I’ve been thinking a fair bit about player archetypes lately, and that also means that I’ve been thinking about the variants within roles. While it is entirely true that the idea of having three roles for parties was not something that existed in MMORPGs for the entirety of the genre’s history, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that tanks are some sort of recent addition. Tanks have existed in the genre and in RPGs in general for a long time. “Let the big guy get hit instead of the rest of the party” is a pretty comprehensible and predictable idea, after all.
The fun thing is that as soon as players have more than one option for tanking, you wind up getting a lot of different options for what tanks can look like in the first place. So today I want to look at the categories that tanks tend to fall into. Note that these are not exclusive categories; many MMORPGs might have the armored tank also be a healing tank or whatever. These are just broad categories for managing the person who gets hit at the front of the group.
1. Armored tank
Pretty much every MMORPG character is wearing armor. Indeed, almost every tank wears a great deal of armor! That’s not the point here. The armored tank isn’t just someone wearing armor but someone whose entire kit is based around reducing incoming damage as much as possible. It’s often the most obvious or default sort of tank, and it works well at minimizing incoming pain, although the idea is often that single big hits overwhelm your defenses.
2. Dodge tank
By contrast, the point of a dodge tank or avoidance tank is that the best way to survive big hits is to not get hit in the first place. How effective a dodge tank even is will depend on the game, of course, but the idea is still there that only getting hit 10% of the time can sometimes be better than only getting hit for 10% of the damage. The up side is that this can allow for other players to pay less attention to the tank, since by definition you aren’t getting hit much. Down side? Well, when you do get hit…
3. Soak tank
Instead of tanking less damage, why not just have such a huge health pool that any amount of damage you take is functionally irrelevant? That’s the goal behind the soak tank. You may not have the armor of others or the ability to bypass damage altogether, but you have more health and that functionally renders you much harder to kill in the first place. Benefits? Well, you have a huge health pool and are thus hard to kill. Drawbacks? Unless you have tools to make that health pool easier to heal, you require a lot of healer attention.
You may notice that these three form a pretty basic trinity of tank types. Very observant of you! You’re pretty much right.
4. Heal/drain tank
In some games (such as Final Fantasy XIV), this kind of replaces the main thrust of the soak tank; in others it’s a totally separate option. Rather than just having more health and tanking that way, you have either a normal amount of health for a tank or maybe slightly more, but the key is you have a lot of tools to recover health on your own to make up for weaker defenses. This can be really active and neat and allow you to survive through periods on your own, but it also does mean that mistakes in healing render you a lot squishier than others.
5. Stagger/barrier tank
Again, this can arguably take two different forms; in some games you have tanks that erect barriers to absorb damage, in others they take damage but slowly heal some of it back or have some of it offloaded up-front. In all cases, the main idea is that you’re extending your health by specifically absorbing some damage and finding a way to turn that absorbed damage to your advantage. It’s a rather technical thing, but it can often make your gameplay feel far more tactical as you try to measure out when big damage spikes are incoming.
6. “Balance” tank
If you’ve got several different tank types already floating around, how do you make a new tank feel distinct? Well, you make a tank that does everything in small amounts. Less armored than the armored tank, but more armored than the dodge tank, but more evasive than the soak tank… you get the idea. A little bit of everything, able to do all of it on its own. Mostly.
7. Specific-damage-type tank
In a lot of fantasy MMORPGs, magic damage can be particularly pernicious. Other times fire damage or psychic damage or whatever is a problem. Tanking anything toxic in City of Heroes is a rough time. The point is that this is a kind of tank that is really good at managing a very specific sort of damage type, usually able to handle other tanking as well but maybe not quite as well. Your Rune Fencer has to do something in Final Fantasy XI, after all.
8. Gimmick tank
In World of Warcraft, there were several fights where Warlocks made good tanks. Warlock has never had a tanking spec, but you tended to be loaded up on lots of health, and you could drain life to boot, so you were tailor-made for a situation that needed a very specific sort of soaking in a specific fight! This can also cover things like Blue Mage tanking in FFXIV, or any situation when your character isn’t really a tank but can manage to tank in unusual circumstances.
9. Ranged tank
Generally speaking, tanks need to be up in melee range. It’s the trade-off for being more durable. But some games let you roll tanks that deal with ranged enemies by operating just fine at range. That usually doesn’t mean that you get to be at maximum range and still tank things, but it does mean that you have tanks who aren’t miffed if they need to step away from the personal space of whatever they’re tanking. I actually really enjoyed this in Star Wars: The Old Republic; tanking on a Trooper was a lot of fun.
10. Control tank
Last but not least, there’s the option to tank in part by just not letting your opponents get a word in edgewise. Reduce your enemy’s ability to deal damage, make them less accurate, stun them, all that fun stuff. You might argue that in practical terms this is just taking the long path to other tanking routes, but it feels different – and it also makes the control tank a lot of fun in situations when you’re off-tanking, since presumably all of your debuffs still work just fine even though the enemies aren’t targeting you personally.
Everyone likes a good list, and we are no different! Perfect Ten takes an MMO topic and divvies it up into 10 delicious, entertaining, and often informative segments for your snacking pleasure. Got a good idea for a list? Email us at justin@massivelyop.com or eliot@massivelyop.com with the subject line “Perfect Ten.”
