Edit: BTW, I spelled fighter wrong, sorry about that guys, just pretend it was spelled right.
Edit2: By tank I mean a damage absorbing character who is at least decently effective at stoping the rest of the party from getting hit, and takes a lot of damage so that they can allow their allies to keep doing their stuff.
As was stated in your 'Major Spellcaster' poll, the answer is "it depends". In this case, as much on your definition of "tank" as on your group composition and intent. Is 'tank' just "a sturdy melee character that's tough to take down"? Or is it specifically "a character that draws attacks to themselves to shield their allies", a'la the MMO definition? In the latter case especially, specific build is more important than broad class. You need a way to disincentivize attacks aimed at squishier, more valuable targets - in effect, ways to force the enemy to fight stupidly and prioritize what they absolutely know are the wrong targets. That is much harder to do with a competent human being running the opfor, rather than an algorithm specifically designed to be easily exploited.
[REDACTED]
Anyways.
The barbarian is a 'tough melee attacker', not a tank. It has one "tanking" subclass, and as much as I really like Ancestral Guardians, I'm also one of exactly two people I've ever met who knows it exists. The easiest option for the DM to deal with the barbarian is simply to bypass it. Hammering on the ragemonkey is pointless, any DM running competent foes competently will see that assaulting the million-HP ball of mad that takes half damage from everything is a waste of time. Leave just enough opposition in place to slake the thing's bloodthirst, then send the main body of your force against enemy casters.
Blood hunters aren't tanks in the first place, not with how often they sacrifice their own HP. Blunters are disruptive strikers, intended to hit hard and quickly while using their blood curses to debiliate enemies just long enough to make it stick. They aren't built to shrug off multiple attacks freely, they have moderate AC at best and no features that help them reduce or recover from damage. That d10 hit die does not make them a particularly sturdy class.
Fighters are Barbarian Problem 2.0, just generally with AC instead of resistance. The fighter choirtling about his 27 AC has no real complaint coming when the DM simply says "nah" and skips past the fighter to attack targets that are actually threatened by attacks, and short of specific feats there is very little any given fighter can do about it. Battle Master has a few maneuvers that allow them to actively protect allies, and there's the mostly-gobshyte 'Protection' fighting style, but really. A fighter gets one AoO, and it tends to deal an average of about tennish damage. That's not going to discourage a DM for long when the wizard keeps doing Wizard Shit in the back and making everybody's life hell. Again - you need a specific build to 'tank', not just taking a base class.
Paladins? Paladins are the one class who tend to make their allies tougher simply by existing in proximity to those allies, and paladins also make for the best combat medics since Lay on Hands is ridiculously good and also paladins have the armor and HP to forge into a fight to use Lay on Hands at need. That's still not tanking, though. Paladins have the best ability to recover from a bad turn or a particularly rough enemy assault, but they have even less ability to actively prevent it than fighters or barbarians do. Their only tool for 'tanking' is Compelled Duel, which is finicky and prone to breaking at the worst moment. Many paladins ignore their Charisma and dump their spellcasting abilities in favor of Moar Hitt Beter, which is a deeply boneheaded thing for paladins to do since their Charisma-based abilities are among the best in the game means their already limited tanking ability mostly just disappears outright.
The best capital-T, protect-the-party Tanks are grapplers, Sentinel users, and other characters that can forcibly curtail enemy movement and stop foes from engaging as they wish. Which includes the wizard in the back casting barrier and mire/snare spells to hinder enemy movement. Frankly, the best 'tank' you're ever likely to get is a battlefield control specialist Transmutation or War wizard.
"But Yurei!" I can already hear the complaints coming. "That's a controller! Controllers are different from tanks!"
No. No they are not,[REDACTED]'Tanking' is controlling an enemy such that it directs its attention to your face instead of the vastly more punchable faces of your allies. A tank 'Controlling' the enemy by putting its corpus in front of said enemy and inviting attacks is doing exactly the same job as a 'controller' that is controlling the enemy by placing barriers, snares, or decoys out there to confound the enemy's attacks - it is stopping dangerous blows from falling on vulnerable allies. [REDACTED]
Notes: Users are expected to be civil in their conduct, avoid being inflammatory in their posting, and not intentionally make their posts difficult to read or understand. Thank you
You left off Druid. Once you get Wildshape, Druid gets a ton of extra HP via Wildshape, can get grappling abilities from Wildshape, and can get spells similar to a control Wizard.
In my opinion, a Druid focused on Tanking makes the best Tank.
P.S. War Mages and Transmutation mages are not the best 'tank' wizards. Their abilities are too focused on Utility and Offense. Abjuration Wizard, Chrono, Gravity, Divination, and Necro all have abilities better than the Trans. or War mages when it comes to tanking. Abjuration gives the ward that you can use on other people. Chrono and Divination can force someone to fail a save, Gravity moves people, and Necro creates stronger minions to tank for you.
You can walk past the barbarian all you want, the barbarian can just go right back after you and hit you from behind as you try to attack the wizard. This was a dilemma we had in our game yesterday. We were fighting a Star Spawn Seer(gods I hope it doesn't give the MMM version, that books is trash), whilst stuck inside a locked room (NPC betrayed us and locked us in as they left). A party member had freed the creature because he wanted to just go around pulling levers and it released the eldritch abomination from his vat tank. Another player attacked it, after taking his sweet time to look at the magical armor in the next room, after another NPC and PC started grappling the creature because it was trying to break the handle to keep us locked in longer. DM kept hinting that it was trying to stall us for time on purpose. The creature teleported out of the grapple, click-clack ensued. DM kept hinting at the stalling and I asked if it seemed like us fighting it was part of the creature's plan. DM said yes and commented that it was a bit of a "catch 22", cuz we could just simply ignore the star spawn and all of us could just go work at the door and try to leave, but the star spawn could just attack us from behind the whole time.
