Playing Tanks in League of Legends Part 2 - Laning

In my last article I outlined what defines a tank and discussed their primary purpose in a team composition: teamfighting. This week I’m going to pull back from the role of tanks mid to late game and outline their goals in the all-important laning phase.

Goal: Becoming a Brick Wall

The only goal of a tank in a teamfight is making sure their carry survives. Similarly, tanks have a single goal in the laning phase: get tanky. Unlike teamfighting, there is only a single way to accomplish this: get gold. Of course, it’s never simple to get gold, and how the laning phase goes for a tank will affect their ability to do their job of soaking up damage later. So let’s look at the three places tanks are typically found, Top, Jungle and Support, and how they should be accumulating wealth and items there.

Image Credit goes to BurningTramp

Top Lane

Tanks are common in the top lane, and this is the lane where they have only their own kits and skill (plus the occasional gank from the jungler) to work with. The biggest problem with most tanks is that they have little burst damage, and their ability to bully their opponent relies on extended trades. Brusiers, their typical lane opponents, will either be able to out-trade a tank or beat them in an extended trade. So how do you beat a bruiser as a tank? First, and the number one rule of laning, is to know the match up. Most tanks have built-in sustain and defensive abilities, while many bruisers do not. This allows tanks to either mitigate damage in a trade or to heal back up faster than a bruiser after a trade.

As an example, we’ll pit Malphite against Jax. Malphite has an armor steroid, a move speed leech and an attack speed slow. When they go to trade, Jax will want to make the trade last as long as possible to benefit from his bonus attack speed and short cooldown Empower. Malphite can win the trade if he quickly uses his Brutal Strikes to mitigate Jax’s damage, then Ground Slams to slow Jax’s attack speed. After a few auto attacks, which Malphite should use to get the most out of his Brutal Strikes, Malphite should slow Jax and run away before Jax can take advantage of his short cooldowns and increasing attack speed.

As a different example, let’s take Volibear against Jayce. Jayce can deal a lot of upfront damage thanks to his poke and his hammer-form burst damage. If Volibear and Jayce go to trade, Jayce will do a lot of upfront damage to the bear, and probably try to run away before they can trade auto-attacks. If he isn’t too low from the initial burst from Jayce, Volibear will want to charge at Jayce and fling him back, forcing Jayce to fight and hopefully getting his Frenzy off a few times. Even if they get each other both low on health, Volibear will begin to regenerate thanks to his passive, making Volibear a tank who wants extended trades.

Aside from trading, top lane gets the most gold of any tanks, thanks to them being able to farm their lane (unlike junglers and supports). This allows them to reach their core defensive items early and possibly pick up a “luxury” offensive item if the game goes on long enough. Thanks to their high sustain and (usual) lack of burst damage, tanks in the top lane typically want to focus more on farming than trying to kill their lane opponents.

Jungle

Like top lane, tanks are common in the jungle. The primary difference between playing a tank in the jungle and a tank in the top lane is gold. Junglers get a lot less gold than the rest of their team, and this will make your laning phase goal of becoming tanky difficult. However, tanks in the jungle are incredibly powerful and their crowd control and initiates make them exceptional gankers.

The idea of a farm-heavy jungler has recently been popularized again by Cloud 9’s Meteos. While this can be risky in solo queue, tank junglers can make excellent farm-heavy junglers, as they have innate sustain or tankiness that helps them clear camps without taking too much damage. Unfortunately, many tank junglers don’t really need items to be effective early on and so most of them are better off ganking. Among exceptions to this rule would be Zac, who scales very well with items, and benefits from farming the jungle and amassing gold for mid-game.

Unless you’re playing one of those few tanks like Zac or Cho’Gath who scales so well with items, most tank junglers want to gank, and they want to gank a lot. Their combination of inherent tankiness, crowd control, and high base damages means they can lock down an opponent, eat up damage for their laners or turret dive, and deal a good amount of burst damage during a gank. Tank junglers like Nautilus and Rammus are perfect examples of gank-heavy tanks as they both possess a large amount of crowd control (or a single very long one in Rammus’ case) and can dish out an impressive amount of up-front damage early on.

With gold being so tight for junglers, good itemization is important. Two items that stand out are Spirit of the Ancient Golem and Locket of the Iron Solari. Spirit of the Ancient Golem remains an amazing jungle item, giving excellent stats for its cost and being a rare tenacity item that lets you buy something other than Mercury’s Treads for boots. Any tank jungler should be getting Ancient Golem as their first item, with Mobility Boots or Ninja Tabi soon after. The recent changes to Locket of the Iron Solari, Aegis of the Legion and Runic Bulwak (RIP) have unfortunately hurt jungle tanks a lot. The new Aegis and Locket are much more situational than their previous incarnations, and while the stats are cost-efficient, they aren’t really worth the item slot on most tanks. However, with gold being tight and cheap stats hard to come by, it’s not a terrible choice on jungling tanks. So if the enemy has a lot of AOE magic damage or you find yourself falling behind in gold and items, grab a Locket for a little health and MR boost.

Support

If gold is tight for jungle tanks, then support tanks are starved. Tank supports like Leona and Taric need to consider their item choices incredibly carefully as their options are greatly limited. Luckily, these champions also tend to have longer range CC, and are usually expected to peel rather than dive the enemy’s backline, so the task of getting to your teamfighting level of tankiness isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

In lane, support tanks need to focus on looking for opportunities to engage. You lack any real poke or harass, so trades are going to be about doing as much up-front damage as possible. If you have a more defensive lane (say, Taric and Tristana), focus on using your cc to pin the enemy down when they try to engage and don’t look for engages as much.

Item-wise, there aren’t a lot of options for tank supports. Sightstone gives a small amount of health and helps relieve the burden of ward-purchasing, while Locket of the Iron Solari is excellent due to its low-cost and gold-efficient stats. Should the game drag on and you can afford a “luxury” item or two, look to pick up a Chain Vest and Glacial Shroud or work on a Banshee’s Veil to give you a hint of survivability in teamfights. Remember, you should probably be focusing more on defending your carry than going after the enemy carry, so tankiness isn’t as much of a problem.

 

That concludes my two-part guide to playing tanks in League of Legends! My next articles are going to return to professional scene news and theory, but if my guides continue to draw good feedback expect another one soon, and good luck out on the rift!