The role of Tanks and Fighters in the game

Midnight Link·11/10/2014, 12:52:39 AM·2 votes·752 views

There's always been a lot of discussion about the place of Tanks in the game, because some argue that there's no clear difference between a Tank and a Fighter, therefore there's no reason to have both in the game.

Currently this is true, because a Tank is just a Fighter with less dmg and a bit more CC, basically a different kind of Fighter... With the current design Tanks can never be healthy or balanced since whenever a tank is viable, considering that he doesn't scale with any offensive statistics he just builds defense and this makes everyone feel sad, he feels bad because he is just a pile of defensive statistics unable to do anything (the fighters have almost as much CC as him but they deal a lot more dmg) as well as the opponents because they feel like there's nothing they can do to break someone so tanky.

I have an idea to separate Tanks from fighters and make em shine on their own, so a team can chose to pick a Tank over a Fighter if the situation demands it, but more importantly, to bring diversity to campions by increasing the strong points a class. The idea is to do the same with Tanks that was done to Supports last season: make it so that a Tank's utility scales with an offensive statistic. This approach will mean that a Tank will need to balance his offensive and defensive buys (just like a Fighter) and the more offensive they go, the riskyer it gets, but the higher the reward will be as well. This means that a Tank will have a real say in how much tanky he needs to get according to the situation without just giving em damage and making em the same as Fighters. Let's make an example just to clarify (this example was created just to explain my thought process, this is by no means a suggestion as to how the champ should be reworked), Shen could have his e taunt duration increased based on his AP, his ult could teleport him to his ally faster scaling with AP, the heal from his q to his allies could also scale with AP, he could even have a slow on his passive that increases with AP as well.

What do you guys think?

8 Comments

Old Man Teeto11/10/2014, 1:04:01 AM1 votes

Tank: Alistar Bruiser: Olaf

The problem is that they share itemization, if Olaf can build full tank and kill a carry while tanking a teams worth of damage he's oppressive.

If Alistar can build damage and kill a carry while tanking a teams worth of damage he's oppressive.

Both of these have happened at various times, Riot prefers characters that just "die" when caught even if they're oppressive in other ways it means a "team" can supposedly overcome those champions. (See every Assassin/Duelist)

While I doubt Riot will ever solve this conundrum as without doing large scale changes keeping the "five" roles viable is impossible.

Bruiser (Olaf, Trundle, Renekton) Tank (Alistar, Leona, Nautilus) Assassin (Fizz, Zed) AP Utility (Orianna, Lulu, Janna) Sustained Damage (ADC, Karthus, Cassio etc)

Note: Many champions do 2 or more of these roles. IE: Yasuo is both an Assassin and Sustained Damage

AloneInTheCrowd11/10/2014, 1:13:38 AM1 votes

tower dive .

Done2511/10/2014, 2:58:58 AM1 votes

Most people can't even tell the difference between fighters and tanks. That in and of itself should send up a huge red flag to Riot.

ThePurpleKnight11/10/2014, 3:47:23 AM1 votes

Wtf they aren't very alike, what is peoples problem, not all durability is the same despite the items pretty much always being the same.

Tanks are champions like Leona, and Rammus who have abilities to increase durability most of the time, usually on W.

Fighters are more like Skarner or Riven, champions that should have durability in their build, but don't naturally come with very much, usually having a shield or built in sustain at best.