Stonewall recently made a video about the decreasing effectiveness of tanks in soloqueue and competitive play.
I figure this thread could discuss whether pure tanks are dying. While it's important to classify what a tank or pure tank is, it's also a large distraction from the bigger discussion and as many of us have seen, usually doesn't end well. Stonewall touches on this.
Stonewall says tanks are champions that can have natural tankiness in their kits and their stats. Tanks rely on their teammates in some way either because they have low damage or their damage is situational.
So
Is the pure tank dying?
If so why? Itemization changes? Shifts in the meta with new champions? Buffs and nerfs? New map?
Is the tank a bad role since they often don't get the recognition for their contributions? (slower farming => lower cs => less gold, and lower damage => less kills => lower kill count)
On February 04 2015 04:35 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: The the discussion will naturally border on bruiser/tank definitions, and I'm fine with that. Within reason, feel free to discuss the topic here.
Part of that is just how you have over a hundred different champions striving to be unique though.
I'd love to be able to say that tanks just initiate fights, but then there's Garen who often relies on a mid or jungler to catch someone. I'd love to say that a tank can't burst anyone down alone without offensive items, but then again, there's Garen with sunfire cape. Categorizations make things a lot simpler to understand but champions are so complex they don't even fit on a continuum ranging from tank to dps. There's differences in playstyles and itemization that can make a champion a tank or a bruiser.
Eg a volibear with wits end and triforce + 2 tanky items might have more damage than a volibear with 4 tanky items. The volibear with the damage items might be able to quickly kill a carry in a 1v1, but the volibear with just tanky stats might not be able to do it quickly meaning the ADC can often escape. Their playstyles are different. The Volibear with damage items can kill towers and push waves faster, but the volibear with full tank items can flash initiate a fight, take the full Syndra combo, and not die so he can get off a few empowered auto attacks and another rotation of spells if the fight drags on.
I do see fewer teamcomps in soloqueue where someone's able to dive a 5 man to initate a fight and live, because everyone wants one offensive item now whether it's Maw or Brutalizer or Triforce and is willing to invest several thousand gold into it.
And these days I'm not sure if it's even worthwhile to just build fully tanky items. Everyone's building black cleaver on Garen and Iiceborned gauntlet + Abyssal Scepter on Malphite. Is that really better than getting a Thornmail on garen, or a Randuins and Banshees on Malphite? http://www.probuilds.net/champions/Malphite http://www.lolking.net/champions/malphite
What happened to multiplicative scaling of (armor and hp) or (mr and hp)?
I haven't watched the video yet but I did check out the comments on the reddit thread earlier. Going to go on a quick rant A few things from that thread -90% of the posts were saying "X champ is viable but X champ is a bruiser not a tank" -Some laughable definitions like "blitzcrank is a fighter/tank" (he's clearly a fucking hooking support) -People have no idea what a tank is supposed to do in teamfights and still have the WoW conception of taunting the enemy boss to take all the damage and protect your team. I read things like "A tank is the biggest counter to assassins because he protects the team" Really? Good luck defending anyone with your taric e or leona Q. -Lots of people calling gnar a tank becuse he doesnt need to build damage to rapestroy everything. Yeah gnar is fucking every role because he's broken -Most of the people immediately look to teamfights and not at the fact that they have trouble in jungle because of poor skirmishing mobility and slow clear, and in top because of getting out dueled by bruisers and outpoked by ranged champions.
I saw some laughable posts of people listing all the "pure tanks" People like malphite and leona were listed and the definition went "Their main job is to initiate and then defend their back line" Really? Malphites movement leeching long range Q Is what you need to stop that Zed? An attack speed slow with a short radius is going to help against a Fizz? Having 40% more armour and AD is going to defend your graves from riven? They were like "I used to love to play malphite and defend my back line" Hint: Malphites kit is designed to fucking knock their shit up and then take a massive dump on their ADC. Leona has probably the worst ADC saving tools of any played support in the game. The reason she has a hard gapcloser, melee stun, and a tankiness boost is so you can sit on someone squishy and your passive procs with whoever else is diving them.
