I know that damage has gone up across the board... but has anyone noticed these tanks?

Hey there boards, with preseason up in the air we've all seen the crazy builds people are trying out and how powerful some of these runes really are. Whilst it's easy to spot the champions doing the most amount of damage and ending games before the 20 minute mark, I think a lot of players have forgotten about that one class who played a heavy hand in warping the past few metas.

I am of course talking about tanks.

With the emphasis on a lot of the keystones and skill trees being in damage, I actually thought that tanks were going to take a back seat whilst lesser popular classes like fighters and assassins (I know they're popular but they weren't doing too well) were going to shine once again.

I was wrong.

Today I played against Ornn and Malphite and not once during either games could I take these big boys down myself. I play Aatrox top and I usually take ignite to try and snowball a lead in the top lane but against these two champions, I could never actually crack their hardened defenses and they actually generally out-traded me unless I managed to stay on them for longer than 3 seconds with both Lethal Tempo + Aatrox's Passive procced (and by then their cooldowns would have come back up and I'd have to either back away or get my ass handed to me).

NOTE: Before you shit on me for my champion choice, I'd just like to state that Aatrox actually isn't a bad champion. His early game is supposed to be IMMENSELY strong especially with his passive procced and either Lethal or PTA and he can easily go toe to toe with big damage dealers like Darius, Riven, Fiora as long you play your cards right. I have also, within this preseason absolutely destroyed squishy, 'abusive' champions like Kleptomancy GP and proceeded to end the game within 20 minutes and in the same vein, have witnessed the same done to me. Aatrox is very fair in his damage, he has no defensive steroids and doesn't have max % damage. If he wants to do damage he has to build for it and most of his damage comes from physical auto attacks thus making it easier to deal with. With that said however, against another duelist like Irelia, Fiora or Xin building armour/bramble - it doesn't feel as detrimental and damaging as a tank who builds it, benefits from all its stats and doesn't care that he bought armour early instead of damage and then proceeds to destroy a dedicated damage dealer anyways.

Against these tanks, I just felt fighting them was futile. I know I can play passive and just farm up against them... but with how fast games go and how strong their scaling runes and abilities are, I just see myself getting further and further behind if I don't somehow pull a lead from somewhere. Versus Ornn, he just simply bullied me out whenever I even went close to a minion and I don't think there was any window where I could actually fight him, even with full passive + tempo + ignite all up. Versus Malphite I was beating him but never actually being able to kill him before lvl 6 and after that, he bought bramble vest and just killed me anytime he wanted to. With them scaling so immensely hard and fast, late game seems to come at the 13 minute mark where they can get 1 defensive item and I'm screwed.

Now I'm not sure... but are tanks just supposed to be THAT strong? It's like ADC all over again... these two classes which are meant to scale incredibly well into the late game whilst sacrificing their early game just don't seem to be following the rules. Why on earth do tanks do so much fking damage early game? Why is their sustain in line or much higher than champions infamous for sustain such as Aatrox, Xin and Irelia who've all been hit because of this mechanic?

At this point in time, I have generally no idea what to do against them. If I play my main champion who I've dedicated all my time into, I KNOW I'm more than likely going to lose. I guess the Aatrox rework can't come early enough, hopefully it provides some answer to this.

tl;dr - Tanks feel unkillable and I have never felt this bad playing into them on my dedicated bruiser champion since S5 cinderhulk meta.