DEL DIA TANQUE: aka THE TANKER TUESDAY TASK FORCE

NOTE: This was written during Issue 4, well before Issues 5 and 6. Please view UPDATE at the end for the current status on Tankage.

This diary is not about a Task Force. Even though a Task Force is part of the story.

This is about Tankers.

Tankers are one of five original Archetypes for the City of Heroes character designs. There's meant to be a role played by each AT, and a way of balancing these ATs out. Blasters are long-range damage dealers with little or no armor. Scrappers are close-quarters damage dealers with some armor to compensate for being in melee range. Defenders are healers and protectors with some attacks but not as powerful as Blasters. Controllers are literally crowd controllers, with some damage abilities but really their forte is Holding mobs at bay for others to wipe out. Tankers are armored front-line attackers that are shielded from head to toe, but with limited attacks.

There's not supposed to be one AT that is better than the others, but the Tankers kinda bend if not break that unwritten rule. Tankers can survive fights almost entirely on their own, if properly designed. Only Scrappers can match that, and even Scrappers don't get the higher Hit Point counts Tankers get that allow them to survive longer in battle. Certain Tankers (Fire, cough) have offensive capabilities that can rival a Blaster or Scrapper. A good Tanker can overcome the disadvantages of not having as many attack options as a Blaster or Scrapper. And an expert at playing Tankers can perform a game trick known as 'Herding', the ability to draw or 'aggro' a series of mobs together across an entire map if need be in order to kill enough of the mobs all at once. And to be perfectly honest, when confronting a high-level villain class known as Arch-Villain (AV), you NEED a Tanker there to get the job done because that Tanker is the only one with enough Hit Points and with the needed aggro control to survive the fight.

I am not an expert. My Tanker, Greystone Anom, has been rolled from an earlier version to where he's now great at surviving a prolonged fight, but he's still very raw and there's no way he will ever be a good herding Tanker. But still, he's good in a fight.

On the Champion Server, Tankers have become L33t enough to form their own chat channels and organize their own events. Started by a Watchguard SG Tanker named Ring, the event known as Tanker Tuesday held at the start of each months has grown in popularity. Usually, the higher level Tankers would sidekick (SK) the lower levels and have them join in on high-level bad-guy stomping. That, however, got to be a problem when more lower-levels showed up than the higher-levels.

For the month of May, Ring did two things different for Tanker Tuesday. First, he renamed the event Dia Del Tanque (Day of the Tank? My Spanish is rusty), and tied it in to the Mexican holiday of Cinco De Mayo to, ah heck I'll just Copy and Paste Ring's original post on it:

Back in 1862, Tanker Tuesdays were actually called Melee Mondays. There were no scrappers back then, because they had been nerfed and everyone was protesting. So Melee Mondays (first Monday of every month) were an all tanker event.

Well during May Melee Monday on 1862 (May 5th), between 2000 and 4000 Mexican Tankers held the line at Pueblo against roughly 8000 French Squishies (who were mostly upset that they couldn't get in on the Melee Monday Madness even with the most powerful melee attacks in the game). Not only did the line hold, but those tankers rallied and herded all those squishies to the edge of the map where they were forced to zone.

The emcee of the event, General Ignacio Zaragoza, was so proud of his fellow tankers, that when regen was returned to uber status and scrappers returned to Mexico, he declared that in addition to Melee Mondays, there would also be Tanker Tuesdays.

To honor those tankers, and the legacy they left us, We refer to the May Tanker Tuesday in Spanish to remember Mexico's Dia del Tanque (Day of the Tank).

It's official. I'm jealous of Ring's wittiness.

The second thing Ring called for was to Exemplar, or have the higher levels nerf themselves down to the lower levels. This was an attempt to counter the difficulties they've had trying to SK during earlier events. Because of the Exemping, I looked at what Greystone could offer to the event as a Level 29 Tanker. I realized Grey was still available for a Task Force from contact Hess in Striga Isle. If you've read elsewhere, you should know that the Hess TF is the BEST. TF. EVER. Problem was, this TF was not part of the original game package and so a lot of high-level players might have missed out on it and might want to run it. So I offered up the Task Force Hess as part of the event, to see about running an All-Tanker TF on the best TF out there.

Ring himself signed up for that immediately. A truckload of Level 50 Tankers followed suit.

On the day of Del Dia Tanque itself, there was another large crowd of Tankers waiting at the designated spot in Kings Row. We grouped, we gathered, we danced, we waited for Ring to show up and start this gig. Ring did show, bringing along a special guest, Gen. Zaragoza himself! Sure, he was Level 1 and all, but the General had arrived to start the celebrations off with the proper style. We praised the General and then got the lineups going.