YOU DONT NEED TO BUILD TANK ITEMS TO KEEP THE SQUISHIEST MEMBER OF YOUR TEAM ALIVE. If he is squishier than you and does more damage than you and you are both in range you will never be the target There is a name for champions who mainly protect the carries of the team and build items to help do that. They are called FUCKING SUPPORT CHAMPIONS. Janna can literally knock back the entire enemy team and heal her own team for 600 each, then post a 300 health shield with a free BT worth of AD on a 6 second cooldown, and still have a huge slow and aoe knockup in the bag. Good luck with your malphite and fucking 20% movement leech, which won't be very useful on somebody right next to you.
The reason you build tanky is so that you can hit you spells and CC on high value targets without dying. The enemies ability to contribute their damage to a fight is reliant on them getting in range and casting their spells without getting CC'd and nuked. In this way an effectively unburstable tank will keep many players from being able to do anything until the manage to kill him.
Yes tanks can punish a diving bruiser. The reason why is because the back lines can't dive in, because you will punish them and everyone will turn and instantly kill them and clean up the bruiser later. The backline stays back and the bruiser dies because he engaged when his team wasn't able to follow up meaningfully. If they just walk in range they will not be able to achieve anything and if they waste their own gapclosers they will be dead in the water while your own adc can jump away to safety until the team is ready to collapse on whoever dived in.
I'll provide a few sample definitions: A bruiser is a form of tank who relies mainly on short range abilities and auto attacks to deal damage. A "pure" tank is a tank who favours (usually long ranged) abilities over auto attacks and favours CC more than damage. I thought of this on the spot but should cover most peoples definitions nicely.
A tank's job in a teamfight is to give his team an advantage by either directly setting up kills via CC or by preventing the enemy carries from being able to participate in the fight long enough that your team wins based on damage. (either by killing or zoning them)
If someone dives your ADC he's attempting to stop them from participating by killing them. If you zone an ADC you are temporarily stopping him from doing anything, but if you don't help your team in any other way and your team loses 4v4 you will be collapsed on. (Usually earlier on, the adc is weaker and you can let him damage you while you do something else, later on, the adc is the most important member of the team and as long as your adc does'nt die you will usually win the fight)
On February 04 2015 04:35 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: The the discussion will naturally border on bruiser/tank definitions, and I'm fine with that. Within reason, feel free to discuss the topic here.
Part of that is just how you have over a hundred different champions striving to be unique though.
I'd love to be able to say that tanks just initiate fights, but then there's Garen who often relies on a mid or jungler to catch someone. I'd love to say that a tank can't burst anyone down alone without offensive items, but then again, there's Garen with sunfire cape. Categorizations make things a lot simpler to understand but champions are so complex they don't even fit on a continuum ranging from tank to dps. There's differences in playstyles and itemization that can make a champion a tank or a bruiser.
Eg a volibear with wits end and triforce + 2 tanky items might have more damage than a volibear with 4 tanky items. The volibear with the damage items might be able to quickly kill a carry in a 1v1, but the volibear with just tanky stats might not be able to do it quickly meaning the ADC can often escape. Their playstyles are different. The Volibear with damage items can kill towers and push waves faster, but the volibear with full tank items can flash initiate a fight, take the full Syndra combo, and not die so he can get off a few empowered auto attacks and another rotation of spells if the fight drags on.
I do see fewer teamcomps in soloqueue where someone's able to dive a 5 man to initate a fight and live, because everyone wants one offensive item now whether it's Maw or Brutalizer or Triforce and is willing to invest several thousand gold into it.
And these days I'm not sure if it's even worthwhile to just build fully tanky items. Everyone's building black cleaver on Garen and Iiceborned gauntlet + Abyssal Scepter on Malphite. Is that really better than getting a Thornmail on garen, or a Randuins and Banshees on Malphite? http://www.probuilds.net/champions/Malphite http://www.lolking.net/champions/malphite
What happened to multiplicative scaling of (armor and hp) or (mr and hp)?
