Balancing Tanks around being only CC/Lockdown bots is a terrible idea and here's why.

Riot's recent tank rework was designed to push tanks, primarily Vanguards, away from being champions with a big moment of satisfaction followed up with some mediocre but still noticable damage, and instead push them into CC/Lockdown bots that deal no damage. This idea that tanks should only have CC and durability and shouldn't have good damage is a nice idea in paper, but in practice, it turns out to be pretty shitty. Here's why.

Tell me, what is it that you need to have in order to trade with opponents in the toplane? It's damage. Every toplaner needs to deal some kind of damage to be viable. What about the Jungle? Well tanks needs to be able to clear, which in turn requires them to deal damage. Tanks should also be able to bring damage to ganks. Without it they would be outclassed by Junglers like Elise or Rek'sai who on top of dealing a ton of damage happen to have a solid CC. In other words, the ability for a tank to deal any kind of substantial damage is more important than giving the tank 2 extra CC's. This is exactly what happened to every tank in the tank rework. If you remember Zac and Maokai on release, they were both hot piles of garbage, at least as tanks. Zac had terrible damage while Maokai was literally only viable as an AP support. Sejuani was hot garbage on PBE, but riot caught that and gave her MORE DAMAGE so that she could clear and that ended up breaking her. Same thing happened to Zac. They buffed him by giving him even more CC as well as increasing the bases on his abilities, so now he did comparable damage to before while having twice the CC and an ultimate that allows him to put the entire enemy team into his own team.

Now let's take a few examples of tanks that have been around in the past and compare them to tanks that have been designed recently so we can compare their kits. I'm going to be pulling out champions that have been strong or overpowered in the past, and talking about how much damage and CC they have as well as their satisfaction levels. : Hits like a truck, but has incredibly conditional crowd controls. Her E stun requires her to hit a wall, her W stun needs an enemy to dash into it, which is incredibly situational, and her ult is an ultimate ability which is a pretty limited knockup that also makes the enemies untargetable, and most of the time you are going to be using it as a knockback. Playing her well can be pretty fun as you are going to hit enemies super-hard and knocking multiple fed enemies away from your carries with your R is fun as fuck. : His passive hits like a truck, and all of his spells have respectable bases which are nothing to scoff at. His only hard CC's are in his Q which is heavily delayed and telegraphed and his R which is heavily delayed and telegraphed unless he uses it at point blank in which case the CC is weaker. Not that all of Sion's CC is AOE, perfect for a Vanguard who wants to initiate fights and stun as many people as possible. This also leads to him being really fun to play. Landing a huge 4/5 man ult/Q feels really good and keeps you coming back for more. : His dueling potential is really good thanks to the damage on his Q, making him one of the most painful tanks. He only brings 1 hard CC, which is the taunt on his dash as well. He does have shielding and utility however, but he is far from any kind of lockup tank. His kit actually reminds me a lot of bruisers and skirmishers in the toplane. He is decent at dueling and spends most of his time splitting, meaning that players from those kinds of champions would enjoy Shen. : I'm going to be brief on this one. Amumu's kit is fairly boring. He Q's in, using his only hard CC other than his ultimate, then he runs around the enemy team pressing E. But his R is still fun to use and can have a bunch of impact in a game. Its just that after he blows his ultimate he loses a lot of satisfaction : Same as Amumu but more Rock Solid. : This one is an exception. He brings a ton of hard CC's to the table but he still has some damage from his bases. However the reason why he's supposed to be picked over other champions, or his niche, is that he has so many hard CC's and his a massive lockdown threat. On the other hand, he ends up being very difficult to balance, as he often tip-toes on being garbage or overpowered. He's very rarely been just a decent, balanced pick. However, he does have the AOE from his ultimate, which leads to big high moments in his kit. Also catching enemies out with a perfect hook is always fun in the same way that landing that perfect Thresh or Blitz hook feels fun. (Its also notable to say that his meta-role has been support several times. CC heavy, but low damage kits like him are prone to be taken support)

