Is parrying worth the risk in PVP?

As the title ask.

I bring this topic to discussion because, of the handful of invaders who I have denied, most were practioners of the parry, or tried to be at least. In fact, of all the parry spammers I have met, I don't think one has been successful that I can recall.
on one occasion I destroyed an invader in demon ruins with a BKGA who was trying to parry. He reinvaded me later with some lightning sword and easily destroyed me. He sent me a message boasting he would have beat me the first time if he had not been trying to parry.
I've no doubt there may be a parry guru or two lurking about these forums, but for the rest of us, it seems based on observations of others brave but foolish techniques, the chance to land a parry under laggy conditions is not worth the risk as it stops your movement just long even to get pummeled once or maybe twice.

What do you think?

If you can learn to do it properly its always worth the risk. Spamming it against a newer player will often work, as they cant judge dodging it as well. Spamming against a pro will get you BSed super qiuck. Parrying properly, i.e. doing it blind or judging it right has a big pay off if you have learnt how to do it.

You are exaggerating both the difficulty and the risk of parrying. Of course, if you spam parry, you'll get backstabbed or punished otherwise. I parry/riposte people fairly consistently. Like once in every four or five fights. And i am not a parry/pvp guru. There are many many here who are better at parrying than me.

And so what if you get pummeled once or twice? You learn from those mistakes, slowly become better and learn the parry timings.

The trick is to use blind parries. You will rarely get set-up parries. Observe your opponents tactics. Does he always use the same attack patterns? For example, many players spam roll attacks. They roll towards you, attack and roll away. Those are easy to parry after some practice. Same with dash attacks.

When you get good at it it's really helpful tool in PvP, but do not spam or you get killed faster than you can say "backstab punish".

it is worth putting up with weeks of sucking and getting destroyed to finally get the hang of it. very much so, my tip is don't try and parry right off the bat, learn your opponents attack pattern. if you try and parry to soon and don't connect he knows you are fishing and will bait you to parry then circle for a backstab.

That is good advice.

And yes, I do exaggerate, but it's solely for the purpose of entertainment. I hate boring language.

Some weapons are easy as hell to parry. If you're using a great hammer or the BKGA one handed, I can parry you 90% of the time, it's hardly a risk. Once you learn the timing and an opponent's attack patterns, you can parry them if they're predictable enough.

I wouldn't say its not worth the risk but if your not a parrying master don try it.

to me it isnt worth it just because missed parries look so silly.