I am not saying to be a protector. You can be aggressive and still be a tank. Being a tank is about controlling the engage. The team engages off of you and you dictate the positioning. As a tank you have to be extra aware of the geography of the map and how to use it to your advantage because you are the front line. You are not a fat DPS. Your job is to create a favorable fight.
However, you also have abilities that can deny the enemy tanks/DPS the ability to be successful. Zarya can make a Doomfist have a terrible time. Ball can force Widow to either be on her team or have multiple people protecting her (thus creating a favorable engage). The thing about Plat players though is that they just use abilities and they just move in without generally having an overall plan and without an overall plan you cannot be a real tank.
My favorite saying in OW is: “When you say ‘this works at my rank’, what you are really saying is ‘this is why I am that rank’”.
The ideal Tank in Overwatch would be something akin to the Heavy Assault in Archives (Expert+): durable, threatening, will obliterate you if you’re being careless. Every Tank should have some level of this.
Tanking isn’t just about eating damage or providing tangible physical cover… it’s about creating space, deterring people away from your team and presenting yourself as a threat.
Hog does all those things and has a large HP pool, but many weaknesses too, such as being a target to feed enemy ult charge and the inability to stop 'nade and sleep, etc…
You want to know what’s boring? Being locked into the tank role and your DPS going ranged hitscan while both tanks picked dive, then they die all the time, do no damage, and flame you and your other tank for it.
Boring is going double barrier only for the DPS to play double flank, forcing you to readjust to them.
Boring is not getting the healing you need on a ‘main’ tank because the supports are Zen Lucio or off doing who knows what while you’re on the objective when you’re supposed to be, trying to do the job nobody else seems to want to do in this game.
Hog is the only thing keeping my sanity when I can do nothing else for my team but earn 5 gold medals (simply by living the longest) because the concept of teamwork was pinched off and left smeared on our spawn room floor.
Do you want me to hook that flanker off you that nobody else seems capable of dealing with, or not? Also, there’s no tank ult that immediately makes and holds space better than Whole Hog.
Roadhog isn’t my first choice, he’s my last one, and he’s 1000% necessary. Leave him where he is, tanks.
Zarya doesn’t create space either. Arguably Junkrat and Bastion do a much better job of creating space by zoning than Zarya’s chinsy bubbles could ever do, and Mei objectively does a better job (though plenty of people argue that Mei should be a tank).
Maybe, just maybe “creating space” is descriptive of what most tanks do, and not proscriptive of what they need to do.
Wrecking Ball isn’t exactly a paragon of #2 either.
You could just as easily argue that tanks are “big meaty characters that are hard to kill and have lots of health”. Mei is still adjacent to that, as she is with the space/positioning viewpoint, but that description bisects the tanks from the rest of the cast as well as any other, and I’d argue much more cleanly and definitively.
But at the end of the day, any argument to what constitutes “the essence of a tank” is arbitrarily, and arguing for whether a character should or shouldn’t be in a category with an arbitrary, ad-hoc definition is disingenuous at best.
tl;dr: “Creating Space” or any other definition of tank-ness is descriptive, and we shouldn’t be trying to flip that into something proscriptive.
Well like I was saying “creating space” is too vague anyways.
“Gives a positioning advantage” is much more concrete language
And even “positioning” can be broken down to “a location you can stand while putting progress towards objectives/survival/kills, while having a reasonable capability of retreating to cover before the enemy can kill you”
I.e. “If the enemy team used a high noon, could you be safe from it, based on where you are standing and the abilities you or your teammates have”
Hog is easy to deal with. Pick a hero with CC, and wait until he pops breather. If you are able to CC him, that’s a dead hog. Also, bait his hook or just don’t give him the chance to. Don’t stand in a wide open area with him.
The only definition of a tank is what Blizzard thinks a tank is. It’s 100% about character fantasy, not about technical details.
There are some similarities between the “tanks”, but they don’t necessarily define them as tanks in an objective way. As some people already stated, even DPS fulfill a hybrid role and can off-off-tank to a certain degree. A good Mei will defend any point for a much-too-long-time, while Soldier for example can offer some healing for the group. Zoning is available for a lot of characters, actually: Widow, Bastion, Junkrat, Torbjörn - on narrow maps even Symmetra.
Tanks are just tanks, because Blizzard thinks they fit into the roster. They tend to have more defensive skills than dps and support, but first of all comes the character fantasy. And in Blizzard’s mind every tank is big and chunky, while supports are small and flimsy. It’s the same thinking that makes male characters abnormally bulky, while female characters are super slender hot’n sexy. For “diversity” reasons there mei (pun intended) be some characters, that are “slightly” different like Zarya, Zen, Junk and Mei, but overall the game is filled with stereotypes.
Not that I would complain about that - it’s a fantasy game. But fantasy leads the hero roster and their abilities. Technical issues and synergies come second.