Tanker

Overview

The Tanker can take it and dish it out all at once. The Tanker primarily can absorb vast amounts of damage, and hold his own in a fist fight. But the Tanker lacks any long range punch. The Tanker would prefer just to charge straight ahead anyway.

Faction: Hero

The Tanker's power sets are:

Primary: Defense
Secondary: Melee

The Tanker has high hit points and medium damage.

Power Sets

Primary Power Sets

A Tanker's primary power sets are designed specifically for defense. They are:

• Fiery Aura
• Ice Armor
• Invulnerability
• Stone Armor

Secondary Power Sets

A Tanker's secondary power sets are designed for melee. They are:

• Battle Axe
• Energy Melee
• Fiery Melee
• Ice Melee
• Stone Melee
• Super Strength
• War Mace

Ancillary Power Pools

• Arctic Mastery
• Earth Mastery
• Energy Mastery
• Pyre Mastery

Inherent Powers

• Gauntlet

Strategies

The Tanker strategy is fairly linear; first and foremost, the Tanker has to focus on surviving, and then, on gathering attention away from allies. Fortunately, attacking people is a fine way to garner attention, and this means the Tanker's role is not one prone to non-obvious tactics. Advanced combat maneuvers are things the Tanker can experiment with easily, because the Tanker has a large margin of error. Unlike some other archetypes, the Tanker's raw stats allow the Tanker a degree of safety even in the worst of situations.

Herding

Herding is a form of Aggro management, corralling a group enemies into a smaller area. In principle, all archetypes can engage in herding to some extent, by understanding the way enemies react to player actions, but the Tanker excels in this role thanks to their high defensive ability and their inherent power, Gauntlet.

The most basic form of Herding available to a Tanker involves a damage aura (such as is available to the Fiery Aura set). The Tanker moves to engage the enemies, but rather than closing with the nearest enemy and attacking, the Tanker instead moves close enough to the available enemies to deal them some damage with his aura, then closes with their 'priority' enemy, and launch their attacks. Thanks to the damage dealt, and the Tanker's Gauntlet power, the enemy units (unless otherwise distracted) should close with the Tanker, thus keeping their attention focused on the hero best able to take it.

All Tanker primaries have auras that allow this, available at different levels. Invulnerability gets its latest, at level 18 (Invincibility). Also, enemies are less deadly at the lower levels, allowing Tanker players time to learn how much they can handle in this maneuver.

While herding may be broken by heavy area of effect damage, knockback, or other disruption, the effect of a herded group can allow supporter archetypes a focused point where they can orient their area effects (such as Tar Patch, or a large area debuff like Lingering Radiation), or allow a character to peel off small numbers of opponents that they can handle.

Early Play

Many tanker sets are lacking for melee attacks early on, because of the slow progression through the offensive set available to the Tanker. This means that many Tankers are able to make a great deal of use of temporary combat powers (such as the Veteran Rewards powers), or of pool power attacks (such as Air Superiority). At least early on, filling out a decent number of attacks can allow a Tanker to reach the higher levels and therefore, the more powerful defensive abilities.

External Links

• Archetypes documentation on official City of Heroes site
• Official City of Heroes Manual as a zipped PDF file