One time I was temping with some folks in a oneshot game. The plan was to go to some giant camp and do something (never got to it, as you will see) but we came across an odd sight on the way. A few creatures standing next to some mound. Which turned out to be the corpse of a hill giant, and one of the creatures (which I found out later was an Aeorian Nullifier) was inside the corpse and then ate its way out. It handed something to a kobold that was there with it. The kobold grabbed some trinket in its pocket and touched it to the corpse, which sucked it in. We end up talking to this lady and her "creations" (the nullifier and the Monstrous Peryton), the cleric/sorc and zealot barb were like "this ***** evil, she's gotta die" and click-clack ensued.
During the fight, the Kobold, named Elsa, casted counterspell early on. So we all immediately went to kill the caster, ignoring her 2 brutes the whole fight. Well guess what happened? We died. The Peryton and Nullifier killed us all, and Elsa dimension door'd (or plane shifted, idk) away. All of us besides the barb were full casters (cleric/sorc, druid, me a wizard) and so we couldn't do shit when the nullifier casted anti-magic field on itself and then auto-grappled the healer and the barb. Meanwhile me and the druid (mostly me, since I was flying in the air as an aarakocra) were fending off against the peryton. Very poorly, might I add, since I was still focusing on Elsa. It killed me sweet little wizard hit points and then went aaaaaaaallllllllllllllllllll out on the druid as it chased him down. The druid healed me and then the peryton turned around and went back just to finish me off before it kept going after the druid. We TPK'd. Me and the druid were level 10 and the barb and healer were 12. Needless to say that ignoring the brute can only get you so far, because when you walk right past them you forget that they can just walk back up to you and still attack you because they are still there. Walking past them doesn't mean they stop existing.
Walking past a foe means they aren't tanking, not that they don't exist. If you walk past a rogue, that rogue is gonna stab you in the back, but that doesn't make the rogue a tank.
5e doesn't really do 'tanking' in the MMO sense -- the way opportunity attacks work doesn't effectively permit movement restrictions except by standing in a chokepoint and by consuming your reaction it winds up extremely limited in value. The only subclasses that even have tanking-related features are ancestral guardian barbarian, cavalier fighter, and armorer artificer. 4e was the only edition that really did 'tanking'.
The entire MMO mindset of a “Tank” and a “White Mage,” etc. is absolutely antithetical to how D&D works. The reason is because the DM is a real-live human being with a brain, and not an AI with flaws designed into it. You can’t think of D&D in terms of “builds” and such because every DM is different. One does well to drop the MMO mindset and just play D&D for the game it is, a narrative adventure. For more information I’ll refer you to a post I made last week:
Walking past a foe means they aren't tanking, not that they don't exist. If you walk past a rogue, that rogue is gonna stab you in the back, but that doesn't make the rogue a tank.
I didn't say anything about the tanking aspect, I'm responding to this idea that the melee character is useless because "I can just walk past you lolllllll", since people keep forgetting you can still be hit after you walk past.
The only thing that I will respond with to the tanking aspect specifically is that it's stupid you can't grapple as an Opp Attack. That's dumb. Let people grapple as an opp attack.
The fact that the melee characters can walk up and stab whatever walked past them doesn't stop monsters from walking past them in the first place. The whole tanking mentality - both barbarian players who get pissed off because the DM decides wailing on the beefmonster is dumb and wanders back to hit the wizard that's actually causing all the problems, and wizard players who can't fathom why they're taking damage when "the barbarian was in front of me, though?!" - is obnoxious and terrible. If spellcasters want to lob devastating AoE and control effects from the backline, they'd best be prepared to deal with the enemy trying to stop them from doing that exactly the sdame way they'd prioritize stopping enemy mages from doing the same. And beefmonsters who prioritize defense had best have an answer for when the DM decides wailing on the guy whose entire job and livelihood is "getting wailed on" isn't worth their time.
That's what I was trying to get across before my post got cut to pieces. You cannot "tank" in the MMO sense in 5e. Enemies in the game are only that stupid if the DM decides they're literally too dumb to live. Even wild animals know better than to keep attacking something when their attacks are having zero meaningful effect on it. Being a 'Tough Guy' is different than being a Tank, and expecting the one to conflate with the other because vidya gaems say so is nonsense. Would you sit there and continually attack the thing with ten hundred thousand million gorrillion hit points and resistance to everything you do that keeps heckling you with an iron poker while the guy in back with fifty whole hit points to his name and an AC lower than his shoe size is preparing to cast Literally Armageddon?
Why do you expect your foes to make a mistake you would've have made when you were twelve?
The entire MMO mindset of a “Tank” and a “White Mage,” etc. is absolutely antithetical to how D&D works. The reason is because the DM is a real-live human being with a brain, and not an AI with flaws designed into it. You can’t think of D&D in terms of “builds” and such because every DM is different. One does well to drop the MMO mindset and just play D&D for the game it is, a narrative adventure. For more information I’ll refer you to a post I made last week:
True, DMs have incentives rather than programming, but some builds make those incentives very stark. A cavalier past level 3 with the sentinel feat could be described as a tank. The DM can ignore the unwavering mark and eat opportunity attacks, but a "smart" monster still probably doesn't like getting hit.
The entire MMO mindset of a “Tank” and a “White Mage,” etc. is absolutely antithetical to how D&D works.
Something tanking like is not inherently unrealistic, 'holding ground' (to protect artillery and support) is a a real military concept and involves high durability/low offense units that are difficult to move past (ironically, tanks are not used to hold ground), but it does not generally function on the small unit scale of D&D, and the way opportunity attacks work in 5e does not prevent moving past units (3e and 4e opportunity attacks actually worked). It is dumb that the best way for a front line fighter to protect the back line is to run past the monster, because that way it actually triggers an opportunity attack if it tries to go after the back line.
