What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Riot Reav3 recently put out a dev blog on behalf of the Champion Update team, called
the State of Champion Update.
It was packed with a ton of awesome new information about what the update team has been working
on, and one of the most exciting things to read was the announcement of the very next
class update: TANKS!
So today we’re going to share what we know about the upcoming tank class update, and
which champions are extremely likely to end up being targeted for big and small scale
reworks!
With tanks locked in as the next class update, many people may be wondering exactly which
tanks are going to be looked at.
After all, we had a Juggernaut update which was pretty much a subset of tanks.
Well this time, Riot will be looking at all the tanks in general, but the focus point
for any kit reworks will be on the initiating tanks, which Riot refers to as Vanguards.
The aim of this class update is actually pretty simple as it falls in line with what previous
class updates have been aiming to do, which is give each champion their own unique identities.
The other goal of the update is to give the tanks their own forms of mastery and skill
expression.
Reav3 was clear on this point that he didn’t mean that they want every tanky to require
high mechanical skill to use properly, but right now tanks are a bit of a flatline when
it comes to mastery because they all behave in similar ways and fill the same kind of
role in a game.
For Vanguards specifically, this means they all get tanky, then start fights with their
crowd control abilities.
Once you’ve successfully engaged with one of the Vanguard champions, you soak as much
damage as you can - and then your job is pretty much done.
That’s not necessarily a negative thing, but it can often feel like all you can do
to improve with the tanks it to optimise your item build and sequence your abilities properly.
Compare that to other classes, like mages or assassins - they all have varied kits and
distinct approaches to the game, so the more you practice them the more you feel you unlock
their potential.
When it comes to initiating tanks, you learn to dive, CC and soak damage - and that’s
about it.
Players deserve to feel like they are actively improving when they keep practicing a champion,
and to be able to do that, tanks are going to require a bit more depth to their kits.
As they are right now, tanks have what Riot refers to as a ‘flat mastery curve.’
Essentially, instead of constantly improving the more you play them, you figure out how
they work and act in game, and then you are limited by their kits and unable to really
progress any further.
Another key issue with tanks right now is that they tend to underperform in the jungle
compared to other junglers, especially when the jungle itself is strong.
Whenever there has been a point in the game’s history that the jungle has been harder to
clear, tank junglers have suffered because they just can’t take advantage of all the
resources that the jungle provides.
Instead, carry junglers like Lee Sin, Vi and Hecarim tend to shine because they have the
scaling and carry potential from their own damage, so they don’t really suffer as much
from the harder jungle.
The fact that all the tanks have similar kits and poor overall damage output means that
they struggle to compete with the carry junglers, and that’s definitely going to be an issue
in Season 7 because the jungle is pretty challenging by design.
This ties in pretty well with the issue of unique identities.
Right now, vanguards all do pretty much the exact same thing, which Reav3 describes as
being like different versions of Amumu.
They dive into a fight, unleash some area of effect crowd control abilities to lock
down a team, and then they waddle around soaking and dealing minor damage whenever they can.
So for Amumu, that’s a Q, an R, then he pretty much has no more impact and just wanders
around dealing as much damage as he can.
The same goes for Malphite - he uses R, then a Q, and then pretty much does nothing for
the rest of the fight.
The same goes for most other Vanguards, and the main goal of the class update will be
to break the monotony of this design, and introduce more interesting ways to initiate
fights and actually give the tanks a way to take part in teamfights once they have started.
Something else that Riot have mentioned they will be looking at is defensive items, and
how champions engage with them whether they are tanks or non-tanks.
Right now, non-tank champions can actually get equal or even greater benefits from certain
tank items than tanks do, but that’s something that Riot wants to fix in the future so that
tanks can actively do their role of being tanky damage sponges.
Compare that to something like an ADC picking up a mage item - it’s going to be a massive
waste of gold compared to buying an actual ADC item instead.
This is a pretty big indicator that Riot might be planning on redesigning tank items so that
tanks synergise with them far better than other classes, making them really sub-optimal
purchases for non-tank champions.
Another potential fix would be to make tanks way more naturally tanky, and lower the tankiness
given by the stats from tank items - but that has the issue of giving tanks crazy defensive
early games and scaling, and making it so that being denied gold doesn’t really punish
tanks enough.
A better solution would be to introduce more forms of scaling to tank champions, maybe
similar to how Malphite’s Ground Slam scales with his total armor.
