Parry: Warrior vs. Paladin

An interesting thought occurred to me the other day: Warrior tanking involves a lot more physical melee attacks than Paladin tanking, and those attacks can be parried. We have a 6% physical damage reduction from Imp. Righteous Fury, where Warriors have a 10% reduction. The question is, how much of that 4% advantage is reduced by the extra damage caused from extra parries?

Unfortunately I'm not much of one for complicated math problems, so I posed the question to the fine folks at Maintankadin. We took a Warrior and Paladin with endgame-level stats (including exta Expertise for the Warrior), and figured up just how many more parries the Warrior would take, and how much extra damage, on average, that equated to. The results were somewhat surprising.

As of this point, the conclusion seems to be that (depending on Expertise), a Warrior will take somewhere around 2% extra "Parry damage" than a Paladin will. This effectively halves the 4% gap. Add in the fact that the extra parry damage is a bit spikier, and can open up the Warrior to a crushing blow much easier than a Paladin (the dreaded "parrygib"), as well as the Paladin's Ardent Defender and slightly superior Stamina scaling, and suddenly the edge Warriors have over us in straight-up mitigation doesn't seem so sharp.

Oh, and that doesn't even count Windfury.

The thread itself is here, I'd encourage anyone interested to take a look.