Walking past a foe means they aren't tanking, not that they don't exist. If you walk past a rogue, that rogue is gonna stab you in the back, but that doesn't make the rogue a tank.
5e doesn't really do 'tanking' in the MMO sense -- the way opportunity attacks work doesn't effectively permit movement restrictions except by standing in a chokepoint and by consuming your reaction it winds up extremely limited in value. The only subclasses that even have tanking-related features are ancestral guardian barbarian, cavalier fighter, and armorer artificer. 4e was the only edition that really did 'tanking'.
Uhm, No. The limited resource means you can't take an army, but you can tank a single character, ideally the Big Bad Guy. I do agree that a back line mage casting spells that block movement is not really tanking. The idea of a tank is not just to prevent movement, but to make it harder to attack anyone else but you. So a true tanking spell cannot just block movement, it must have a limitation of short range so that the immobilized people can still attack the caster. But lots of effects do this.
5e ways to tank:
Paladins - all have the spell Compelled Duel. Many of their other abilities mean the villain has to fight you. Oath of Ancients has 2 Turn abilities that affect movement, Oath of the Crown forces them to fight YOU.
Fear prevents people from approaching you. If you are between the rest of the party, that can actually Tank an entire army of melee creatures, preventing them from getting past you.
Grapple attack: Restrains. As I and others mentioned, Grappling means you are tanking. This was like one third of our argument.
Sentinel feat: Speed becomes 0
Any of several abilities that let you block or reduce the effectiveness of an attack against someone near you, including Protection Fighting Style
None of which is 'The Best Tanking Class". It's all specific decisions made for specific characters towards a concrete goal, which is a much different situation than the uselessly broad "what's the best tank" thing.
Also worth noting that imposing disadvantage on attacks against non-you targets, i.e. the actual factual best 5e does in virtually all cases for a 'tank' ability, is not all it's cracked up to be. A critter with a +10 on its munch-face rolls that's swinging at a wizard with a whole 13 AC doesn't really give a spit whether it has disadvantage or not, that disadvantage is not likely to matter in the slightest. That wizard is gonna get their face munched pretty much regardless.
The whole Trinity concept that each character in a party must have one UND PRECISELY VUN job, towards which they bend every possible resource they can get in order to cripplingly-overspecialize as hard as they can, is a bad way to play D&D. Real fights are messy, real fights are chaotic. A much better strategy is to wolfpack, make sure every character has as many options as they can reasonably manage. Don't offload all your party's healing onto one poor cleric who never gets to do anything else - not only is that no fun whatsoever for the healbot that doesn't get to actually play D&D, it leaves your party incredibly fragile. if that one, single character goes down the whole party comes apart. Same with tanking - if there's one UND PRECISELY VUN character in the whole-ass team with more than forty hit points by level 10? Your party comes apart and TPKs the instant something unexpected happens and that one beefy boi goes down.
Everybody needs a plan for healing, even if it's simply distributed potions. Everybody needs a plan for when they're in the reticle and taking fire, and that plan cannot be "drop unconscious and pray the team pulls something out of their rumpus to save me". And everybody needs a plan for when they're out of focus and have an opportunity to burn their foes for it. if you can't contribute to a fight no matter where you are and what you're doing, you should re-evaluate your tactics and decisions.
None of which is 'The Best Tanking Class". It's all specific decisions made for specific characters towards a concrete goal, which is a much different situation than the uselessly broad "what's the best tank" thing.
Everybody needs a plan for healing, even if it's simply distributed potions. Everybody needs a plan for when they're in the reticle and taking fire, and that plan cannot be "drop unconscious and pray the team pulls something out of their rumpus to save me". And everybody needs a plan for when they're out of focus and have an opportunity to burn their foes for it. if you can't contribute to a fight no matter where you are and what you're doing, you should re-evaluate your tactics and decisions.
There's a mid-ground between zero specialization and UND PRECISELY VUN. Let's assume that's where the OP lives for the sake of conversation?
Walking past a foe means they aren't tanking, not that they don't exist. If you walk past a rogue, that rogue is gonna stab you in the back, but that doesn't make the rogue a tank.
5e doesn't really do 'tanking' in the MMO sense -- the way opportunity attacks work doesn't effectively permit movement restrictions except by standing in a chokepoint and by consuming your reaction it winds up extremely limited in value. The only subclasses that even have tanking-related features are ancestral guardian barbarian, cavalier fighter, and armorer artificer. 4e was the only edition that really did 'tanking'.
Uhm, No. The limited resource means you can't take an army, but you can tank a single character, ideally the Big Bad Guy. I do agree that a back line mage casting spells that block movement is not really tanking. The idea of a tank is not just to prevent movement, but to make it harder to attack anyone else but you. So a true tanking spell cannot just block movement, it must have a limitation of short range so that the immobilized people can still attack the caster. But lots of effects do this.
5e ways to tank:
Paladins - all have the spell Compelled Duel. Many of their other abilities mean the villain has to fight you. Oath of Ancients has 2 Turn abilities that affect movement, Oath of the Crown forces them to fight YOU.
Fear prevents people from approaching you. If you are between the rest of the party, that can actually Tank an entire army of melee creatures, preventing them from getting past you.
Grapple attack: Restrains. As I and others mentioned, Grappling means you are tanking. This was like one third of our argument.
Sentinel feat: Speed becomes 0
Any of several abilities that let you block or reduce the effectiveness of an attack against someone near you, including Protection Fighting Style
I believe the point was that tanking in 5e isn't like tanking in an MMO. Using WoW as an example (I don't know other games mechanics, so your mileage might vary):
Paladins: All the abilities in DnD require a save; which isn't a guarantee of success. WoW doesn't have a concept of a save for abilities that move players, and limited options for snares and roots (trinkets, druid shifting), and fear works unless you have fear ward/tremor totem etc.
