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Let's Talk Tanks

Yorukin·2/27/2015, 7:15:27 PM·2 votes·368 views

As many of you may have noticed, tanks have been falling out of favor more and more with each passing patch. It's hard to say the exact reason, as there are a number of places to point fingers, but I feel like something needs to be done to ensure that tanky champions have their place in the Rift. Let's break down the issues.

For starters, let's see where tanks normally can be found: top lane, jungle, and support. Support is easily the most common tank spot, as Leona and Braum are both fairly strong champions who excel at working with a buddy. Sometimes you might see odd examples like Nautilus or Maokai, but those are the main two. As for the other spots, though, tanks have been getting crowded out. In the top lane, an average tank's biggest two weaknesses are bullies and fighters. As it stands, those happen to be the most popular picks up top, with examples including Irelia, Gnar, and Riven. In addition, many tanks such as Sejuani or Malphite have a rather weak laning phase. The most common response to champions with weak laning is to take them into the jungle, but this has also become rather difficult with various blanket nerfs. High sustain, high damage, and high mobility are keys to survival in the jungle as it is, and many tanks lack at least the second of those, if not the others.

Now, granted, tanks aren't exactly known for their damage outputs. If they do pack damage, such as Dr. Mundo or Nasus, then they tend to trade out their teamfight utility for it. A tank's main job in the later stages of the game is to distract and disrupt the enemy team, while soaking up damage that would otherwise go towards your carries.

Except that they're not very good at this. Tank items are fine where they are, and some items designed to help deal with tanks (such as Liandry's Torment or The Black Cleaver) feel very nicely balanced. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about other, more popular items. In particular, Blade of the Ruined King (meant as anti-health stacking), Last Whisper (anti-armor), and to a lesser extent Void Staff (anti-magic resist) are all extremely common items in the current meta. They work very well against non-tanks, in addition to being incredibly effective against the things they were meant to counter. By contrast, tank items are very specialized in what they resist; Thornmail for autoattacking comps, Aegis of the Legion for heavy AoE, et cetera.

However, some defensive items do have their issues. Null-Magic Mantle in particular is meant as a cheap item designed to help you survive against magic damage harass. However, when the preseason patch rolled out, the stronger Negatron Cloak was temporarily removed, the Mantle's price was increased to compensate. When the Cloak was reintroduced, the Mantle retained its high price (compared to the other basic defensive items, Ruby Crystal and Cloth Armor). The main problem here is that you are no longer allowed to start with a Mantle and pots in order to deal with frequent early-game magic damage such as from Teemo or Lissandra. In addition, while there are plenty of defensive options, there is yet to be an item custom-tailored to deal with AD casters, such as Zed or Renekton.

Aside from these problems, there are some tanks that many people agree are a touch underpowered, and could use some love. The one that jumps to mind for me would be Zac, but there are others out there.

I'm not going to post any fix recommendations up here; that's what I want you guys to come up with. I admit, I don't want tanks to become TOO popular. If that happens, we'd just shift the meta over from dancing around your opponent to outlasting them. That being said, I want to see tanks become a consistently viable alternative to fighters in all the positions they share.

Sincerely, a budding Nautilus main.

1 Comments

Serevas2/27/2015, 7:41:13 PM1 votes

I think the jungler could be a viable way to revive tanks and bring them back into a semi-meta role. What they need is a specialized, proper jungle item to utilize that will mitigate their exceedingly poor clear speeds, or something that provides them with more health regeneration in combat to mitigate how much damage they take against camps.

The issue with this idea is that the way Riot worked with jungle items this season I find this to be an exceedingly difficult thing to accomplish without it being just as successful on the current junglers and making them pull out even further from the tanks that need this item to function properly. Last season saw a flourish of tank junglers returning with the addition of Quill Coat, and the rework on the Spirit of the Ancient Golem item. That was easy to do as you built very specifically immediately. This season you'd have to replace one of the smite modifiers, but what's to stop Jarvan or Vi from taking that same item to expedite their clears even further and stay ahead rather than evening the score?

One proposal would be an alternative item to Machete, specifically a Quill Coat perhaps? It'll provide slightly higher regen, in combat, or increased damage over time in exchange for the other, or maybe both together even, I'm not really sure, but I don't want it to be too overpowered. This item shouldn't be able to be built into the Warrior, Magus, or Devourer enchantments and should exclusively become Juggernaut, and as such Juggernaut could be removed from the current item choices and reworked into something similar as Spirit of the Ancient Golem was, maybe a free ward inside it, or perhaps the health multiplier. This prevents the bruiser type junglers from taking it as they'd have to sell it and pick up the other iems at full cost setting them behind in gold.

I don't know if you got to experience Nautilus in the jungle after the SotAG rework came through, but it was quite formidable, as were most tank junglers at this point. They may not have been quite there, but they weren't too far behind the bruiser-type junglers that we currently have and had at the time as well.