As the absolute authority on garen as well as the only person playing him, and also being a malphite player -NOBODY IS BUILDING BLACK CLEAVER ON GAREN. Anyone who is doesn't know what they are doing. (They probably also rush brutalizer in lane) I very often build thornmail on garen. -Abyssal is a niche pick on malphite, randuins is a much more important item. Abyssal is usually played to improve your personal burst not to help your team. But if you're playing malphite with full spellpen you kind of have to go abyssal. Since double AP comps are popular now you want it a lot more. Iceborn is good because it adds some sustained damage if you can't burst someone. Same with sunfire. Banshees isn't a tank item. Banshees is an item that is only good when a single spell is a big threat to you. How you build is very dependent on the enemy team. You can often forego any damage items and go randuins/sunfire/thornmail on garen and do decent damage. You also have games were you go sunfire/hexdrinker/LW as your first items all of which contribute to your damage. Similarly on malphite, sometimes stacking armour is enough, othertimes your burst is important. Garen fits more under my bruiser definition of a tank (though I still see them as tanks) and malphite more as a "tank" tank
The reason why people don't go full tank, is because if you run in and survive and get away, it doesn't matter if you don't achieve anything meaningful. ADCs have heal. Supports have mikaels and tons of other shit. No damage items won't let you kill anyone. If you instead wait for a good opportunity to jump in so you won't insta die, then you can actually kill someone. In a situation where you can always jump in either you're too fed and they can't do anything or you can't achieve anything and it doesn't matter. There's also multiplicative scaling of DPS and HP. If you have 2x DPS and 2x HP you have a 4x strength in a fight (you take 2x longer to kill and kill in 1/2 time) if you ave 3x dps and 1x hp you have a 3x strength in a fight (you take 1x longer to kill and kill in 1/3 time) this is why adcs tend to lose to bruisers in fights. (also a lot of tanks if they have enough burst) unless of course they can kite forever but I mean in a face to face war It's much harder to go from 2x DPS to 4x DPS than it is to go from 1x HP to 2x HP. A balance is more effective.
EDIT: Looking at that probuilds thing people are also building warmogs, which is terrible on garen because he has so much regen anyway. LW should be like the 3rd or 4th top item. Looks like fed garens are more likely to finish BC and Warmogs too so you'd expect winrates to be higher but it looks like sunfire has a super high winrate when its also the most popular (it's by far the most important garen item but I won't talk much about it here)# I'd imagine people not getting sunfire are either feeding a lot or bad in general so they lose more i guess
-Most of the people immediately look to teamfights and not at the fact that they have trouble in jungle because of poor skirmishing mobility and slow clear, and in top because of getting out dueled by bruisers and outpoked by ranged champions.
They were like "I used to love to play malphite and defend my back line" Hint: Malphites kit is designed to fucking knock their shit up and then take a massive dump on their ADC. Leona has probably the worst ADC saving tools of any played support in the game. The reason she has a hard gapcloser, melee stun, and a tankiness boost is so you can sit on someone squishy and your passive procs with whoever else is diving them.
YOU DONT NEED TO BUILD TANK ITEMS TO KEEP THE SQUISHIEST MEMBER OF YOUR TEAM ALIVE.
There is a name for champions who mainly protect the carries of the team and build items to help do that. They are called FUCKING SUPPORT CHAMPIONS. Janna can literally knock back the entire enemy team and heal her own team for 600 each, then post a 300 health shield with a free BT worth of AD on a 6 second cooldown, and still have a huge slow and aoe knockup in the bag. Good luck with your malphite and fucking 20% movement leech, which won't be very useful on somebody right next to you.
As the absolute authority on garen as well as the only person playing him, and also being a malphite player -NOBODY IS BUILDING BLACK CLEAVER ON GAREN. Anyone who is doesn't know what they are doing. (They probably also rush brutalizer in lane) I very often build thornmail on garen. -Abyssal is a niche pick on malphite, randuins is a much more important item. Abyssal is usually played to improve your personal burst not to help your team.
A few very good points here. I picked out a few that I definitely agree with.
People are definitely building Garen wtih early brutalizers. It's probably their earliest item on probuilds, and then rather than sell brutalizer they upgrade it to cleaver when convenient to get some armor reduction on the spin.
And on almost all the malphite builds I looked at, people didn't get a Randuins, probably because they thought they were tanky enough or wanted more damage on their rotations.
If you're a bruiser build J4 (hydra lw) and the enemy team has a full tank Malphite, I'd say you do a better job cc'ing as J4 if you just Ult the enemy carries in place and then EQ out compared to the malphite that sticks to your team taking more damage than his team is able to return.
Win rates for items were some of the dumbest stats available in dota. For instance every hero's first item often had a lower win rate than their last because if they got to 6 items then they probably were stomping. The team with Aegis or Rapier or gem had like a 97-99.9% win rate, because who loses while carrying rapier?
Meanwhile wards and boots 1 had low win rates. Guess we shouldn't buy wards or boots.