Taunts are only resisted in specific cases (diminishing returns, an effect that doesn't exist in DnD). In DnD you can make a WIS Save
Sentinel feat: only applies to opportunity attacks, and there are ways to avoid it (teleports, mobile feat). In Wow, once a tank has threat; it doesn't drop without a mechanic to drop threat (taunt swapping, etc), which usually means the speed of the mob is zero
Grapple: Tanks in an MMO don't need this; its what holding threat does, and taunts help maintain. A mob in an MMO doesn't make a check to break threat. It changes target when something is higher on threat table, uses an ability or phase change that resets it, flat out ignores it because 'that's how it works' or the tank is crowd controlled (fear etc) which drops them lower on the table.
Protection Fighting style: This actually does map well to WoW (Intervene, shouts to reduce damage to other players, etc).
The real mechanical difference is there isn't a "Threat Table" that the DM must use to keep a boss in place and hard set who is being attacked. They may have options to move, and they certainly can take a risk and attack with disadvantage a different target than intended.
But you are right, you absolutely act as a tank in situations; think of blocking a doorway, or a barb and a fighter standing side by side in a 10 hallway. They block range with partial cover, prevent movement past themselves, and it might be the only option a bunch of goblins have without ranged weapons, is to attack. Of course, they could run and go get better weapons. Compelled Duel can work. But the flow and style is nothing like an MMO.
I dun' wanna. These questions bother the hell out of me, because it's always somebody fishing for an excuse to dismiss everything that isn't ZA BESTO.
Let's presume for a moment that it's determined that the Ancestral Guardian barbarian is "The Best Tank". Okay - now what?
Now, anybody involved who plays "a tank" - ever - is going to be expected to play an AG barbarian. Period. Forever. After all, the AG barb is the best, why would anyone ever voluntarily play something other than The Best? That armorer artificer might seem like a lot more fun, as well as bringing some utility tech and off-healing to the table, BUT NO! We must not permit it! For there is only ONE True Best Tank, and once determined that True Best Tank must be played to the exclusion of all other tanks Until The End Of Time (time, time, time.......)!
It's absolutely ridiculous and entirely the wrong stance to take, because all this stupid white-room crap doesn't ever bother taking into account party composition or campaign particulars. Maybe your particular party is super light on healing/CLS and therefor for your specific group, the Armorer is a better overall tactical choice. Maybe you don't want to play a meat mountain plagued by ancestral ghosts and thus the AG barb, however good it may or may not be, is the wrong choice for you.
There is a difference between making whatever you want to play the best it can be, and discarding what you want to play for what other people have convinced you Za Besto is.That difference is called "fun". "Fun" is why the best tanking I ever did was as a wizard casting Mira Images followed by Tenser's Transformation, with a +7 to Con saves and twelve whole AC, ripping a warped owlbear-zombie-horror-thing's putrescent face off with phantasmal dragon claws following the blades of my daggers. Ate every single attack that came my way, aced all the Concentration checks they caused, and averaged around fifty damage a turn because I remembered two-weapon fighting exists and is much better than usual with TT active. Is TT an objectively terrible spell that does nothing to protect its own concentration whilst turning off spellcasting in exchange for moderate-at-best buffs to melee combat? Absolutely - but that owlbear left our team's less sturdy warlock all the way alone while I was in its face nearly matching the GWPAM halberdier fighter for damage output and making my temp HP and thicc Con score do its job.
We won that fight handily and our team's primary healer (Celestial lock) was left unmolested to shoot freely and heal as they deemed fit because Kitty Wizzerd had the option of engaging on the front lines and pinning the second of those two unusually crunchy and unpleasant aberrant horrors in place. Halberdier could only hold down one, somebody had to stand in front of the second and take the eating. Broke every last single rule of 'Holy Trinity' combat in the doing, and you know what? It was awesome, and the right choice for that fight in that moment with the resources I had available to me.
The fact that the melee characters can walk up and stab whatever walked past them doesn't stop monsters from walking past them in the first place.
The whole tanking mentality - both barbarian players who get pissed off because the DM decides wailing on the beefmonster is dumb and wanders back to hit the wizard that's actually causing all the problems, and wizard players who can't fathom why they're taking damage when "the barbarian was in front of me, though?!" - is obnoxious and terrible. If spellcasters want to lob devastating AoE and control effects from the backline, they'd best be prepared to deal with the enemy trying to stop them from doing that exactly the sdame way they'd prioritize stopping enemy mages from doing the same. And beefmonsters who prioritize defense had best have an answer for when the DM decides wailing on the guy whose entire job and livelihood is "getting wailed on" isn't worth their time.
That's what I was trying to get across before my post got cut to pieces. You cannot "tank" in the MMO sense in 5e. Enemies in the game are only that stupid if the DM decides they're literally too dumb to live. Even wild animals know better than to keep attacking something when their attacks are having zero meaningful effect on it. Being a 'Tough Guy' is different than being a Tank, and expecting the one to conflate with the other because vidya gaems say so is nonsense. Would you sit there and continually attack the thing with ten hundred thousand million gorrillion hit points and resistance to everything you do that keeps heckling you with an iron poker while the guy in back with fifty whole hit points to his name and an AC lower than his shoe size is preparing to cast Literally Armageddon?
Why do you expect your foes to make a mistake you would've have made when you were twelve?
