So turns out I’m really bad at tanking (closing on 33% WR) and I’m not entirely certain what is so bad about my tanking. Does anyone have general tips or common mistakes of someone who’s learning to tank?
I have made a few threads on tanking in HotS aimed at people who haven’t tanked much, or want to know more. One of the main tips I can offer is make sure you are always using an ability for a reason, not just because it is available. While a few tanks have abilities that can be spammed, such as Diablo’s Firestomp, for the most part, if you use abilities when you don’t need to, you won’t have them when you do.
Most of tanking is positioning, and making sure the enemy realizes that if they want to attack your backline, or even just go somewhere, they have to go through you. You don’t have to engage with an ability, especially an all-in one like Dwarf Toss, Shadow Charge, or Powerslide. Just walking up to people often makes them waste abilities on you, and you still have powerful tools available.
Which tanks have you been playing? That may make it easier for people to give specific advice.
I’ve been playing around with Johanna, Anubarak, and a bit of Muradin. I think I’m having the most success with Anubarak, but they’re all pretty close.
Muradin is a really solid tank to learn on, so it wouldn’t hurt to practice him. Anub’arak is arguably one of the best tanks in the game, so unless something changes, you may see him start to be contested in terms of banning/early picks on him.
One thing that is pretty much the same on both of them is that W is your sustain/mitigation ability, and can be relatively spammed. In addition, for both heroes, E is an engage, peel, and disengage, so never use it unless you are specifically doing one of those three things. Calculate the odds of winning before engaging, especially if you are going to hard engage with E.
Remember that your main job is to set up your team to win a fight, not to chase kills or die gloriously in a 1v5. Every move you make is with the goal of giving your assassins a kill opportunity. This often means just being a road block to the enemy team’s front line, so your back line has the space to poke them down to the point where they can be finished off.
For more details on the primary functions of a tank, this was the first thread I made regarding the tank role.
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