PSA: Tanks? Or Optimus Primes?

Lïghtkeeper··3 votes·851 views

Okay. So we all know that this new tank meta has become a thing thanks to a few new items as of late, but can we just reconsider what the hell Riot actually means by tank? Typically, a tank is a character that is designed to absorb and mitigate large amounts of damage from enemies, often to serve as a sponge of sorts to protect their allies. But through what rationale does Riot allow these "tanks" to still do massive damage while receiving absolutely none!? I just got out of a game against a Nautilus Support, Malphite Top, and Amumu Jungle. Let me rephrase. The Heaviest Armor tank in League, the Endless health/shield Titan, and the fucking decrepit God of CC. Their wombo is alone enough to piss anyone off, but when all they are building is frozen hearts, sunfires, that speedy item that's totally "not" a reboot of Shurelya's and STILL sending me from 100 to 0 in 2 seconds!? THAT'S A LOAD OF BULLSHIT! Like who fucking needs CC on those spells if they just burst like crazy! No need for a frickin enemy marksman, they can just 3v5 us! We can't touch them from their cc and the still do MASSIVE dmg! What kind of bullshit is this!? THIS IS NOT BALANCE!

12 Comments

Sirsir2 votes

When they 'do massive damage,' do you have any defenses?

Alljoy1 votes

The raid boss fantasy is real.

Darcade3331 votes

tanks deal a lot of damage, thats true :) but what can be the solution for this?

Lïghtkeeper1 votes

Wouldn't the obvious just be to lower their base damage on abilities??

Lïghtkeeper1 votes

This may seem rather oppressive towards tanks, but they aren't MEANT to be dealing out solo dmg. That's not their angle!

Sir Yamazuki1 votes

{quoted}

This may seem rather oppressive towards tanks, but they aren't MEANT to be dealing out solo dmg. That's not their angle!

but, they don't. Despite having aoe damage as well, their average damage during a game is low in comparison to every other type of champion. Tanks aren't bursting or assassinating anyone unless they actually build damage. Even if they are solo killing, they aren't doing it as quickly as an adc or an assassin would. Sometimes as a tank, not even 3 rotations will kill the squishiest member, where as an assassin would kill them in 1, or an adc would with 3 auto attacks. Even when tanks are fed, for a lot of them, it doesn't increase their damage at all, all it does is make them harder to kill earlier which means they aren't killing anyone faster by simply having a gold lead either, so there is a chance to escape, where as a fed adc or assassin is going to kill you much faster and you probably have zero hope of escaping them due to how much damage they dish out in .5~2 seconds.

Any "tank" killing someone quickly aren't really tanks, they are bruisers, and no matter what, that's what they will end up doing even with nearly no damage.

KidSpectre4 votes

You just replied to yourself. Did you forget to switch accounts?

Lïghtkeeper1 votes

I was following up on what I had just said. >.>

Darcade3331 votes

you cannot pinpoint and label a champion as "tank" and "not a tank", it differs with build i have seen both heavy tank warwick and squishy+heavy dmg ww so you cant point out the champions who needs their base ad reduced

Pirahna1 votes

counter pick, counter build. %dmg spells, major pen builds. item 3035 item 3142 on marksmen, item 3135 item 3001 on your ap carries. also, if your teams tanks are good, then you should have peel to keep them off of you while you shred them with said items. there will always be a champ out there that can 100-0 any given champ in a 1v1. teamfight against these guys and place yourself out of range of the tanks and behind your own. a nice braum ult followed by an angry ali should give you enough protection from a malph/amumu combo.

Xintium1 votes

First post in this forum, sorry for the wall of text, there is a brief version at the end.

Back in Season 4, when there wasn't a "tank meta", I thought that, at a fundamental level, some type of champions should roughly "counter" other type of champions to keep a general balance and fairness in the game, especially in team fights. The natural questions, at that moment, that I immediately recognized regarded tanks, adcs and assassins: (1) if assassins have a relatively safe laning phase and, during team fights, can burst any other champ (including tanks) in less than 1 second and somehow go back to safety (to rinse and repeat the process), this will make them unbalanced; (2) if AD Carries have too much health (fortunately, this will never happen), this will be a problem too; (3) if tanks have 5k+ hp, huge amounts of armor and magic resistance, and deal the same damage as a burst mage/assassin at the same time, with some CC to boot, then something is clearly wrong. The second point (2) is, luckily enough, only theoretical and the first point (1) is untrue in its entirety (though Assassins, generally speaking, can still 100-0 squishy targets by fully committing, but this isn't a problem per se).

Enter S5, where the "tank meta" became a thing. The third point (3) is actually becoming true, though I cannot know to which degree. The fundamental fact that should keep the mathematics roughly "balanced" should be the following: a generic champion "X" should never have both high damage and "tankiness" at the same time. Just like a Jinx with the hp/armor/mr of a full-tank-build level18 Nasus using Ultimate is a theoretical monster which breaks the game, there shouldn't be allowed an unkillable tank with the damage of burst mage/assassin (or more). Summarizing, the principle should be: either you have damage or you have "tankiness". But no champion should have both at the same time. With AoE and/or undodgeable CC added into the mix.

Some may critique that the laning phase is the weak point of tanks. This poses two problems: the first is that we are silently accepting that all tanks are now late monsters (the equivalent of a 1k-stack Nasus), which I can argue is not the best decision ("rise the puppy" now becomes "rise the tank"); the second is that it should be always taken into consideration that this is simply untrue: Nautilus Support is not a solo lane (and I cannot honestly say it is "weak"), jungling isn't like laning and, more generally, tanks do not always start in such a bad spot as to make them automatically lose against non-tanks.

The other type of critique which I would like to dismiss is "kiting". Although it should always be done to almost perfection, kiting is not the definitive solution to the "tank problem". If all tanks starts to magically have CC and/or gap closers (which all the mentioned tanks in the original post have) or very high movement speed, the effectiveness of kiting is greatly reduced (to almost zero, unless you are called Kalista, which is probably the only adc that can do "perfect kiting", i.e., keeping a nondecreasing, safe distance in an infinitely long escape path). Kiting is very effective when a slow speed melee enemy ("tank") tries to reach a high speed target with range ("sniper"), but it isn't effective when they can close the gap in 0.2 seconds and stun you for 1.5 seconds, probably dealing enough damage to kill you anyway.

Regarding CC effects, especially AoE knock ups and/or stuns, the tank problem is really apparent: mixing high damage, CC and tankiness can become explosive if some math of the game starts to change in your favor, escalating due to a butterfly effect for a single, apparently small, change in an item and/or a base stat of a champion.

In brief: In the set {high damage, high tankiness}, you can only pick one, minimizing the other. At least, in principle, since we can clearly see this is not the case as of now. Having a terrible laning phase, whether true or not, isn't a solution to the problem.

BluePolarizer1 votes

Your question is simple: why do tanks deal so much damage with no damage items? My question to you is: why do you expect to be able to tank damage when you have no defense items?

Base damage is a thing. If all tanks did was be hard to kill, there is no reason to ever focus a tank. The whole point of a tank is to deal unignorable damage that forces you to focus them. Tanks struggle against champs that can facetank their base damage and deal way higher damage back to them, like Jax, Irelia, Yi, etc.

More from Gameplay

More by Lïghtkeeper