I know, I'm saying that everyone keeps acting as if just walking past and ignoring the barbarian is some uber-powered move that wins the entire combat in one turn. No. Because the barbarian will just move up behind you and keep hitting you whilst you're ignoring them. If you ignore them, guess what? They're not taking damage. The biggest problem on the battlefield is on full health and wailing on you whilst the wizard just casts shield again and again. You're taking all the damage and the barbarian is taking none. I'm not saying anything about how the fact they can still attack you makes someone a tank, or whatever else you presume I'm saying. What I'm saying is just what I said word for word, that ignoring the frontliner is going to be bad for you. Yes you can hit the wizard, but the ghosted fighter is right behind you and he's about to action surge. I don't care for y'all's beef with warcraft and MMOs and I'm not arguing with your point of whether or not you can "MMO tank" in 5e or whether X Y or Z counts as tanking.
You gotta pick your poison, deal with the damage dealer or deal with the mage. Ignoring either one means you get assaulted by the other.
Monologue in the spoiler:
One of the many reasons DMs focus on the barbarian instead of jumping past them to the caster is simple. It's the same thought process that comes with DMs not casting banishment on the GWM fighter immediately. It feels bad. In the banishment example, the player is out of the combat for a whole minute or until someone breaks the baddie's concentration. It feels like shit for that player, they aren't having fun. They're checking out of the game whilst everyone else gets to do their thing. It makes sense, the BBEG sees the warrior is very clearly the biggest threat damage-wise on the field, so they need to neutralize them as quickly as possible to save themselves and so they can kill the others more easily without someone at their back. But that player is feeling like shit.
If you play tactically every fight and always have your enemies ignore the tank and jump towards the caster, the players won't have fun. The caster feels targeted and singled out and the tank feels like they wasted their character because none of their abilities ever come into play. Their high AC means nothing, you just make them roll saves all the time instead of hitting them. Their long reach and sentinel feat doesn't do shit when everything just runs 3 squares out around them because they can see the tank has a polearm. Everyone will feel like "omg the DM is being adversarial and is always against us in every fight."
I was running an combat oneshot once, the players finished a fight but we still had to play more for the session to count for rewards on the server we play(ed) on. A player asked if they could fight a dragon and I was like "Sure." Everyone was a melee character except for the hexblade who had eldritch blast. That dragon never landed. Smart dragons don't land. I had the dragon fly up out of range of eldritch blast and/or dodge while it waited to get its breath weapon back and then it would rush back down and smoke everyone. That's what a smart dragon would do when they see that none of the tiny little shits under them can reach them. They didn't win that fight, but they got him close, especially when I let the rune knight yeet the barbarian onto the dragon while it was low enough. That's when they started actually having fun. The rune knight afterwards would chide/tease me about how I put up a melee party against a flying creature and never had the creature land. Now I stand by the fact that a smart dragon would never land, I told him just that. Smart 👏 Dragons 👏 Don't 👏 Land 👏 He kept saying that "but dragons are vain, they land and fight you on the ground because they are so confident that you're weak and they will take you head on." I just stated again, Smart 👏 Dragons 👏 Don't 👏 Land 👏 But the point of it is, they would've had more fun if I had the dragon land. It would make more tactical sense for the dragon to never land, for the archers to just target the wizard, for the lich to counterspell your revivify/healing word, for the big bad walking demon armory to run past the paladin and uppercut the sorcerer, etc. But will it be more fun?
Now I will say, that this style of having the enemies going after the physically weaker PCs or not having dragons land, etc, is something I do a fair bit. I know that treading this road leads to quite a bit of player complaints. Sometimes I stick to my guns and sometimes I look back and feel like I ran a bad game. It's about balance I guess idk. I don't know how to end this last paragraph.
I dun' wanna. These questions bother the hell out of me, because it's always somebody fishing for an excuse to dismiss everything that isn't ZA BESTO.
Let's presume for a moment that it's determined that the Ancestral Guardian barbarian is "The Best Tank". Okay - now what?
Now, anybody involved who plays "a tank" - ever - is going to be expected to play an AG barbarian. Period. Forever. After all, the AG barb is the best, why would anyone ever voluntarily play something other than The Best? That armorer artificer might seem like a lot more fun, as well as bringing some utility tech and off-healing to the table, BUT NO! We must not permit it! For there is only ONE True Best Tank, and once determined that True Best Tank must be played to the exclusion of all other tanks Until The End Of Time (time, time, time.......)!
It's absolutely ridiculous and entirely the wrong stance to take, because all this stupid white-room crap doesn't ever bother taking into account party composition or campaign particulars. Maybe your particular party is super light on healing/CLS and therefor for your specific group, the Armorer is a better overall tactical choice. Maybe you don't want to play a meat mountain plagued by ancestral ghosts and thus the AG barb, however good it may or may not be, is the wrong choice for you.
There is a difference between making whatever you want to play the best it can be, and discarding what you want to play for what other people have convinced you Za Besto is.That difference is called "fun". "Fun" is why the best tanking I ever did was as a wizard casting Mira Images followed by Tenser's Transformation, with a +7 to Con saves and twelve whole AC, ripping a warped owlbear-zombie-horror-thing's putrescent face off with phantasmal dragon claws following the blades of my daggers. Ate every single attack that came my way, aced all the Concentration checks they caused, and averaged around fifty damage a turn because I remembered two-weapon fighting exists and is much better than usual with TT active. Is TT an objectively terrible spell that does nothing to protect its own concentration whilst turning off spellcasting in exchange for moderate-at-best buffs to melee combat? Absolutely - but that owlbear left our team's less sturdy warlock all the way alone while I was in its face nearly matching the GWPAM halberdier fighter for damage output and making my temp HP and thicc Con score do its job.
We won that fight handily and our team's primary healer (Celestial lock) was left unmolested to shoot freely and heal as they deemed fit because Kitty Wizzerd had the option of engaging on the front lines and pinning the second of those two unusually crunchy and unpleasant aberrant horrors in place. Halberdier could only hold down one, somebody had to stand in front of the second and take the eating. Broke every last single rule of 'Holy Trinity' combat in the doing, and you know what? It was awesome, and the right choice for that fight in that moment with the resources I had available to me.
