Class Roles - Tank or Rodeo Clown

The archetypal concept of the tank assumes that PvE opponents have the mental capacity of cattle. Instead of a monster intelligently attacking what would make his enemy most vulnerable (the Healer) or what is the greatest actual threat (the DPS), it attacks the one opponent that isthe smallest real threat and the hardest to kill: the Rodeo Clown... er Tank.

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I'm a little late replying, but wanted to share something.

I was playing first release of EQ back in the day and saw what I believe were the first uses of terms like tank, nuke, --zor, newbie (became noob, then nub as averege gamer IQ diminished), mob, train (many mobs all aggroed and kited)and so on. Some words I don't remember because they were either EQ-specific or fell out of use, and others were stolen from other genres of gaming (zerg comes to mind).

All of them seem to have a story behind them, and while you can't find the one person who made each change, you can logically track the progression of an idea.

The parent terms used before "tank" were often in reference to an hp pool or mana pool. A healer was constantly refilling a pool of hp, or a "tank" of hp. At that time, you could have a "full tank" of mana before an important fight, and tank classes would ask a healer to "top me off."

After awhile, it became the norm to refer to a player class by a role rather than the class name, such as "nuke" (DPS was not in use at that time), "stealth," or the warrior-types, which became known simply as "tanks" because their hp pool was the only thing that really mattered to other classes, while the total mana pools of magical classes were not really scrutinized as heavily-- and so not referred to as much. There wasn't really anything else to call an armored aggro class that was easy to type and universally understood.

For people that came later to the MMO scene, the term "tank" made sense because it gave them an image of an armored vehicle, and so the term has persisted without it's original context, lol!

I'd like to also reply separately to say that character in MMOs that occupy space or have "collision detection," in dev-speak, have been tried many times.

The problem-- and many people don't realize this-- is that in any MMO interaction, there is about a .5 sec delay between any action your character takes, and what others see. When choosing a lineup of strategically-minded attackes or defenses, it isn't much of an issue, as the player with the best preparations (level, stats, gear, abilities) or experience (when to fight/run, defend/attack, heal/potion, ect.) will usually win.

Notice how most games now have a "global recast timer?" This places a buffer on just how quickly any character can use abilities, giving the game server leeway in its constant attempt to keep everyone in time with each other. Otherwise, players with better connection speed or hardware would have an advantage far beyond what they already do, and strategy would be nearly impossible to employ with inferior means. Even first-person-shooter games suffer from this problem, and you may find you have been shot AFTER dodging around a corner, or that you were right on target when in fact your victim has found cover, depending on how the game handles it.

Not a bad solution to an impossible problem (so far), brilliant, in fact. Still, when you start to make character placement an important variable, you run into a lot of strangeness that can't be fixed with recast timers. As it is, getting attacked from behind will not always look right, as the attacking character has already moved to another spot by the time your own character registered having been hit.

Collision detection is even more difficult. With everyone .5 sec out of synch with each other (or more), you can never really know if you are actually in front of the character you are trying to obstruct. The best you are able to do as a player is to try and predict a path of travel a few paces ahead of time and pretend that your opponent is actually there. Basically, you have to get a lead on them and hope they aren't moving too erratically. This is possible in the opening of group vs group encounters, as the two sides meet and clash with melees out front and ranged in the back, but once the madness is well under way, there's just no way to make use of it in the confusion except in very confined quarters.

It's a problem that will have to wait for technology to improve so that our internet (or whatever it's called by then) is as fast as our processing. (fiber optics?) For now, though, the only way to make use of collision would be to slow down the relative movement of characters until we were all moving as if in slow motion, lol.

Come to think of it, that could work for a game based on naval battles or some such...

My general response to the ideas in this article was "Guild Wars can do that". Body blocking? Check (opponents only, though). Decent tank damage? Check. All sorts of nasty status effects and counters? Check. The main thing I can see missing is "attacking from the rear". GW massively increases the chance of a critical hit (max damage + bonus) when you're moving directly away from your foe, but otherwise there's no special "facing" rules. Also, Guild Wars aggro mechanics preferentially target weaker characters and casters, which means that tanks must actively focus on beating the bad guys up or use body blocks or snares to prevent foes from running off and beating up the support troops (or using ranged attacks to do the same).

Possibly this is a consequence of the PvP focus in the game engine. Since human players aren't going to be affected by a simple "aggro rating", the game must implement active mechanisms to allow tanks to lock down foes.