What is a tank and what is their job?
A tank (also known as a meat shield) is a style of character in gaming, often associated with a character class. A common convention in real-time strategy games, role-playing games, fighting games, multiplayer online battle arenas and MUDs, tanks redirect enemy attacks or attention toward themselves in order to protect other characters or units. Since this role often requires them to suffer large amounts of damage, they rely on large amounts of vitality or armor, healing by other party members, evasiveness and misdirection, or self regeneration.
Tanks are often represented as large or heavily armored.
Worst offender in GOH of a *misrepresented tank*
(To give an idea of what we are talking about)
First Order Stormtrooper
Dark Side
Classes: First Order, Human, Tank
Description: First Order tank that uses Advantage to disrupt enemies.
Level 7
Hindering Shot - Deal Physical damage to target enemy with a 45% chance to inflict Speed Down for 1 turn. This chance is doubled if First Order Stormtrooper has Advantage.
Level 7
The Order Relentless - First Order Stormtrooper gains Advantage and Defense Up for 3 turns with a 25% chance to gain 40% Turn Meter.
Level 6
Return Fire - First Order Stormtrooper has 60% Counter Chance.
Pros:
- Has a good health pool, on a level expected by a good tank
- Good counter chance, that makes it even more interesting when considering the damage output of his attack
- Great synergy with First Order, specially when together of Phasma and TIE Pilot
– Speed down chance on basic attack
Cons:
- Doesn’t Taunt nor have any specific party ability for mitigating/protecting damage
- Bellow par farming for shards
- Speed is very low
A Simple yet powerful change might be needed?
It is time we start to see diverse teams over the current meta and tanks and heals to move up in arena usage.
This should be looked at for all tanks to have some form of team defense.
- Taunts.
- redirection i.e Tank takes 60% of damage dealt to team to himself at 40% damage. Or tank takes the damage dealt to the next two team members to himself at a reduced rate.
- Protection - the tank shields the team to take 40% less damage with three turns.
- Links - Tank links with two others to take damage for them at a reduce rate for x turns.
- linking with the enemy.
* randomly chosen
* reduces the damage the two linked deal
* Everytime the two that they linked with take damage they provide a stacking armor buff to his team.
- Reflect (Jedi/sith) tanks reflect the next two attacks directed at your team to your enemy at 40% less damage.
(This of course means they would first have to address the problem with armor in this game.)
I hope other forum users agree and wish to see tanks and healers stepping up over speed dps teams.
Characters should be reclassified with this change as well to better represent if they are a tank,support,healer or dps.
Thank you for reading
Mofojokers
Whats your opinion on this debate?
Replies
@CG_JohnSalera
Thoughts?
Old ben is more support than tank, Fives and kylo are more attackers than tank. Mace is more attacker than tank.
It would be better if they corrected tank labels and change tank challenge into "Tank and support"
Thanks Turtle , Yes it's time to see them fixed and brought into the front lines ( pun intended ).
Correcting character classes and then fixing what a tank is would be much appreciated by everyone.
Yeah. The best example is that Nightsister Acolyte is healer and she doesn't have healing spells. While Luminara is attacker and she has the best heal in the game.
I have found many examples of this and it can throw people off and even annoy others. Best to see character classes fixed then have true tanks emerge from the ashes.
Just to add RG update has made him a very good tank and I'm very happy to see this and hope to see future fixes.
In other things, FOST cant have: Counter attacks at a 36% chance of triggering an Assist from Phasma, and Taunt at the same time. The reason its soooooo obvious that Im not gonna stop in even discussing this.
I agree in parts with you but with the mechanics of Goh this would help to diverse teams away from speed demons. So using a more classic view of tanks will be very beneficial.
5s i would like to see him reduce damage of his Squadron for x turns. Instead of him been left to last people may be forced to deal with him.
As stated in the top not every tank needs taunt but some way of team defense to classify them as a tank otherwise they need to be reclassified as dps.
Edit: i enjoy discussions so feel free to debate with me and lets see what we come up with.
Lets say a buff/debuff out-of-turn class-based. Im ok with that, just add flavour to the class, but simply stack tanks based in Taunts, no. As far as I know them, every tank in-game has something usefull for its role, but with the speed-meta, the real problem here actually, only taunt has a somehow 100%usefull function. Offensive tanks as Windu and Fives should have more utility in my honest opinion. Right now they are a waste of a slot if you dont sinergize them accurately, in example Fives in a counter team with Dooku and Kylo, Windu in a QGJ lead, etc..
Indeed hence i feel making 5s more of a threat as a tank may see him in more teams.
Diversity in teams makes me happy, i would love to see say a full FO team over the FO team using Poe over Fost.
Edit: my favorite idea of tanks are those that have links i.e the tank links with two others and takes the damage at a reduced rate for x turns.
Yeah i see people doing FO teams with Poe over Fost and it just looks wrong.
The work of an offensive tank is to either deal enough damage to become a primary/secondary target, or to be soooooo annoying that people left you for the last, when your huge health pool and debuffs can decide things in your favor. Also you can have a big health steal and work defense to a draw. There are way more than one strategy for this sub-class, and obviously its way more than 1-button class like taunters are.
Im actually enjoying Windu a lot. Its a great tank, really. Lacking a bit in potency, but somehow a backstabber with great potencial to last to the end, and survive for a long time with just his basic attack and unique. I cant see how dieing in the first round due to taunting could make him better, when he shine in the last one.
@DelphiAuriga
Yeah they can span out but the job of a tank has always been to draw attention away from his team.
For Windu i believe he is completely wrong as i know Windu is a Agile dps using vapaad to dance between Light and dark in perfect balance.
But his abilities and stats misrepresent this and with the buff i see they are dead set on having him as a tank.
He could be a prefect candidate for linking with the enemy.
- randomly chosen
- reduces the damage the two linked deal
- Everytime the two that he linked with take damage he provides a stacking armor buff to his team.
This of course means they would first have to address the problem with armor in this game
The fixed payout times are the worst part of this game and makes it absolutely family-unfriendly.
Yes very odd that Healers are so up there when some tanks like solo have so little.
This last you mention is a mayor trouble to viability of tanks. Its due to a secondary trouble: time limit in Arena.
In my opinion this is the real trouble for defensive teams in the game, the amount is diverted to just one game mode instead of trying to fix the general problem. Also is the same issue creating speed-meta, cause time/turns is everything.
Main thing that placed two tanks in the meta is that thing, namely Poe that is really fast and Royal Guard that has endless turns to taunt. I could see better some sort of turn meter control on their own, so they get a free turn to do their job when an ally needs it, or debuff massively enemies to help allies.
Or simply better: make cannons slow as they should be. Rey and Geonosian Soldier should be the slowest heros in the game just like comparable per-hit heros like Maul, Tano or Ventress are. Making cannons faster than tanks by a full order of magnitude its the worse designing choice I saw in this game. Either buff-up tanks to be on-par, carefully avoiding to buff healers to avoid endless battles, or nerf fast-cannons. Its a joke that Qui Gon Jinn can assist four times in the time a tank can debuff/taunt once.
Indeed as i said the mechanics have made it so.
I want to see other tanks come up to the front lines. With the changes to RG i believe they might be trying to bring all tanks up.
Yeah making choices against tanks should be important and for tanks to useful outside of speed tank poe and auto taunt RG.
Using things like linking and misdirection are useful tools.
+1
Thank you
Mofojokers