The Rock: Tanks - the Cornerstone of Success (Patreon)

Following on from the previous article about Supports, I felt it is worth looking at many of the other 'classes' that survivors can be specialised into and as we've looked at the first of the two 'thankless' tasks in supports, it's time to look at the second "boring" role that a survivor can play. 

The Tank

For those of you who are not familiar with the term; Tanking (and tanks) is a term that stretches all the way back to text based online games called Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) and it is where a single player will aim to take most of the damage from the opposing mobs on behalf of the rest of the party. They will survive through having a large pool of health, being healed and damage mitigation.

Healing is not really a thing in Kingdom Death, we have a few limited examples of it, such as Acanthus, Green Saviors, Green Ring and similar, however for the most part healer classes do not exist. This is actually something I really appreciate, because I find that healing as a way of surviving is an uninteresting mechanic in games. I prefer forms of damage avoidance and mitigation because there is an inherently higher level of skill involved when each screw up or bad break is pretty much a permanent chunk of your health lost.  

For our Tanks in KD:M, we're looking at the following ways of tanking:

• AI Control - Damage Mitigation 
• Evasion - Damage Mitigation
• Block/Deflect - Damage Mitigation
• Hit Cancelling - Damage Mitigation
• Survival Actions - Damage Mitigation
• Armor Points - "Health" 
• Immortality - "Health"

A lot of these are relatively simple to understand, Evasion makes the monster miss. Block/Deflect outright cancels a hit. Survival actions such as Dodge, Dash and Encourage can avoid certain types of damage (Dash is used to 'kite' the monster and Encourage avoids things like Grab or Coup de Grace). Armor Points and Immortal both give you a buffer of disposable health that will allow you to avoid taking severe injuries. AI Control is a more nebulous concept and it has two ways it can be applied, I'll explain it in more detail when we talk about the early game tanks and the Spidicules/Slender Man combos further on. Hit cancelling is a relatively rare thing in this game, it's mostly confined to a few specific gear cards and secret fighting arts so it'll get it's own section.

Tanking 101

So what are you doing as a tank? Well your primary goal is to be the target of the monster as much as possible and then use 'gates' to protect yourself from severe injuries.

These gates are as follows:

• 1. AI Control
• 2. Evasion
• 3. Blocking
• 4. Soaking

1. AI Control

This is one of the more hidden forms of damage prevention, it is very hard to understand exactly how much damage AI Control prevents because most of the time you can't measure in an easily visualised method how much damage it has stopped. This results in it being overlooked and ignored, even by relatively competent players.

Now most of the time the AI Control is actually going to be done by your support, this is because you need the Rawhide Headband for most AI control. But, there is a weapon class that provides a lot of AI manipulation in its design - Clubs. Items like the Riot Mace, Skullcap Hammer, Whistling Mace and Gloom Hammer all allow for an offensive take on controlling the monster's AI. They work in various different manners, and we'll look at them in their own entry. But it is why I consider Clubs to be one of the two primary tanking weapons.

In the early game however, where Rawhide Armor isn't in abundance, you might well be the only survivor who can do the job. This is why I advocate the following build.

This is a basic Evasion Tank. Now the Monster Tooth Necklace is optional, but with it you will wound L1 early game monsters on a 2+, which is a great way of maximising the hits you get with your weapon, because you won't be swinging every turn. 

You combine this loadout with the Music Innovation line, which gives you access to Drums (for Rhythm Chaser) and Forbidden Dance for +1 Evasion; Survival of the Fittest (+1 Evasion) and Tall Grass (Most LY1 Early Game monsters have Tall Grass by design).  So you can create a survivor with the following evasion:

• Rawhide +1
• Monster Grease +1
• Rhythm Chaser +1 (until knocked down)
• Survival of the Fittest +1
• Forbidden Dance Lifetime Gain +1
• Tall Grass +2

That's a total of +7 Evasion against Tall Grass monsters and +5 evasion vs. the rest, that's a huge increase in survivability, and this is one of the reasons why I advocate Drums as your first non-Symposium innovation.