Ring announced first for me to start the TF lineup, so I hopped about the line looking for all Tankers between Levels 26 to 30 (the only Levels that can run the TF). I picked up Obsidian Efreet, Aeorell (who was at her first Tanker Tuesday), and Mister Robot, a good colleague upon whom I could rely. With them in place I checked the high levels who were interested in going, and invited Ring, Lil' Mama (who had not run the TF before), Kiloton and Persistence, the Tanker from the Shard TFs that got Blue Arc through a lot of tough patches. We exemped the high-levels and hurried off to Striga. Well, most of us. Ring had to stay behind for about 20 minutes to keep the tanking organized. And I had to run off to Talos to reset my Reputation.

Reputation is a relatively new device to the game. A player can pay to up or lower his Reputation, and that Reputation can change the difficulty of the game. Heroic, the lowest level, means you will face same-level minions and on door missions your Boss target will be an LT. Invincible, the highest Rep, means you will face minions three levels above you (+3) and your Boss target will be an actual Boss also of a higher level. Blasters tend to stay at Heroic. Tankers and Scrappers are insane enough to Rep at Invincible. As a more pragmatic player, I had my Tanker at Rugged (middle setting, at most +2 mobs). For TFs, though, a high Rep can cause problems, even for Tankers. Aeorell, for example, was Level 27 to my 29, so she could have faced bad guys from level 32 or 33 (Task Forces are 2 levels automatically above the team leader, PLUS whatever Rep adds to it) and would have been unable to hit them. So I reset to Heroic, which did the trick (most mobs were Level 31 with a handful of 32s and very few 33s).

I got my Rep fixed and Ring finally handed duties off to Myrmydon (another Master T... Mistress Tanker actually) and then we got the TF underway.

From my other documentations of TFs, you'll notice I emphasize a need to 'balance' the team out among Archetypes. There's a need for a Tanker, a need for at least one Defender/Controller/Healer, a need for some damage dealers (either Scrappers or Blasters). But you'll notice at the beginning of THIS document, I pointed out Tankers can bend, even break, the rules of the game.

An All-Tanker Task Force kicked serious butt. We didn't need damage dealers. We didn't even need a healer, even with the close calls we got during the game. The Tanker builds, by the levels we were at (high 20s) compensated for each other so that the other ATs seemed superfluous. Lemme explain.

There are four Primary Tanker forms. Fire (Fiery) Tanker is the offensive weapon Tanker: low on defenses but high on damage dealing. Fires get powers such as Burn (available at Level 18), which can wipe out entire mobs in seconds. And that weakness on defense can be compensated by the Jumping pool and its powers Acrobatics and Combat Jumping (or Fighting pool's Tough and Weave). Fire was provided by Obsidian Efreet.

There's Ice Tanker: once the, let's admit, nerd of the Tanker set. Originally Tankers couldn't stack armors (have multiple armors on all at once), which hindered the survivability of armor-based Tankers (Ice and Stone noticeably). Ice Tankers since update Issue 2, when granted the ability to stack armors, have become incredibly uber herding machines, durable enough to survive the herding effort of a hundred bad guys shooting them. For Ice we had Persistence, a Mistress Tanker (anyone who could survive the Shard TF Arch-Villains is uber!).

There's Invulnerable, obstensibly the most popular form out there. Popular because everyone bugs the Fire Tankers for Power-Leveling and not the Invulns, so it's a great way to avoid the PL begging. Also popular because Invulns can match up to most of the secondary attacks (Battleaxe for example is very popular, but mixed with a Fire armor? Doesn't look right...). Invulns can take a licking and keep on ticking. They're built to just stand there and breath while mobs try futilely to level serious damage on them. Invulns could herd if needed, can heal themselves up better than most other builds, and depending on how they built their attacks they can be lethal in battle. Ring, Aeorell, Kiloton, Mister Robot and Lil' Mama were all Invulns.

There's Stone, similar to Ice Tanker with stackable armors, but slower in a fight (thematically heavier builds with all that rock armor). Similar to Invulns in our ability to stand there and take a beating. Stone comes with Mudpots, not as lethal as the Burn patch but effective in keeping mobs slowed up and easy to hit. Stone Tankers are still a little limited compared to the other builds. Stone Tankers, however, have the coolest-looking armors. That's Grey.

