Something I wrote for my final paper in game design this quarter:



The tank in League cannot only be a damage sponge. Unlike monsters, players do not have a threat algorithm that can be managed with aggression skills and be permanently held by a sole person. Because the tank cannot pull agro, they must rely on other methods of reducing damage to the team and change their mentality of what a tank needs to do. The main focus of a tank is not the “soak massive damage and survive” that it is in other games.

In the more traditional games, if a tank dies, there are extreme consequences, usually involving the player being unable to further participate in a dungeon. These consequences exist on a much smaller scale in League and aren’t as lasting because the game is designed to have the revival aspect be integrated. Also, with how the items and formulas are designed, no tank can ever stand up to the raw power of a properly built ranged DPS for long and none should ever try to meet that power. Because the tank does not need to fear death nor do they have the ability to withstand extreme sustained assault, the focus shifts from self-survivability and agro to how the tank can help the team while he is alive and how he can persist to render aid after death given that he builds durability oriented items.

The tank exists to crowd control and peel. Instead of absorbing the damage, he either draws it upon himself by going into the fray first, decreasing it by crowd controlling the enemy, or preventing it from being applied by forcing the enemy into vulnerable positions if they do. Going in first is an unreliable way to draw attention, but stunning the enemy DPS is a sure-fire way to lower damage. Zoning, the act of keeping an enemy out of combat via pre-established threat, prevents any damage from being applied because the enemy is too scared to get into combat. Because outright soaking damage in place of your squishy allies is impossible, tanks rely on strong crowd control and the threat of crowd control to prevent the enemy from engaging. Items the tanks can acquire will augment their durability, but, for the most part, the items are upgraded because they aid in increasing the team’s durability more than single survival.

Tank items are rather different in League and are not limited to being purely stat sticks that increase durability. As far as raw stats go, combining the components into a final form does not provide a huge stat increase. The main draws in combination are the unique actives and passives acquired upon merger. In terms of raw statistics, defenses scales at a lower rate off of health and armor increases compared to physical damage scaling off four stats. To equalize this disparity, defensive items have passives and actives that further mitigate enemy damage.

The Frozen Heart and Randuin’s Omen reduce enemy attack speed, thus lowering the average damage per second while not reducing damage per hit. Items such as Iceborn Gauntlet focus on removing the enemy’s ability to maneuver, because a carry that cannot reach its target does less damage. Zeke’s, instead of making it harder for enemies to apply damage, makes it easier for some of your allies to shrug it off by healing from their attacks. All of these items, when applied together, drastically lower enemy damage per second without making the wielder that much more statistically durable against a built enemy DPS.

The overall fundamental change to the mindset of a tank is overwhelming. In any other game, where the tank is just a damage sponge, the player is disconnected from the team. As long as he does his own thing, the team should do the rest and, after a certain gear breakpoint, that largely holds true. There is the illusion of teamwork, when it really is just separate individuals that happen to be going in the same direction. Under that game type, there is no player interaction or desire to communicate outside of getting the group together and assigning roles.

In League, that changes. A tank must be constantly interacting with the team, calling their targets, figuring out who is breaching the defensive line, identifying immediate dangers, and leading the group. The tank is the effective playmaker of the group and must be aware of what his allies are capable of. When the tank loses focus and cannot perform or fails to evaluate correctly, then his team suffers drastically from it.

---------- Post automerged 12-06-2012 at 12:01 PM ---------- Previous post was 12-05-2012 at 04:15 PM ----------

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