Doing that would encourage tanks to build tank items over damage items, and it would
also make those items far more cost efficient for tanks compared to champions that don’t
have the tank-stat scaling.
So you may be wondering at this point which specific champions are going to be targeted
for large scale reworks - and they aren’t actually locked down yet, or at least if they
are Riot hasn’t officially announced them.
Fortunately we pieced together things from a ton of different Rioter posts on the message
boards, so we have a fair idea of what we can expect in the future.
The first champion who is a huge potential candidate for a large scale rework in the
class update is Nunu!
So in terms of art assets, Nunu is definitely outdated and failing on his archetype enough
that a full VGU would be pretty justifiable.
On the other hand, Nunu’s gameplay concept as THE anti-jungler is actually pretty good,
and his Consume ability is unlike anything else in the game.
His kit doesn’t have the best synergy, but it would only really take an ability change
or two to get Nunu into a state that feels really fresh and modern.
Consume, Ice Blast and Absolute Zero are all cool abilities that would likely stick around
if Nunu was reworked, but Blood Boil and his passive Visionary do leave a bit to be desired
and could definitely be replaced with something else to better allow him to be the perfect
counter-jungler.
This is well within the scope for the tank roster update, and there’s only really one
issue - he’s not really a vanguard tank looking to engage for his team.
That means he doesn’t align perfectly with the goals of the tank class update, but there’s
also a potential for Riot to rework him to be more effective at engaging, which could
make him a really good choice for a large scale rework, and help him get value out of
his epic Absolute Zero Ultimate without being completely dependant on his team to spoon-feed
him the kills.
We already mentioned Amumu as one of the key vanguards that Riot is looking at in terms
of figuring out how they can make tank gameplay more exciting, which brings us to one of his
counterparts - Sejuani.
In essence, they both do the exact same thing in game, which is gap close, AoE CC the enemy
team and then deal ambient damage, mostly in AoE form.
That means it’s really likely that one of the two is going to be hit with changes, and
a large scale rework - even if it’s just to help differentiate between the two and
give players an actual reason to pick one over the other.
Riot hasn’t said yet which is more likely to get changes, but our guess would probably
be Sejuani.
Having a champion on a mount is a really strong potential archetype, and Riot could probably
take the concept further and make her a fair bit more interesting.
Sejuani has had reworks to her kit before, and Amumu is definitely older - but we’ve
seen Riot are pretty willing to rework a champion as many times as it takes to get them right,
so we’d guess that’s the direction they’d go.
That way they can leave Amumu as the defacto gap close into AoE CC champion, and try give
Sejuani a slightly different strategic niche to fill.
Next up is Maokai, another champion that always comes up as a mention whenever Riot discusses
the state of tanks in-game.
Like the other Vanguards, he has the same kind of playstyle - use an ability to gap
close, then disrupt the enemy team.
Unlike the other initiator tanks though, Maokai prefers to single out individual targets,
and is more focused on defending his own team than helping kill the enemy team.
That makes him an awesome champion for peeling for his squishy teammates, and it also makes
him a bit of an exception to the class.
His abilities all feel relatively fluid and fun to use, and his Sapling Toss is a great
gimmick to set him apart from the rest of the herd.
That means he’s probably in a way better state right now than the other potential candidates,
so it will be really interesting to see if Riot decide to change him up as a large scale
rework, or just give him a few tweaks to modernise him slightly.
The answer is probably the latter - if you consider the goals of the tank rework as giving
the tanks distinct identities and a proper mastery curve, Maokai is already doing pretty
well in both regards.
Anyway that just about wraps things up on the future rework of tanks - they’ve long
been one of the most polarising and annoyingly dominant classes in the game so hopefully
Riot does a good job making them healthy and actual a bit more fun to play.
There’s a lot of champions out there we didn’t mention that could do with some love,
for example Shen, Zac and Malphite, but Riot has mentioned that if they can deliver an
awesome update with less ability changes overall, they’d be likely able to do more than the
usual 4 large scale reworks.
So you never know, we might see the tank class update covering the most champions out of
any update yet!
Make sure you leave us a comments and let us know your predictions for champion changes,
or maybe suggest which tank you think should be one of the large scale reworks this time
around.
And it looks like that’s gonna be it from me, if you enjoyed the video drop a like,
subscribe if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time.