Now let's see some of the tanks that have been designed with Riot's new tank design philosophy. : When her damage was initially removed on the PBE, she became so bad that she couldn't even clear properly. This prompted Riot to buff her early damage on her W which made her into a clearing monster and broke her hard. She needs to do damage to be reliable but her actual damage doesn't really feel all that satisfying. All of her damage is frontloaded onto procing her E which wasn't even that satisfying in the first place, and it makes the rest of her kit suffer as a result. Also note that she has no AOE hard CC on her kit whatsoever. Instead, she has a massive lockdown combo by combining her E stun with her R which stuns a target for a pretty large amount of time. Her playability suffers because of this. Most Sej mains say that her rework has made her feel really clunky, and that she just isn't satisfying to play at all anymore. She really doesn't have a huge high moment anymore unlike the old Sej. : Riot replaced Zac's Q, which was a reliable slow and damage spell, into a riot/displacement spell that did minimal damage. The damage from his ult was also nerfed heavily since he no longer gets the three bounces. The CC on his ultimate has remained relatively the same, although it has lost its reliability in exchange for more control over where it can be placed. Because of all these changes, Riot also decided to halve the duration of the stun on his E in half. This caused Zac to be come virtually unplayable. His clear was garbage, he was telegraphed and did barely any damage and he lacked the CC to be good. So riot buffed the bases on his Q which gave him his damage back while also bringing back the knockup duration on his E. These changes broke him as his rework was essentially a big buff to his kit, retaining his damage while also giving him double the CC. Despite this, most Zac mains don't like this new rework because he's much less fun and chaotic than he used to be, and a lot of that comes from his R. His old R used to be this crazy disruption ability that scattered enemies everywhere causing panic and confusion from the enemy team and fun for the Zac. The new ultimate feels much more contained and tame in comparison. It's just less fun as a spell. : What were they thinking? Riot removed the damage on his Q and nerfed his W, and then frontloaded a ton of damage on his saplings? They also gave him a new R which is kinda cool but they still didn't fix some of the biggest problems that this champ had. Not to mention that since they removed the damage on half his kit, he literally became only viable as an AP Support which primarily used the only good part of his kit, the saplings. Of course they nerfed support Maokai and they reverted the nerfs to the rest of his kit, and he's recently become a monster tank again. His kit is really simplistic and basic with not much nuance other than sapling and ult placement. He just W/Q's you and then saplings you and maybe uses his R for more lockdown, but he's still Maokai. Old Maokai wasn't exactly the pinnacle of enticing gameplay and new Maokai doesn't change that, other than maybe oneshotting somebody with 10 saplings in a brush. : His kit is actually pretty fun, but that's because he's overloaded as fuck. The deal with this guy is that Riot wanted him to be a tank that actually deals damage like a mage, and possibly even one that builds a bit of AP. So they decided to load his kit with 3 hard CC's and also incredible bases on his Q and passive, while also giving him damage mitigation on his ult and W, and a really good dash on his E. Because of this, he's really hard to balance. Why pick any other tank when you can play the Azir of tanks, Galio! Despite that, he's actually pretty fun. Landing a 5 man ult and following that up with a 5 man W feels good, and blowing up squishies with your QEAutoW combo feels good.

So what did we learn?

• AOE CC tends to feel good to play
• Champions with a load of CC's but no damage tend to be difficult to damage and are less fun to play
• Being able to fight and duel enemies feels good as well and can work on kits for Wardens who don't need to have as much CC.
• Wardens in general don't need to have much CC unless they are being played as support.
• Big Hard engage ultimates feel good, but they aren't enough to carry a kit in satisfaction levels seeing as how they take up so much of the champions power-budget. They are also difficult to balance since they are easily countered. Simply spread your team out and now its going to be much more difficult to land these big ultimates.

With this knowledge in mind, I think that Riot should stop trying to push Vanguards into CC bots and instead push them back into their old design of having a few big hard CC spells at first, and then dealing a sizable, but not massive, amount of damage, either sustained or burst. However, these designs should not mirror the designs of old Vanguards like Malphite or Amumu. Instead, we should look more towards Sion as a model to base future tanks off of. Having the CC being spread throughout the kit or on a basic ability as opposed to having it be on the ultimate, and instead having the ultimate be a means to achieve getting the perfect usage of said hard CC. After they get their big CC at the start of a fight, their damage patterns should actually mirror those of Juggernauts or other fighters, just with less damage of course. Vanguards should be proactively trying to get their damage off in fights as opposed to passively dealing damage around them. Perhaps giving a tank an auto-attack reset might not be a bad idea? As for Wardens, I feel like Riot's been doing fine on them. Just don't make them really overloaded and either choose to give them good damage or good cc, not both (hi .)

Before I end this, there's one item that I want to mention. Despite what I've just said, I think that is actually a good idea for an item. Trading out damage for more survivability if perfectly fine in a tanks kit but I feel like there needs to be some modifications to this item. Right now, there is not enough of a reason to not buy this item. I think that this item should be a niche items for tanks who want to trade out their ability to do damage for more survivability so that they can set up their CC more easily. But right now, there's not enough of a trade-off on this item, and as a result, this items been core on every tank, as well as being bought on divers that shouldn't even be getting the item. I think that one of two things needs to happen with this item.

1. The damage reduction needs to be brought up to 90% so that you're really giving up damage for the active on this item.
2. The active needs to automatically proc at the start of a fight since that's generally where a tank will want to use this item so that they absorb the initial burst of damage that's going to come their way. They do end up losing the initial damage that they would have dealt from the initiation however, since this item has already been procced. As for divers that want to buy this item, they will lose 60% of the damage on their primary burst combo, which is likely something that those divers don't want to have happen.

#TL;DR A champion with terrible damage that only brings CC and utility to the table is what we call a support, not a tank. Tanks should feel more like updated, modernized version of the tanks of days gone as opposed to CC filled damageless husks of champions that are difficult to balance and also unfun to play.

Edit: Just to clarify, Tanks should not be doing carry levels of damage. Far from it in fact. The amount of damage tanks are doing now after buffs to their kits is about where they should be. I think that I could have worded and written this post because because its actually more about the CC creep being injected into tank kits because of the notion of them dealing less damage when in reality they still need to do some kind of damage to succeed in any role outside of support. This led to the tank update where almost every champion updated was garbage initially then got their damage buffed back to the levels of a standard tank, which broke them since they now had way more cc of said standard tanks. Same goes for Galio. I was asking more for a return to tank designs of old when they had less cc but more impactful cc and abilities. Of course with more modernization because 8 different colored s running around does not make for an interesting class.