The HotS dev team has always seemd to struggle with tanks.
First, tanks and bruisers were lumped together in the “Warrior” category for a long time. Then it’s always been clear that they had a hard time designing them.
Arthas has been the worse tank in the game for I don’t know how many years now. And I think they would have fixed it if they knew how. They didn’t seem to know what do do with him.
Yrel was supposed to be a tank. We know how that turned out.
Blaze was made a Tank, had to be buffed, and is is almost never picked as solo tank. Turned out like Yrel and he’s usually a bruiser.
Mal Ganis didn’t work out. And to this day is still rarely picked.
Diablo got several buffs, and used to have an ability that did nothing (W) and a trait that was often a disadvantage
Johanna had to have a talent backed in to give her an identity (Knight takes pawn), Had her trait buffed both in the shield hp and cooldown, and the mana cost was removed. She was fixed fairly quickly though.
Anubarak didn’t have much of an identity until they made him the spell tank. (I kind of liked when he had spell armor baseline) His bettles used to be bad. But they did remove Invulnerable from his E (and unstoppable from Muradin’s E) because it was kind of busted as a catch all ability.
One exception is Garrosh, who was busted on release.
Well, if one has chat turned on (egad!) players tend to not understand “tanks” either.
The expectations around the term tend to come from other games, especially pve ones where tanks have specific tools for controlling enemy behavior in ways that would feel unfair in a player vs player context.
When the game used “warriors” that was back when the goal of the game was to avoid forced compositions, especially back when the game was going to have a “shop” for all talents to be “bought” in common. Some traces of that went live (ie generic talents) and that was changes to hero-specific talents.
The control and peel a tank offers isn’t going to force players to have to target the tank, so there’s a fundemental conflict between design aspirations that where made for a game different from what we have now played by unobservant players that echo terms they see without understanding what is happening in a team fight.
It’s not just HotS but Blizzard in general, as well as a lot of games. Even over in WoW tanks–other classes as well–tend to bounce from broken to busted on a regular basis; expansion pack to expansion pack.
I believe such issues, as well as wild changes, has to do with the very high turn over rate in the game industry which results in writers, programmers, head honchos, ect. swapping out. As a result people get in and they immediately want to change things. Or changes that were planned had to be scrapped because someone extremely important to the project or groups of people left (Overwatch for example) resulting in the remaining people gaping like fishes for a bit before farting out something else.
Potentially another issue is that someone way up (who have no business interfering) cannot make up their minds and the devs just have to role with it which results in games getting a lot of changes or wind up in gaming hell (Duke Nukem Forever as an example) due to lack of discipline.
Now with HotS they kept shifting gears throughout its life. Originally it was mean to be a sort of gift to the fans of Blizzard with mechanics as Xenterex mentioned. Then they shifted to the competitive scene and wanting gameplay to be spicier as they try and compete with League of Legends. This resulted in the discarding of warriors and specialists for more high octane combat because…whatever competitive scene it was called. I forgot.
Regardless, rather than fixating on a set point that many heroes kept getting changed around. Some more extreme than others such as Tassador for example.
Then there is all the logistics of what looked good on paper is actually trash, interactions with other heroes, how players react, unseen compositions being created, and other things that are extremely hard or impossible to predict.
Stitches I believe was even worse for just long, if not longer, than Arthas was. There was many a joke that Stitches was not bottom of the barrel but buried a few feet under it.
There’s some really bad historical accounting in this post. The meta has evolved and various heroes have been good/bad, and tanks are no different. Arthas was in the meta at a few points in the game. The only real thing that is really true in your list is that Yrel was supposed to be a tank as they were designing her, but she was never released that way. So saying like it was some huge issue is like pretty hyperbolic.
Another example, Johanna was OP on release lol, and very much so had an identity in the fact that she had one of the first unstoppables. It’s more so that people just overwhelmingly picked talents that gave wave clear advantages. This is why mages sort of fell out of the meta because there was little reason to pick a squishy if these bruisers/tanks could clear just as well. Blizzard also just got crazy with AOE creep as they moved towards talent pruning. Tanks weren’t initially supposed to be wave clearing specialists, but with Leo and Joh being so OP, that set a bad precedent to keep buffing heroes.
The tank/bruiser categorization was always kind of a bit silly for me. For me, it was more people who were just too lazy to be expected to peel and wanted a role so they weren’t blamed for not helping allies and could just soak instead.
I feel like theres alot of misconception in general as to what makes a hero a tank and it took a while for the hots team to figure out what a tank even was in hots to.
With how to make a tank, I think how reliable their CC is super important. If the skills got to much counterplay your entire kit falls apart as a tank. Like you mentioned, blaze and yrel are great examples.
On paper, blaze has one of the better stuns on the game but in pratice, that slight start up the move adds a huge level of unreliability to blaze as a tank.
And then yrel has it even worse with with a 2 second delay on her abilities. While she can use her trait to speed things up, she can only do so with 1 ability.
This is gonna sound crazy but I think theres also misconception that teams even need a traditional tank to be well rounded. What a team actually needs are a way to engage, peel, and a front line (granted, good tank kits generaly provide all of these things). For example, a lineup of sonya, imperius and anduin or deathwing, maiev, cassia can make for a still well rounded team.
This is how heroes like arthas and stitches still manage to find viability dispite being bad tanks.
Stitches has good engene. I dont think I need to go in more detail then that.
Arthas has really really peel against a specific kind of hero (melee auto attackers). This is where his niche comes from dispite a kit thats bad at engaging.
