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I don't think tanks are inherently less tanky atm, but they opt out of tank runes to get early power

Bern·7/27/2018, 10:35:56 PM·1 votes·624 views

They'll avoid aftershock in favor of runes better for laning and skirmishing (e.g: comet in lane on cho, fleet in jg on sejuani), which makes them squishier. If they took the designated tank options, they'd probably do fine at tanking.

A large part of the issue is that unlike the old bottom-up mastery system, where your weaker mastery choices locked you into a keystone, the new rune system is top-down: you don't need to invest 20 mastery points in a bad tree for a tank before you can access comet. Furthermore, you lose a lot less going resolve secondary than you did going 21 offense/9 defense, since investing in more offense oriented runes isn't nearly as bad as investing in the offense tree used to be. You give up a lot less in the way of tank stats than you used to. (Hell, sometimes you still get really nice tank stats from non-Resolve trees -- Legend: Tenacity, anyone?) As a result, tanks are less tanky because they can opt into early power without totally crippling themselves. They're still way worse at being tanks, but they're less abusable in lane. This means they don't scale half as well as tanks as intended.

Arguably, another part of the problem is how much of a tank's tankiness is frontloaded into aftershock. Instead of a smooth tanking curve, you're unkillable for 2.5 seconds and then your ability to tank drops off like a rock. It also makes health significantly more valuable and lowers the relative value of armor and MR, skewing tank item purchases and power.

tl;dr: runes are fucking up how tanky a tank is because tanks are opting out of tankiness, and aftershock frontloads tankiness

2 Comments

MrFawknSunshine7/27/2018, 10:42:47 PM2 votes

aftershock is only effective if you can cc the enemy and proc it during a fight. for the enemy its really easy to walk away from the damage it might give.

and its cool down is 35secs which is fairly long. its not great in lane. it can be useful in team fight situations if you are engaging alot. but grasp gives u a combat stat in lane that gives you perm HP for using it which is up every 4 seconds.

the issues isnt the keystone not providing tankyness the issues is resolve being only a bonus of 135 hp that starts off at 15 hp lvl 1, and the fact that you cant get any bonus armor or mr til at 10 mins in game from conditioning. typically for a tank they are being really bullied early by the brusiers running conqueror cuz 15 hp and no extra armor or mr before 10 mins is less impact-full in lane as compared to conqueror which not only gives bonus ad scaling but converts 20% of damage to true damage so getting armor or mr dont even matter.

Khristophoros7/27/2018, 11:01:10 PM2 votes

Aftershock has a pretty bad uptime compared to offensive runes. You can't consistently trade against a bruiser in a solo lane as a tank. They will abuse the long downtime of your Aftershock rune. You'd have to have something on your kit that allows you to at least go even on trades without relying on Aftershock.