point.

Base chance and rating aside, agility wins the competition for the "balanced" statistic as dodge is also added for agility and it only takes 30 agility = 1% chance to dodge for a warrior. As an added benefit agility also impacts other stats like armor for every 1 agility you also get 2 armor. Additionally 33 agility will net you 1% chance to crit which doesn't sound like much but can be a real threat per second boost.

Moral of the story: do the math before you equip it! If you see a peice of gear that's the same as yours and except you see it has 15 parry rating and you'd give up 30 agility, dont do it!!

If you need help figuring out what's what a good place to start is with Veneretio's calculators.