As a 44 Templar I see all fighter subclasses soloing encounters designed for groups of 3 or more. They do it all the time. It's no wonder they level so fast and don't want to group all that much. I also see furies, wardens, rangers, warlocks, wizards and a few other classes that can and do solo "group of 3 or more" encounters. There's simply no rhyme or reason anyone should be able to do this.
The devs keep talking about balance and all subclasses doing their "job" equally well just differently. Well I'm sorry to say that's never going to happen. If you give Templars good straight up and/or reactive heals... you have to give them to druids and shamans too otherwise they'll be left out of the group game because people do what they did in EQ1.. take a cleric they're the best. If you give druids and shamans good heals, then you leave the Templars out in the cold because druids and shaman have way better buffs than Templars. There's no way they will be able to balance this without making all priest classes carbon copies of each other which then negates the reason for having subclasses.
As for parry, I can't imagine any good reason for taking it away. We already have enough problems with interrupts and getting beat down. Heavy armor is nearly useless. It's sad that when I look at armor I look at the resists and stats rather than the mitigation. I don't see how 11 points of damage from a dot spell should consistently interrupt me when I have 219 skill in all my spell classes and I'm level 44 with something around 3500+ hps... that's a minor scratch at best and shouldn't interrupt my spell casting... now a barrage of 950 from a giant in Permafrost ya that should easily interrupt me.
As said pretty much everywhere else, EQ2 is still in beta only we're paying for it. Altho I don't anticipate they'll be getting my money much longer as there are more and more options out there in the gaming market.