With that mix of ATs, we proved to be unstoppable in a fight, and powerful enough to finish off mobs as quickly as Scrappers. The only difficulty we ran into was the difficult decision to choose which of us got to herd the mobs. We finally settled on Persistence, who seems to have developed this into an art form.

The Task Force itself remained the same: The Trap on mission one. The Trap wasn't too much of a surprise as only two of us had never run this TF. The team had split up because of the doors closing down on the interior room, but there was nothing to worry about. Except Ring had a RL emergency involving the construction and installation of something called a 'diaper'. While he was distracted, we had some concerns. Wasn't too bad though. And the diaper was during the time of the TF operating at 98 percent efficiency.

The Generator Room on mission two. A simple rescue mission of a hostage, overshadowed by the fact there's a set of generators we Tankers can pound into pieces. WOOT. Actually it helps to clear the room first. The mobs of Vampri and Galaxys don't take too kindly to generator pounding.

The prolonged and epic running battles between the four Radar Stations circling the Council Base/Volcano. That in itself was a lot of fun. Each Radar station is just one room. ONE room. And all we need to do in each of those one rooms was to beat up a defenseless computer! Poor things. They just got installed with Linux too.We did run into larger mobs on the Third Station, which caused a few problems especially against Galaxy enemies that were dishing out painful immobilizes. But that was the only sore spot of that round of missions.

After that the missions get longer and a bit trickier. We entered a base to destroy a key generator, and hack 2 computers at the same time to locate certain clues. The mobs here were more aggressive, the Council tunnels a bit too claustrophobic, and the named Boss on this mission, Archon Calvin (???), specifically pointed me out with the order to "Kill Greystone Anom!" and damned it all if the mobs weren't doing a good job of it. Thank goodness I had a Tanker (or 7) to pull the mobs off me.

The next mission was more fun. We entered more tunnels, but these were leading upward, and into a lava pit (the first exposure during the TF, to give you an idea of how the magma can be brutal). We spent some time herding, well Persistence and Ring did, some of the mobs into that minor lava pit, examining the damage dealt to the bad guys and how we Tankers would survive the boiling hot magma. From there, the team got to the main control of the volcano base, and got the awe-inspiring look at the head of the Megamech through the windows, such as the image on the right highlights.

The final mission as always is the Defeat Burkholder. There was some bickering at this point on our game plan. Ring wanted us to pose atop the Megamech itself, a risky endeavor as that was where the AV Burkholder was waiting. One suggestion was to pull the mobs away in the entire room and leave Burkholder, then pull Burkholder down and everyone hurry upstairs to pose. Another suggestion was to fight and complete the whole mission and then stand on the Mech, but that was deemed too dangerous as we needed to exit within the 30 seconds of the mission's completion. We settled on trying to clear out a ring/level of the MegaMech station at a time and see how it went from there. Persistence by this time was the designated Herder, and we let her cut loose on the ground floor.

The best laid plans of mice and Tankers... We soon scuttled a lot of what we planned to do and just simply charged in. I think Tankers can't handle the non-Herding aspect of life and are apt to join in against their better judgment. And...hold on. In the midst of writing this I have received word that the game has gone LIVE on Issue 4 update. It is as though millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. But on the bright side my guys can get cooler costumes now.

Where were we? Oh, yeah. We fought on the beaches. We fought on the hills. We shall never surrender. Ahem. WWII month on the History Channel. Basically we Tanked our way up the ramps one level at a time. This was, sadly, the one time we suffered a loss when poor Mister Robot was distracted by those French invaders. General Zaragoza warned us of this treachery, and yet we were still unable to prevent it. Oh, why Lord? Why did you force us to regret not bringing a Healer to Revive poor... (Mister Robot uses an Awaken inspir while his fellow Tankers aggro away any potential attacker). MISTER ROBOT: "I got better." Oh. Never mind.

When we got to Burkholder's level it turned out, with all the Tankers running about, not that big of a deal. Sure, the mobs needed clearing out, and Burkholder was throwing a hissy fit about us stepping all over his MegaMech, but for an AV Burkholder was having a very hard time hurting us. I mean, an AV couldn't lay a finger on Persistence, who had taken the thankless job of handling Burkholder for us while we posed on the 'Mech. All of us Tankers meant all of us had defensive boosts that kept us safe. After all, those anti-personnel cannons lining the upper walls of the hollowed-out volcano were barely scratching us, mere pests like mosquitos.

