Musings of a Silver 5 Tank Main

I started playing League of Legends almost 8 months ago after vehemently refusing to play for more than a year. It's now easily one of my top 10 favorite games ever. I started by playing top lane, then Jungle. When I got into ranked games, my team quickly relegated me to the Jungle, jokingly saying that I would keep out of trouble there. I played a lot of Hybrid Warwick in my pre-ranked career, but I quickly realized one huge problem: No one wants to play tanks at low-ELO.

This put me in an awkward position. Do I learn to play boring tanks, or do I continue to play auto-attack heavy junglers, who were quickly becoming weaker? I gave in, taking one of my favorite top-laners, Cho'gath, into the Jungle. After playing through a slew of heavy, tank jungles, I finally settled on Sejuani, my current main.

(For those interested, I went through Cho'gath, experimental Garen jungle, tanky Hecarim, and Volibear.)

The point of this thread is my observations on team comps. It seems, when practicing in normals or playing with randoms in ranked, that nobody knows how to build around team comp. It may have something to do with my silver-level placement (my ranked team has forced my ELO somewhere around Silver 1-Gold 5) but nobody plays to the enemy teams weakness or their friendly teams strengths. I started playing tanks out of necessity, because nobody else wants to. I believe this is because tanks don't have a lot of kill potential. This lack of kill potential led me to choosing a CC heavy tank like Sejuani, because the lock down she provides is incredible. Of course, there are other great tank choices, but most people seem to think that tanks themselves are poor choices. I feel as if people think I play tanks because I'm bad at the game, which is simply not the case.

Tanks are essential for a team to do well, and not just off-tank supports, like Thresh, Blitz, or Braum, but real slug-fest taking champions like Garen, Cho'gath, Sion, and Darius. I've come out of fights where I died extremely satisfied because my team got an ace off of my death. In some games, I measure my worth not by kills and assists, but successful engages where Iay or may not have died.

To sum up, I've found that playing tanks is an undervalued, underappreciated role that is essential for the health of your team. Give your tanks a little love!