Then, Malganis has pretty bad engage and fairly meh peel. His Q is super slow, his E being just a sleep can make it somewhat unreliable as peel in the chaos of a teamfight and both abilities are very telegraphed. Malganis ends up playing more like a bruiser that spams CC instead of having good damage.
I think what makes it so hard to make a proper tank is finding the sweet spot between to much counterplay and not enough and the misconception that its the tanks job to just be hard to kill.
I don’t think you’re particularly wrong in your assessment, complaint regarding each tank. Except, perhaps maybe on the entire premise.
I would say tanks are more or less in a good spot, at least compare to dd/dps and healers. There were each period when some tanks weren’t picked, but now, all of them can be picked, simply what they provide to the table being different.
I believe you are wrong in your assessment of my statement.
Nowhere am I saying that tanks are currently generally bad. I’m asking why the devs had such a hard time correctly designing tanks. To the extend that some of them ended up being unable to actually be used as tanks.
Yeah, Stitches used to be pretty bad. Though you could still get a guaranteed kill from a pull+ gorge. Or just pull from under your tower. Arthas in comparison could not easily create a kill secure opportunity for his team, on top of having no escape like Stitches.
It isn’t so much that tanks are hard to design, but that a new tank is the hardest to get used to, no matter whether you are playing with them, against them, or as them. On release, Mal’ganis was considered wildly broken, until people got used to how to play with/against him, and now he is considered underpowered. Mei was similarly an instant ban, until people realized how to exploit her weaknesses. She is still a decent tank, although not considered top tier.
Almost every tank has had their time in the spotlight, I can remember when ETC was the most terrifying thing to face, same with Anub. As the meta shifts, so do the tanks. When the Gladiator Medallion was a thing (barf), there was a major shift in meta that still persists to some extent to this day. In addition, there are any number of tanks that are perfectly fine, but people tend to forget about them. Diablo and Taunt Varian have a definite place in draft, but are often overlooked due to this almost irrational fear of Johanna.
One last thing, I have always looked at the word “tank” as a verb, not a noun. There are any number of heroes that have come and gone as viable tanks such as Uther and Imperius. Many of these are still viable in the right hands and right draft, so to say that Blizzard is bad at designing tanks is a bit myopic. It may be more accurate to say that the player base in general is bad at tanking!
It is extra responsability and leadership skills that is expected in tanks and healers and the thought of failure in performing such a role is terrifying. Imagine not only having your health to worry about but also babysitting others while hitting opponents or the horrors of having to decide who you’ll save and who you will have to sacrifice in the process (yourself included). What if you make a mistake? It would be so shocking to be called a d*** a*** c***, wouldn’t it? That’s much more profanity than the usual IDIOT and everyone is so worried about how it might affect their frail ego long term.
Tank kits are fine and designed well for the role they are designed to perform, the only problem is there isn’t enough incentive. Not only is the xp bonus for roles in high demand laughable but also the most popular game mode casually builds up teams with total disregard for the optimal experience.
If this game had a working matchmaker with any consideration for a fair match or respect towards player time it would insist on forming better functioning teams. Anyone that’s played WoW is familiar with what this entails but the demand for those two roles is so great that many are willing to switch and learn just to skip horrible queue times. Now that you’ve broken out of your shell you have more time to play and by extent have made it possible for several other players to enjoy the game as well by not making them wait two hours before entering a dungeon.
It isn’t the failure of the player base as much as it is of the developers.
Mei was only insta-banned because every new hero is insta-banned, but she never performed particularly well. Honestly, she’s probably the most well-balanced hero they ever released. Key evidence is that her first major balance patch was a buff.
That’s pretty much what I was saying. People don’t really know how to deal with new things, so ban out of reflex more than out of actual need. I do think this perception of “too strong!” affects tanks more than a lot of other heroes. While some new tanks really were too strong on release, it didn’t seem as egregious as with assassins (cough Maiev cough). I personally think most new heroes are reasonably balanced, and do not require too much tweaking, but players tend to overreact a lot of the time.
For example, I think Anduin was about as close to a perfect release as any recent hero, and he is still a strong choice in most ranks. He is also one of the healers who can handle the craziness of QM relatively easily.
Hogger, on the other hand, was kind of the opposite. I think he still needs a solid nerf bat between the ears, but he didn’t seem to scare the playerbase as much on release, even though I felt he was wildly overtuned once you got used to his play style.
Given the tryhard nature of ranked at any skill level, half of these bans were to deny someone on your team picking the same hero on the first day just in case no one on the enemy team had bought it. Some other day buddy, you can take the hero for a test drive in someone else’s game.
Stitches was trash until they buffed his hook range and did several other buffs to him.
For Arthas I think you can still make him work out just like you can with Malganis. It just takes more work.
Hogger’s issues are more conceptual than number-related. He has mobility, mercing, teamfight damage, on-demand Unstoppable, CC, self-healing, amazing lane clear, poke, and escape, and he sacrifices nothing for it. I think he’s very poorly designed.
Something in the middle would work, sort of like Butcher’s charge where he doesn’t become unstoppable momentarily but after a short delay, or at least until he bounces away from the first wall.
Come to think of it, that would just make him a worse Malganis.
I think it’s a delight when they are, but that’s only really because of how bad they often get it, especially post LiMing era when Blizzard decided to throw caution to the wind after Morales/Lunara severe underpowered releases.
Blizzard deservedly earned their bad will, that it’s not a surprise that some people overreact when things actually aren’t crazy bonkers. People got so used to the ridiculous OPness of the game, under reactions from Stockholm syndrome wasn’t uncommon either. When DW was released and so many here was like, well he’s not that bad, it was insane being on the boards at the time.