-Most of the people immediately look to teamfights and not at the fact that they have trouble in jungle because of poor skirmishing mobility and slow clear, and in top because of getting out dueled by bruisers and outpoked by ranged champions.
They were like "I used to love to play malphite and defend my back line" Hint: Malphites kit is designed to fucking knock their shit up and then take a massive dump on their ADC. Leona has probably the worst ADC saving tools of any played support in the game. The reason she has a hard gapcloser, melee stun, and a tankiness boost is so you can sit on someone squishy and your passive procs with whoever else is diving them.
YOU DONT NEED TO BUILD TANK ITEMS TO KEEP THE SQUISHIEST MEMBER OF YOUR TEAM ALIVE.
There is a name for champions who mainly protect the carries of the team and build items to help do that. They are called FUCKING SUPPORT CHAMPIONS. Janna can literally knock back the entire enemy team and heal her own team for 600 each, then post a 300 health shield with a free BT worth of AD on a 6 second cooldown, and still have a huge slow and aoe knockup in the bag. Good luck with your malphite and fucking 20% movement leech, which won't be very useful on somebody right next to you.
As the absolute authority on garen as well as the only person playing him, and also being a malphite player -NOBODY IS BUILDING BLACK CLEAVER ON GAREN. Anyone who is doesn't know what they are doing. (They probably also rush brutalizer in lane) I very often build thornmail on garen. -Abyssal is a niche pick on malphite, randuins is a much more important item. Abyssal is usually played to improve your personal burst not to help your team.
A few very good points here. I picked out a few that I definitely agree with.
People are definitely building Garen wtih early brutalizers. It's probably their earliest item on probuilds, and then rather than sell brutalizer they upgrade it to cleaver when convenient to get some armor reduction on the spin.
And on almost all the malphite builds I looked at, people didn't get a Randuins, probably because they thought they were tanky enough or wanted more damage on their rotations.
If you're a bruiser build J4 (hydra lw) and the enemy team has a full tank Malphite, I'd say you do a better job cc'ing as J4 if you just Ult the enemy carries in place and then EQ out compared to the malphite that sticks to your team taking more damage than his team is able to return.
I'm actually probably wrong about the randuins because you get Sunfire/FH a lot for armour, and people are playing lots of 2x AP. It's just that in soloq theres lots of all AD comps with riven and zed and yasuo being popular that you can pick malphite and get sunfire/fh/randuins/lw and get a free win. Funny you mention jarvan. I tend to say people build too tanky on jarvan and too damage oriented on renekton. I claim that a jarvan who ults and then EQs out is a waste of space unless you know for sure that the people inside can't get out, and even then you should stayin with them since you want to focus them or EQ after to chase
If malphite is taking more damage than his team is able to return it's either a bad engage or you went too deep. If j4 literally uses all his abilities just to make a jarvan wall he basically has done nothing but the jarvan wal in that fight so your team has to win 4v5 based on that.
It's okay if you can drop a rumble ult or something in there but it sucks usually
brutalizer garen is shitty nearly all the time. You want hexdrinker ot upgraded boots with speed against ranged/ap champs and sunfire against melee. Unless you are stomping a melee AD champion SUPER hard that you don't need any defense stats.
What's dumb about this conversation to me is I feel like "Tank" and "Bruiser" often overlap, and "Bruiser" and "Fighter" often overlap. Riot doesn't even use the word bruiser in their own categorizations.
In general, I think the idea of a "tank" in League is a champion who builds defensive items, and also for some reason makes you attack them despite having a lot of defense.
They can either do that by also doing a lot of damage, like a Jax or a Nasus, meaning they can just run at you and if you don't attack them they will kill you.
Or they can do that by also having so much CC that if you don't get rid of them you won't be able to attack anybody else. I'd say Sejuani and Rammus and Nautilus kinda fall in that category, but Sejuani and Rammus have the ability to do damage by building defensive stats, so they're also kind of the first category anyway.
I agree with Teut that I don't think of a "tank" as back line defense, I think of a tank as somebody who gets into their back line and then stays there as long as possible.
In general it just seems like a dumb conversation. Tanks are obviously not dead. They've just moved from being in the jungle in season 2 to being top lane in season 5, and it's taken Stonewall 3 years to figure that out.
The only tank jungles that have survived are ones who have damage that scales off of defensive stats so that they can clear, which junglers are actually expected to do now, unlike in season 2. There's a reason why Alistar/Malphite jungle is bad, and that's because it is bad.
