Melee DPS, parry and tank insta-death

I’m sure most people are aware that, after damage reduction by armour and resistances, there are 4 ways that we can avoid incoming damage – the attack can miss, or we can dodge or parry, or block some or all of the damage with a shield. Enemies in the game do the same.

I guess people also realise that it’s impossible to block or parry attacks coming from behind. That is why melee DPS always attack from behind an enemy – the enemy can still dodge attacks, and can still be missed, but they can’t parry or block. Since most bosses have a 10.8% combined parry and block chance (although this can be reduced by your weapon skill), standing behind an enemy should give melee an improvement in DPS of about 10%.

If you play a melee character you probably know all that. What you might not know is that there is another reason to stand behind the enemy, and it has to do with a special property of the parry ability.

A lot of people aren’t aware that, when you parry an attack, your swing timer is reset. Imagine that you are running around with a massive slow two-handed weapon with a 4 second attack speed. Usually, you will hit things every 4 seconds. However, if you attack, and then 1 second later you parry an enemy’s attack, your swing timer is reset and you can attack again immediately. Sounds pretty good, right?

The trouble is… mobs in the game can do this too.

Imagine Gruul, under the effect of 15 growths, hitting the tank for about 10000 damage every 4 seconds or so. Those are big hits, but that’s quite healable, especially on a tank with 17000 or more health. Now imagine there are 10 melee DPSers standing in front of Gruul. Even worse, imagine they are all dual-wielding rogues who are attacking the boss about once every second. Gruul is receiving a lot of hits from in front, and he has a 5.4ish% chance to parry each of them… and each parry would reset his swing timer.

Gruul could be receiving up to 20 melee attacks per second from our rogues, with a 5.4% chance to parry each of them. Statistically, Gruul is going to parry an attack every second…

Suddenly Gruul could deal multiple 10000 hits to the tank in the space of a second, if he had a string of parries.

I think we all know what happens next!

So melee DPS, make sure you stand behind the boss… not only will it increase your DPS, but on tough content - especially slow, hard-hitting bosses - it will greatly increase the chance that the tank will live!

Obviously, there is also a chance that the tank's attacks will be parried. Not much that can be done about that - except using a slower weapon, or stacking weapon skill, which is hard to come by.

One last thought… bosses can parry pet attacks too. Even shadowfiends. So if you really want to take this to an extreme, I guess the tank would always need to turn the boss away from the raid, so that released pets arrive at the back of the boss. And yes, I know this doesn’t work for all fights… like Gruul, since we are standing all around him. Just a thought!

P.S. There is a little bit of conjecture in here. The jury is still out on exactly what effect parrying has on the swing timer. It definitely reduces the swing timer, and it looks likely that it completely resets the timer, although that is kinda anecdotal - lag makes it hard to be sure. Even if it’s just a swing timer reduction, and not a complete reset, the point still stands.