So, When Will Riot Actually Make Tanks Viable?

Since patch 8.13 or so, we've all been tormented by games littered with high burst damage and ridiculous amounts of team compositions that simply don't have a hard tank because they can use someone like , or to engage. If you play a tank, you're not going to be doing enough damage for the team to care about you in the slightest and if you do take aggro, instead of dying to one assassin's combo, two will jump on you and effectively one-shot you. Honestly, this is kind of ridiculous, but here comes patch 8.16 to save the day!.. right? Much to all of our dismay, they nerfed a tank (), and only buffed six others ( , , , , and ), leaving all other tanks behind. This is especially a problem with tanks like Ornn, Maokai and Zac who are basically unplayable in all elos due to how neglected they are. I genuinely believe that Ornn in particular is only played at all due to how fun he is, not how useful he is since he's so god awful. But hey, maybe there's a silver lining. They nerfed burst runes!.. right? Sort of, but not really.

• Electrocute, the biggest offender's damage was nerfed by 20-40 and damage ratios were nerfed by .1 AD and .05 AP, which is effectively nothing when you put it in practice. This electrocute damage is one auto attack for most assassins late game and is barely effective early. In fact, the cooldown was reduced by 25-5, meaning it can proc far more often.
• Summon Aery was re-balanced early game to to 5 less damage but provide 5 more shielding to allies. That's actually a nice change to help against level 1 burst damage, but that's only at level one.
• Celerity was nerfed to provide 3.6% less AD and 6% less AP. This is actually nice to prevent high-mobility assassins from one-shotting you.
• Cheap Shot was nerfed to do 7 less damage at level one, which was more of a hit to CC-based tanks that may take domination like Maokai or Ornn than it is for assassins. Most assassins don't have a lot of CC to proc this very often.
• Sudden impact was nerfed to provide 3 less Lethality and 2 less magic penetration. This isn't bad considering it's a must-have for a lot of assassins.
• Scorch's damage was halved, but so was it's cooldown making it a better poke rune rather than a burst rune. Compared to Electrocute, this good change, I think. Generally, I think Riot needs to be a little more active at making ALL tanks tanky (not just six of them and ) and preventing assassins from being able to one-shot anyone. An assassin's job in almost all games is to kill high-priority, squishy targets. These changes didn't make a huge difference in the current burst meta and possibly worsened it with Electrocute changes.