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I'm playing a gishy multiclass of Swords Bard, Swashbuckler Rogue, and Hexblade Warlock and in our next plot arc it looks like I'm going to be the only melee focused character so I'm pretty sure I'm going to be the tank and actually I'm looking forward to it. I don't have the Panache ability yet, but I'm gunning for it. I can't wait for the session when I can draw my rapier, point it at a significant foe and tell my party, "This one is mine" while they run past because I just deactivated their opportunity attack.
With Glamoured Studded Leather, a shield, the shield spell, and Defensive Flourish as well as Booming Blade on my OA, I think I will do a decent job.
There is a difference between making whatever you want to play the best it can be, and discarding what you want to play for what other people have convinced you Za Besto is.That difference is called "fun". "Fun" is why the best tanking I ever did was as a wizard casting Mira Images followed by Tenser's Transformation, with a +7 to Con saves and twelve whole AC, ripping a warped owlbear-zombie-horror-thing's putrescent face off with phantasmal dragon claws following the blades of my daggers
...Broke every last single rule of 'Holy Trinity' combat in the doing, and you know what? It was awesome, and the right choice for that fight in that moment with the resources I had available to me.
This: 'Tanking' needs is more of a what is needed at the moment and isn't locked to a particular class/subclass at all. I played a monk, with my son who did play as an ancestral barb, and the duo worked well together, based on the assumption that my son would focus a target, and I would unload on them. It was only about providing the monk advantages and NOT protecting the rest of the party necessarily (as lizardfolk, we thought they should learn to protect themselves.) But I've seen fighters/bards/hexblades do similar things.
And just like Yurei's experience, my best tank for a campaign was a Bladesinger. She could dance in melee and her silly high AC made her a nightmare. Until she met spell casters...then she turned someone into a giant ape, and they became the tank. Because ignoring the huge monkey in the room generally was a bad idea.
More fun, and less focus on the "Best" anything. Best for one group, might be mediocre for another.
Note: The blood hunter is not official content.
Edit: BTW, I spelled fighter wrong, sorry about that guys, just pretend it was spelled right.
Edit2: By tank I mean a damage absorbing character who is at least decently effective at stoping the rest of the party from getting hit, and takes a lot of damage so that they can allow their allies to keep doing their stuff.
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HERE.[REDACTED]
As was stated in your 'Major Spellcaster' poll, the answer is "it depends". In this case, as much on your definition of "tank" as on your group composition and intent. Is 'tank' just "a sturdy melee character that's tough to take down"? Or is it specifically "a character that draws attacks to themselves to shield their allies", a'la the MMO definition? In the latter case especially, specific build is more important than broad class. You need a way to disincentivize attacks aimed at squishier, more valuable targets - in effect, ways to force the enemy to fight stupidly and prioritize what they absolutely know are the wrong targets. That is much harder to do with a competent human being running the opfor, rather than an algorithm specifically designed to be easily exploited.
[REDACTED]
Anyways.
The barbarian is a 'tough melee attacker', not a tank. It has one "tanking" subclass, and as much as I really like Ancestral Guardians, I'm also one of exactly two people I've ever met who knows it exists. The easiest option for the DM to deal with the barbarian is simply to bypass it. Hammering on the ragemonkey is pointless, any DM running competent foes competently will see that assaulting the million-HP ball of mad that takes half damage from everything is a waste of time. Leave just enough opposition in place to slake the thing's bloodthirst, then send the main body of your force against enemy casters.
Blood hunters aren't tanks in the first place, not with how often they sacrifice their own HP. Blunters are disruptive strikers, intended to hit hard and quickly while using their blood curses to debiliate enemies just long enough to make it stick. They aren't built to shrug off multiple attacks freely, they have moderate AC at best and no features that help them reduce or recover from damage. That d10 hit die does not make them a particularly sturdy class.
Fighters are Barbarian Problem 2.0, just generally with AC instead of resistance. The fighter choirtling about his 27 AC has no real complaint coming when the DM simply says "nah" and skips past the fighter to attack targets that are actually threatened by attacks, and short of specific feats there is very little any given fighter can do about it. Battle Master has a few maneuvers that allow them to actively protect allies, and there's the mostly-gobshyte 'Protection' fighting style, but really. A fighter gets one AoO, and it tends to deal an average of about tennish damage. That's not going to discourage a DM for long when the wizard keeps doing Wizard Shit in the back and making everybody's life hell. Again - you need a specific build to 'tank', not just taking a base class.
Paladins? Paladins are the one class who tend to make their allies tougher simply by existing in proximity to those allies, and paladins also make for the best combat medics since Lay on Hands is ridiculously good and also paladins have the armor and HP to forge into a fight to use Lay on Hands at need. That's still not tanking, though. Paladins have the best ability to recover from a bad turn or a particularly rough enemy assault, but they have even less ability to actively prevent it than fighters or barbarians do. Their only tool for 'tanking' is Compelled Duel, which is finicky and prone to breaking at the worst moment. Many paladins ignore their Charisma and dump their spellcasting abilities in favor of Moar Hitt Beter, which
is a deeply boneheaded thing for paladins to do since their Charisma-based abilities are among the best in the gamemeans their already limited tanking ability mostly just disappears outright.The best capital-T, protect-the-party Tanks are grapplers, Sentinel users, and other characters that can forcibly curtail enemy movement and stop foes from engaging as they wish. Which includes the wizard in the back casting barrier and mire/snare spells to hinder enemy movement. Frankly, the best 'tank' you're ever likely to get is a battlefield control specialist Transmutation or War wizard.
"But Yurei!" I can already hear the complaints coming. "That's a controller! Controllers are different from tanks!"