Now your job here is to stand in the Tall Grass and hit the monster occasionally, but most of the time you will activate the Rawhide Headband's ability and ensure that the monster you are fighting is going to attack you, not the other members of your hunt party. Because in the early game, everyone else is probably still wearing just a loincloth, so they don't want to get hit!

It seems boring, but honestly it's one of the safest ways to play early on, and it's another good thing to do if you are the most experienced player in your group, because everyone else gets to hit the monster while you concentrate on keeping them alive.

This is a good way to get to grips with understanding just how much damage you are preventing via AI manipulation.

2. Evasion

We've already seen in the above example just how powerful evasion can be, high evasion lets you lighten your armor because you do not need armor points if you are not being hit at all. It is possible to use the Leyline Walker ability which gives you +3 evasion for meeting its conditions

Or alternatively you can go with a build that utilizes Crystal Skin:

You can even combine these two abilities together! 

The advantage of these two abilities is that you free up 5 slots which would be taken up by armor and instead you can bring a load of other useful pieces of gear. There's a lot of power and utility available out there and you can make a lot of use of it if you are a Tank with space to spare. However, if you go this route, you want to make sure you're set up for:

3. Blocking

Blocking is a catch all term for various ways of ignoring hits or reducing damage. The flagship items for this are:

and

So Blocking boils down to either outright ignoring hits; via methods such as dashing out of range, dodging, shields, Phoenix Placart, Fencing Secret Fighting Art and similar; or reducing damage taken via Lion Skin Cloak, Silk Body Suit, Leprosy (Ability) and so on.

Ignoring hits is far more powerful and effective than reducing damage, because damage reduction has a hard minimum cap of 1. As many early game monsters deal just 1 damage per hit, the damage reduction doesn't work - But it'll get stronger as you move forward and face more powerful enemies.

Note in both cases these kind of things only work against "HITS", if monsters are damaging you in another fashion, which is anything that doesn't include the word 'hit' or an attack profile, then you are going to need to soak rather than evade or block. 

4. Soak

Soaking is your last line of defense as this involves you literally taking the damage yourself and sucking it up. This is not an ideal situation because there are some attacks that just ignore armor points entirely (Such as the Gorm's Retch or the Butcher's Bite). The preference would be to avoid these entirely via good positioning and AI Control. 

Sometimes though, you've just got to take a few for the team and that's where soaking comes in. 

Essentially you've got armor points, your injury boxes and severe injuries to suck this up. Most of the time the aim is to not take the severe injuries at all, but Gorment Armor allows you to suck up the severe injuries and roll with them.

(I really despise the affinity design of the Gorment Armor by the way)

This is a really risky way of playing, and you generally want to back up a build like this with Fighting arts like Tough (+1 to non-one rolls on the severe injury table), Unbreakable (Ignore 1 Severe Injury per lantern year) and other gear items like the Gormchymist potions or Dried Acanthus. This is because sometimes 1s still happen, bleeding tokens are a pain and the head location is a nightmare to get hit in.

However, it is really fun if you do get it working! You get to play a Wolverine type, regenerating from any and all injuries short of death!

So soaking isn't your best way of playing, but sometimes it is the only option you have, especially against monsters who hit so hard and fast that they overwhelm your blocking.

That's the basic principles of the Tank and hopefully you can see now why it's a very skill intensive way of playing when compared to other survivor types. You need to be able to position correctly based on the monster you are fighting, know when you attack and when to go full defense, understand what you have to do when the situation starts to get out of control and also know how to build correctly, because you're not just sitting there, waving a weapon about and trying not to get hit. You're literally the front and center of this fight and the others may well die without you.

Next time I'm going to run through a few specific tank builds and explain why they are built the way they are. This will allow you to take the principles used and apply them to other loadouts!