He is basically a typical "but tanks worked in rpg/mmo I want it to work here too" without thinking about how the game works and what every role is required to bring.Also how is braum not mentioned?He is literally all he described and he is pretty good and a top tier pick.Sure he is support but it is exactly what he described lol.
Yeah spinesheath used to troll everyone definition of a tank and claim that janna is a tank based on the criteria people were agreeing with (had some sketchy definitions of good engage based on jannas CC and flash ult I think though)
Stonewall just likes playing tanks but sucks at them and whines that they arent viable tldr braum is a support and supports are teh boring qqqq jungle or afk
On February 04 2015 06:04 Ketara wrote: In general it just seems like a dumb conversation. Tanks are obviously not dead. They've just moved from being in the jungle in season 2 to being top lane in season 5, and it's taken Stonewall 3 years to figure that out.
The only tank jungles that have survived are ones who have damage that scales off of defensive stats so that they can clear, which junglers are actually expected to do now, unlike in season 2. There's a reason why Alistar/Malphite jungle is bad, and that's because it is bad.
Yeah, that makes some sense. Another factor is that Sejuani and Rammus can't lane. Aside from a handful of soloqueue heroes doing diamond mid AP Sejuani and top lane Rammus, everyone agrees they belong in the jungle so they've been balanced for the jungle. Sejuani's clears are slow but they don't fall off too much compared to other tanks like Malphite.
On February 04 2015 06:30 Ketara wrote: Braum is just about literally the only champion in the game who can tank damage in the classic RPG/MMO sense.
Yasuo's wall can also tank damage then. Yasuo confirmed tank :D
I'm not sure on the damage scaling with offense part Slayer. I'm fairly certain it's not true with Thornmail, I always saw building damage as a way to clear faster, lifesteal back for some sustain between fights, and a way to assassinate squishier targets that used multiplicative scaling, before they could abuse it on you. I guess I'm saying that for the most part a champion that builds full tank can probably outduel the same champion who went with some offensive items, but I can't test it since LoL doesn't have a sandbox mode. Like full tank Garen would probably beat a Garen that had mostly tank items and maw + last whisper if they both used standard builds.
You can do some simple calculations I did these way back in starcraft a balance of dps hp always beats skewing towards one of the other
the scaling they have together beats the self scaling unless maybe you have something retarded like crit and even then i dont think its enoguh its not about burst at all id put my money on the LW maw garen any day
That video was largely a waste of time. It didn't discuss anything that valuable, the bulk of the time was splitting hairs over whether or not x champion was a tank.
Tankier champions have probably become less valuable over time, but its because of the removal of Force of Nature, the addition of BotRK, the addition of Liandries, building % max health damage into a ton of newer kits (Gnar, Sion, Sejuani, etc), changing the penetration formulas, Randuins getting significantly weakened, and its usually not anything inherent to their kits. Also new champions being introduced that are obnoxious for long periods of time like Rengar, Khazix, and Yasuo before being toned down.
Even in season 2's hey day a lot of tankier champions would get Atma's Impaler and sometimes a Triforce. I feel like he's talking about some mystical creature that doesn't exist or is Taric.
The video is pretty inconsistent and his thoughts are partially formed. He sets up a definition of what a tank should be. High defensive stats, with good cc, and high damage that's unreliable. Then he says the last tank in the meta was Zac. Need I explain why that's inconsistent and simply wrong?
I really dislike hearing tanks have bad itemization when their itemization is the best. If a damage dealer wants 15 magic pen, it costs 1100 gold. Or 775 combined cost. If a tank wants magic resist it costs 500 gold for 25 mr. What tank/bruiser players want are unkillable champs that can 100-0 anyone in the game. They want to break the game, they don't want actually balance when you hear them moan about bad itemization.
On February 04 2015 06:30 Ketara wrote: Braum is just about literally the only champion in the game who can tank damage in the classic RPG/MMO sense.
If you want to ignore taunts, sure. For example, Shen's taunt cuts 50% of taunted autos against him.
I really think taunt are super underrepresented in this game as a form of CC, with only Shen, Rammus, and Galio possessing them. Oh look, 3 champions people agree at tanks.
Because they were designed and tanks and taunts put into their kit for that reason Taunt is a weaker version of a stun but it's really not much weaker at all, on a tank its effectively just a stun
EPT
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