No. No they are not, [REDACTED] 'Tanking' is controlling an enemy such that it directs its attention to your face instead of the vastly more punchable faces of your allies. A tank 'Controlling' the enemy by putting its corpus in front of said enemy and inviting attacks is doing exactly the same job as a 'controller' that is controlling the enemy by placing barriers, snares, or decoys out there to confound the enemy's attacks - it is stopping dangerous blows from falling on vulnerable allies. [REDACTED]
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You left off Druid. Once you get Wildshape, Druid gets a ton of extra HP via Wildshape, can get grappling abilities from Wildshape, and can get spells similar to a control Wizard.
In my opinion, a Druid focused on Tanking makes the best Tank.
P.S. War Mages and Transmutation mages are not the best 'tank' wizards. Their abilities are too focused on Utility and Offense. Abjuration Wizard, Chrono, Gravity, Divination, and Necro all have abilities better than the Trans. or War mages when it comes to tanking. Abjuration gives the ward that you can use on other people. Chrono and Divination can force someone to fail a save, Gravity moves people, and Necro creates stronger minions to tank for you.
You can walk past the barbarian all you want, the barbarian can just go right back after you and hit you from behind as you try to attack the wizard. This was a dilemma we had in our game yesterday. We were fighting a Star Spawn Seer(gods I hope it doesn't give the MMM version, that books is trash), whilst stuck inside a locked room (NPC betrayed us and locked us in as they left). A party member had freed the creature because he wanted to just go around pulling levers and it released the eldritch abomination from his vat tank. Another player attacked it, after taking his sweet time to look at the magical armor in the next room, after another NPC and PC started grappling the creature because it was trying to break the handle to keep us locked in longer. DM kept hinting that it was trying to stall us for time on purpose. The creature teleported out of the grapple, click-clack ensued. DM kept hinting at the stalling and I asked if it seemed like us fighting it was part of the creature's plan. DM said yes and commented that it was a bit of a "catch 22", cuz we could just simply ignore the star spawn and all of us could just go work at the door and try to leave, but the star spawn could just attack us from behind the whole time.
One time I was temping with some folks in a oneshot game. The plan was to go to some giant camp and do something (never got to it, as you will see) but we came across an odd sight on the way. A few creatures standing next to some mound. Which turned out to be the corpse of a hill giant, and one of the creatures (which I found out later was an Aeorian Nullifier) was inside the corpse and then ate its way out. It handed something to a kobold that was there with it. The kobold grabbed some trinket in its pocket and touched it to the corpse, which sucked it in. We end up talking to this lady and her "creations" (the nullifier and the Monstrous Peryton), the cleric/sorc and zealot barb were like "this ***** evil, she's gotta die" and click-clack ensued.
During the fight, the Kobold, named Elsa, casted counterspell early on. So we all immediately went to kill the caster, ignoring her 2 brutes the whole fight. Well guess what happened? We died. The Peryton and Nullifier killed us all, and Elsa dimension door'd (or plane shifted, idk) away. All of us besides the barb were full casters (cleric/sorc, druid, me a wizard) and so we couldn't do shit when the nullifier casted anti-magic field on itself and then auto-grappled the healer and the barb. Meanwhile me and the druid (mostly me, since I was flying in the air as an aarakocra) were fending off against the peryton. Very poorly, might I add, since I was still focusing on Elsa. It killed me sweet little wizard hit points and then went aaaaaaaallllllllllllllllllll out on the druid as it chased him down. The druid healed me and then the peryton turned around and went back just to finish me off before it kept going after the druid. We TPK'd. Me and the druid were level 10 and the barb and healer were 12. Needless to say that ignoring the brute can only get you so far, because when you walk right past them you forget that they can just walk back up to you and still attack you because they are still there. Walking past them doesn't mean they stop existing.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
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Walking past a foe means they aren't tanking, not that they don't exist. If you walk past a rogue, that rogue is gonna stab you in the back, but that doesn't make the rogue a tank.
5e doesn't really do 'tanking' in the MMO sense -- the way opportunity attacks work doesn't effectively permit movement restrictions except by standing in a chokepoint and by consuming your reaction it winds up extremely limited in value. The only subclasses that even have tanking-related features are ancestral guardian barbarian, cavalier fighter, and armorer artificer. 4e was the only edition that really did 'tanking'.
The entire MMO mindset of a “Tank” and a “White Mage,” etc. is absolutely antithetical to how D&D works. The reason is because the DM is a real-live human being with a brain, and not an AI with flaws designed into it. You can’t think of D&D in terms of “builds” and such because every DM is different. One does well to drop the MMO mindset and just play D&D for the game it is, a narrative adventure. For more information I’ll refer you to a post I made last week:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/135658-building-a-character-for-the-party-or-for-yourself?comment=20
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A twilight cleric.
I didn't say anything about the tanking aspect, I'm responding to this idea that the melee character is useless because "I can just walk past you lolllllll", since people keep forgetting you can still be hit after you walk past.
The only thing that I will respond with to the tanking aspect specifically is that it's stupid you can't grapple as an Opp Attack. That's dumb. Let people grapple as an opp attack.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
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The fact that the melee characters can walk up and stab whatever walked past them doesn't stop monsters from walking past them in the first place. The whole tanking mentality - both barbarian players who get pissed off because the DM decides wailing on the beefmonster is dumb and wanders back to hit the wizard that's actually causing all the problems, and wizard players who can't fathom why they're taking damage when "the barbarian was in front of me, though?!" - is obnoxious and terrible. If spellcasters want to lob devastating AoE and control effects from the backline, they'd best be prepared to deal with the enemy trying to stop them from doing that exactly the sdame way they'd prioritize stopping enemy mages from doing the same. And beefmonsters who prioritize defense had best have an answer for when the DM decides wailing on the guy whose entire job and livelihood is "getting wailed on" isn't worth their time.
