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Tanks vs adcs

titaniumfreefall·1/14/2015, 5:45:00 AM·9 votes·2,085 views

lets just say this, i love playing tanks. nautilus, leona, braum, etc. but i have been seeing a strange trend. mr and armor have a very low impact mid-ish to late game. lets take nautilus for example: lots of health, mr, and armor and a pretty hefty shield right? right. so why is it possible for an adc to kill me outright over the course of about 3-4 seconds? i realise that naut should not be dueling adc's, but when i get melted in team fights solely for the fact that im on top of the adc is a bit unnerving. armor mr and health seem so far behind damage that damage cant even see them in the rear view mirror, not that it looks because its not worried about them at all.

but what im getting at is that adc's dont need to focus and kill high priority targets. they just hit whoever is close to them or annoying them at that time and thats usually a tank trying to cc them. i figure that they have an attack of (im guesstimating) about 500 damage. tanks normally have about 3500 to 4000 hp, thats between 6-8 aa's without factoring in crit, which would make it about 4-6 aa's. with an attack speed of 1.5-2.0 (seeing as a few popular adcs have AS steroids) that takes about 2-4 seconds.

moreover, so many ad items come with some form of armor ignore/shred (last whisper/botrk) which are pretty uncounterable (is that a word?) by tanks who either A) build more armor or B) build more health.

but guess what, the more armor you buy the more percent is being ignored so youre only gaining a fraction of what you paid for

and the more health you have, the more you are being chunked by %hp damage items.

IMO i believe that adc's have taken over the game. the era of adc, as i call it. i also think this is why people are going so many apc supports that can do massive damage (lux, velkoz, morg, annie, etc.) while they all have cc and slows to be technically called supports, they only contribute more damage from the back line instead of more survivability or damage soak on the frontline. sure there might be a shield here or there, but its not like leona or thresh or braum standing in the middle of a teamfight ccing the carries.

tanks are called tanks for a reason, but the way i see it, tanks should be renamed "free gold" or "slight annoyance" instead.

59 Comments

WooBeeWoo1/14/2015, 7:28:24 AM4 votes

I totally agree. Naut is my favorite and I never play him cause hes totally useless. I don't even have time to set a decent engage up because if I get aa a few times im on my death bed.... ADCs make this game pretty shallow.

DPRKSpy1/14/2015, 11:33:10 AM3 votes

That's a bit abstract, op.

The whole purpose of being the tank in an offensive role is to buy those valuable seconds of being a nuisance to the priorities so that your teams dps champs can go for the kill while you CC the living hell out of whoever it is you're on top of. Obviously you're going to die if you overstay your welcome in the adcs face; the peel for the adc comes (Janna Thresh and you soon find yourself on the receiving end of a barrage of AA. Tanks are reactive champs, their builds are centred around the enemy teams main sources of damage.

The intrinsic value of the ADC is essentially to be a glass cannon, in that you sacrifice solid defense for massive offensive capabilities. It's the nature of HOW that damage comes out that will define whether or not you get melted. There's two types of ADC I can see: the AA type, and the burst type. Vayne is an AA type, dealing damage through repeated AAs that trigger her W passive; while Ezreal is a bursting ADC, relying more on the damage from skills and damage buffs for individual AAs (like Ezreal with a sheen or Graves with an IE).

Granted, shred items exist, but there are always answers for them. Keep in mind these answers are NOT the end-all to shred items, they merely soften the blow. Randuins is probably the best answer - in most cases - to BOTRK being built. It's innate AS debuff passive combined with the MS slow active is lethal to anyone that chooses to AA you. But obviously again, it doesn't make you invincible, just more of a nuisance/threat to enemy ADC. As to why a tank would have 4000 hp outside of being Mundo (who isn't really a tank in the classical sense either), you're just inviting people to get HP shred to answer you. In regards to LW: without it, ADC would be useless as every champ in every role would stack armor to make ADC useless. It's necessary to the gameplay of LoL for it to exist.

My point is that the tank cannot do it alone, your items and your play help contribute to the overall success of your team. Being a tank means you value teamwork over the individual skill of a player (not that that's not important either) - your MO of the game. If it means sacrificing yourself to buy your carries precious seconds of survival in a fight, then you've accomplished what tanks do. So yeah, as a tank, you're going to have to throw yourself right in the middle of it, eating sheen procs and AOE all day. But that's what we Shen do. So don't build more armor or more hp, as ofc LW and BOTRK will just destroy you, instead opt for option C: Play smarter

Toru Itai1/14/2015, 9:59:26 PM3 votes

it's not about the tank getting killed, it's about te tank dieing in 5 seconds instead of 10

Nissasah1/14/2015, 9:55:25 AM1 votes

Sure, some tanks might be a bit weak now but in your maths your forgetting a lot of factors. First you're not counting in armor, which is a really big factor. Second, most tanks would have Randuin's Omen which slows the attack speed. Third, far from all adcs have that attack speed you wrote down (Think Corki, Lucian, Ezreal). Realisticly an adc wont attack according to 100% of their attackspeed, it's a very scenario to scenario but I'd guess average would be around maybe 70-80% in teamfights (Could be very wrong though, so don't take this for granted). Just some food for thought.