This thread is generally for people who are interested in playing a tank, who want to just know more about tanks, want to understand their tank role better, and for people who want to make gimmick tank champion. The following things are what tanks should focus on executing to maximum effectiveness. So if you're new to the tank genre of champions, listen up.

• Survivability: Tanks need survivability, whether it is in the form of health stacking or armor and magic resist stacking. Some tanks go to the extreme and some tanks balance it out. Survivability is necessary for the tank to do one of the most important jobs, initiate.

• Initiation Techniques: Most tanks should be able to have a form of initiate combat. This is best done in the form of either getting there fast and control the team or control the team and getting there fast. This needs to be done in some kind of way other than walking up to the enemy team slowly because when you initiate, you generally want the team fight to be in that area. If you do flashy moves and control the team, then they are forced to stay there or leave the team behind. If you walk up normally, without any abilities, then they can travel to more a favorable battleground, or the enemy could just completely flee.

• Crowd Control: Crowd control is used for various reasons as a tank. Since you are bulky, you can virtually go anywhere you want within the enemy team’s ranks and control anyone you want. This is why champion displacement crowd control on a tank is the most effective. Since you have almost free movement, you can displace anyone to anywhere greatly increasing the effectiveness on these abilities. Any crowd control is good though and normally it has to be a knock up, stun, displacement, or slow. It is also important to know that crowd control should be used to protect your carries if the carry is fed enough. This allows the carry to open fire on whoever he wants without interruption.

• Threat: If you have 9001 health, 1500 Armor, and 1455 Magic Resistance but no one attacks you, why have those stats? As a tank, you also need to be a threat whether it is from crazy crowd control, high damage, or anything that can be extremely harmful to your enemy team’s strategy. If a tank lacks this, he is mostly underpowered as a tank. Normally, having the above traits is enough to be a threat.

My friend seriously thinks a tank Shaco can work because the clones is also tanky and some bull**** like that. Well he is flat out wrong. Aside from needing a few expensive items to become someone who can even take a beating, (Shaco sucks at farming, so these items are hard to get) Shaco lacks the things that all tanks generally need.

Survivability: Shaco only has it if he has a few expensive items which are hard to get and severly gimp any early game tanking ability. You have clone and Deceive, but most tanks do not have skills to survive and they rely mostly on stats.

Initiation Technique: Shaco can Decieve in which is only good as a flashy initiate if they don't have an oracles. Shaco has no hard crowd control either though so aftet he pops out of stealth they can run to a more favorable battleground.

Crowd Control: While the miss chance is nice, the slow is horrible and it won't save anyone's life or end anyone's life.

Threat: Only ignorant people would even try to focus a Shaco who has tank items. They have no reason to attack a Shaco as he provides 0 threat.

On a realistic note, the above traits a tank needs is why Dr. Mudno is underpowered as a tank. He is generally weak in all of those areas.

Survivability: Mundo's unique survivability comes from regeneration. This is fine until Riot made the Executioner's Calling items which completely shuts Mundo's survivability out.

Initiation: Mundo can hardly initiate. He can run in at decent speed and throw cleavers which only do a short slow. Hardly enough to keep one in place.

Crowd Control: He has a very bad slow...that is it.

Threat: Why attack a Mundo? He does subpar damage, bad crowd control, and he can just run away. Well you could always buy an Executioner's Calling and consider him a squishy.

I would use a different word for "survivability," because Shaco actually has quite a lot of it... just his techniques involve avoiding damage. Perhaps "mitigation" or "effective health?" Otherwise you have a pretty nice guide. I'd probably outline the common tanks and what each one brings to the table as a tank. Something like...

Malphite: Excellent initiator. Good farming and anti-carry ability in Ground Slam, decent harass with shard.

Nasus: Excellent farmer, can get very high damage for cheap which lets him spend the rest of his gold on being tanky. Strongest snare in the game. Lacks disables and has below-average tank stats though.

Rammus: Good initiator, great at countering melee carries and baiting.

etc

I think something that is missing is positioning control... that's something that Alistar, Blitzcrank, and singe do well. Flip, Rocket grab, and headbutt are great skills for:

A) killing someone, rocket grab is like a free kill in many situations.

B) getting the tank out of the way before he can initiate. Headbutt does a great job of this, getting rid of an opposing tank and allowing your team to start the fight ahead, focus firing a carry or nuker to remove precious damage.

C) getting a melee target out of melee range or a range target into melee: singe's fling is the pinannacle of this style of combat. If your Ashe is about to be uber pwned by yi... just fling him over your shoulder away from your ashe... Ashe gets to hit him during the animation and (as Yi tends to be Mr. Squish) you've just won that fight because he can't get back in range of your carry to gib them.

shaco can be a tank. guardian angel and aegis work extra well on him than other characters.

he also has aoe cc + blink, both of which are invaluable to a tank.

jitb counts as aoe cc.

people would attack tank shaco because he has other cc from two-shiv. the slow + blind.

I think Kayle is a great tank and i think she's a little underated as a tank. Bad part is she lacks of any form of initiation or a high damage output. She's preety much all over the place in terms of tanking , supporting , and ganking.

Thing about Kayle as a tank is that there's very little reason to attack her. Whether or not she's built to tank, her primary benefits don't require her to be anywhere near the frontline. I mean, it's not a waste to build her beefystyle, but she lacks the initiator and threat to be a tank.

That being said, she can support initiators very well with her ult. Fiddle + ult, any melee carry + ult, etc.

On the note of mundo being a bad tank....he makes a much better DPS. I have had some good success with Starks, then infinity edge, then mallet or veil or some health, as masochism and crits tend to be quite potent, though it took me some practice. Other than that, you have outlined the job of a tank quite well.