So with all the mobs cleared, and with Burkholder helpless to stop us, we jumped all over the MegaMech and left our muddy footprints all over... RING: "Um, Grey, YOU'RE the one with muddy feet. Don't go blaming us for... (stumbles, accidentally scrapes his car keys along the painted surface of the 'Mech) Oops." BURKHOLDER: "NEIN! NEIN! Get off of mine Mech! OFF!"

PERSISTENCE: "Oh, for heaven's sake...INTO THE LAVAPIT WITH YOU! (Knocks Burkholder down into the boiling hot magma)"

This is one of the tricks to the TF: why waste energy fighting Burkholder when you can cook him to death? Draw him with aggro down into the lava pit surrounding the feet of the MegaMech and keep him there. Now, this normally works best when the Tanker can get healed up or buffed while standing in the lava as well to keep Burkholder from hopping back out. For an All-Tanker team, though, the trick was to make sure we could heal ourselves quick enough, or else had a fire protection power such as Resist Elements or Brimstone Armor. Ring was the one with the most problems as he didn't get a fire protection armor, but he was still capable of staying within the lava. We all did, surrounding poor Burkholder and keeping him in the boiling hot magma until he died.

With that, the Mission was Complete. The Timer was also Set for 30 Seconds for the Base to Explode.

With the 'Mech in flames, we hurried to the doorway out, and with about 10 seconds to spare we made our exit. Ring, bless him, was making screenshots as well, and is able to catch dialog balloons as part of the image (for some reason I can't do that). Ring's parting shot caught me in the middle of saying "goodbye megamech!" and it was so cool I begged his permission to include it here.

And so...THE SALUTE! WE WIN! TANKERS RULE!

Lessons learned from this:

Blasters really need to get improvements to their powers, else everyone will play Tankers from now on.

It's not so much the number of Tankers on a team as it is the...well actually yeah it IS the number of Tankers that's important.

It helps to have a mix of Tanker ATs. Some Fire for the cooking, some Ice for the herding, some Invuln for the duration and some Stone for the comic relief.

We need more TFs like the Hess one. IT ROCKS!

But about Tankers themselves, truly, a Tanker is a powerful thing to play on the City of Heroes. All-Tanker teams are feasible, unlike other ATs. Just remember, make sure it's a good build. The purpose of a Tanker is not to crush the enemy but to survive the battle: the armors were important in keeping us alive sans healers.

See you next Tanker Tuesday!

UPDATE: Since this diary, the Game Devs had seen fit to make additional changes to AT builds, especially Tanker builds, for Issues 5 and 6.
The changes were not for the better.
With Issue 5 the percentages on the Tanking armors were reduced, from Nigh Invulnerable Status to Okay, We Can Get Hurt Status (It was like dropping from Godhood to Demigodhood). Additionally, some of the powers were altered, things like Burn no longer trapping bad guys but instead Fearing them off, or certain Ice Armor powers no longer doing what made them so popular. It wasn't pretty.
Issue 6 made it worse. The Game Devs came with Enhancement Diversification, which for Tankers was really Enhancement Nerfage. ED placed a cap, roughly three matching Enhancement slots, to all the powers. Go over that third slot with the same enhancement, and you lose effectiveness with those extra enhs. It made any fourth or higher enh slot essentially a wasted slot. Now, for attacks or for powers that allow multiple types of enhancements, say for example a Heavy Mallet (Damage, Acc, Recharge, End Discount, Knockback), you could slot 3 Damages, 1 Acc, 1 Recharge and 1 Knockback and there's no problem. Armors and defenses, however, usually had only slot one enhancement type (Damage Resist or Defense Buff). Instead of having 6 Damage Resists on Stone Skin at say 180 percent, fer example, you cap out at 3 Damage Resists at roughly 97 percent. See the difference?
The heaviest blow, sadly, came with the Tanker aggro control with Taunt. Instead of Taunting and keeping that Taunt aggro on entire rooms of bad guys, the Taunt power could attract only 17 bads at a time, and there was now a time limit on how long you kept that aggro. This was intentionally done to crimp Herding: while many Tankers had developed effective Herding techniques, there were concerns that Tankers were doing all the work on teams and that Herding was making door missions too easy to run. Herding was also a major component of Power Leveling: crimping that affected PL'ers awful quick.
The Game Devs had their reasons for making the changes. "Balance," they kept saying. Balance between the ATs. Balance for PvP purposes. And so the uberness of Tankers were reduced to mere eh-ness. So everything I mentioned in this diary? Doesn't really apply much anymore...
That is, of course, until Tankers figure out new tricks. Shhhhhh, don't tell...

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