That's what I was trying to get across before my post got cut to pieces. You cannot "tank" in the MMO sense in 5e. Enemies in the game are only that stupid if the DM decides they're literally too dumb to live. Even wild animals know better than to keep attacking something when their attacks are having zero meaningful effect on it. Being a 'Tough Guy' is different than being a Tank, and expecting the one to conflate with the other because vidya gaems say so is nonsense. Would you sit there and continually attack the thing with ten hundred thousand million gorrillion hit points and resistance to everything you do that keeps heckling you with an iron poker while the guy in back with fifty whole hit points to his name and an AC lower than his shoe size is preparing to cast Literally Armageddon?
Why do you expect your foes to make a mistake you would've have made when you were twelve?
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True, DMs have incentives rather than programming, but some builds make those incentives very stark. A cavalier past level 3 with the sentinel feat could be described as a tank. The DM can ignore the unwavering mark and eat opportunity attacks, but a "smart" monster still probably doesn't like getting hit.
Something tanking like is not inherently unrealistic, 'holding ground' (to protect artillery and support) is a a real military concept and involves high durability/low offense units that are difficult to move past (ironically, tanks are not used to hold ground), but it does not generally function on the small unit scale of D&D, and the way opportunity attacks work in 5e does not prevent moving past units (3e and 4e opportunity attacks actually worked). It is dumb that the best way for a front line fighter to protect the back line is to run past the monster, because that way it actually triggers an opportunity attack if it tries to go after the back line.
Uhm, No. The limited resource means you can't take an army, but you can tank a single character, ideally the Big Bad Guy. I do agree that a back line mage casting spells that block movement is not really tanking. The idea of a tank is not just to prevent movement, but to make it harder to attack anyone else but you. So a true tanking spell cannot just block movement, it must have a limitation of short range so that the immobilized people can still attack the caster. But lots of effects do this.
5e ways to tank:
None of which is 'The Best Tanking Class". It's all specific decisions made for specific characters towards a concrete goal, which is a much different situation than the uselessly broad "what's the best tank" thing.
Also worth noting that imposing disadvantage on attacks against non-you targets, i.e. the actual factual best 5e does in virtually all cases for a 'tank' ability, is not all it's cracked up to be. A critter with a +10 on its munch-face rolls that's swinging at a wizard with a whole 13 AC doesn't really give a spit whether it has disadvantage or not, that disadvantage is not likely to matter in the slightest. That wizard is gonna get their face munched pretty much regardless.
The whole Trinity concept that each character in a party must have one UND PRECISELY VUN job, towards which they bend every possible resource they can get in order to cripplingly-overspecialize as hard as they can, is a bad way to play D&D. Real fights are messy, real fights are chaotic. A much better strategy is to wolfpack, make sure every character has as many options as they can reasonably manage. Don't offload all your party's healing onto one poor cleric who never gets to do anything else - not only is that no fun whatsoever for the healbot that doesn't get to actually play D&D, it leaves your party incredibly fragile. if that one, single character goes down the whole party comes apart. Same with tanking - if there's one UND PRECISELY VUN character in the whole-ass team with more than forty hit points by level 10? Your party comes apart and TPKs the instant something unexpected happens and that one beefy boi goes down.
Everybody needs a plan for healing, even if it's simply distributed potions. Everybody needs a plan for when they're in the reticle and taking fire, and that plan cannot be "drop unconscious and pray the team pulls something out of their rumpus to save me". And everybody needs a plan for when they're out of focus and have an opportunity to burn their foes for it. if you can't contribute to a fight no matter where you are and what you're doing, you should re-evaluate your tactics and decisions.
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Methinks you're taking this too seriously.
There's a mid-ground between zero specialization and UND PRECISELY VUN. Let's assume that's where the OP lives for the sake of conversation?
I believe the point was that tanking in 5e isn't like tanking in an MMO. Using WoW as an example (I don't know other games mechanics, so your mileage might vary):
The real mechanical difference is there isn't a "Threat Table" that the DM must use to keep a boss in place and hard set who is being attacked. They may have options to move, and they certainly can take a risk and attack with disadvantage a different target than intended.
But you are right, you absolutely act as a tank in situations; think of blocking a doorway, or a barb and a fighter standing side by side in a 10 hallway. They block range with partial cover, prevent movement past themselves, and it might be the only option a bunch of goblins have without ranged weapons, is to attack. Of course, they could run and go get better weapons. Compelled Duel can work. But the flow and style is nothing like an MMO.
I dun' wanna. These questions bother the hell out of me, because it's always somebody fishing for an excuse to dismiss everything that isn't ZA BESTO.
Let's presume for a moment that it's determined that the Ancestral Guardian barbarian is "The Best Tank". Okay - now what?
Now, anybody involved who plays "a tank" - ever - is going to be expected to play an AG barbarian. Period. Forever. After all, the AG barb is the best, why would anyone ever voluntarily play something other than The Best? That armorer artificer might seem like a lot more fun, as well as bringing some utility tech and off-healing to the table, BUT NO! We must not permit it! For there is only ONE True Best Tank, and once determined that True Best Tank must be played to the exclusion of all other tanks Until The End Of Time (time, time, time.......)!
It's absolutely ridiculous and entirely the wrong stance to take, because all this stupid white-room crap doesn't ever bother taking into account party composition or campaign particulars. Maybe your particular party is super light on healing/CLS and therefor for your specific group, the Armorer is a better overall tactical choice. Maybe you don't want to play a meat mountain plagued by ancestral ghosts and thus the AG barb, however good it may or may not be, is the wrong choice for you.
There is a difference between making whatever you want to play the best it can be, and discarding what you want to play for what other people have convinced you Za Besto is.That difference is called "fun". "Fun" is why the best tanking I ever did was as a wizard casting Mira Images followed by Tenser's Transformation, with a +7 to Con saves and twelve whole AC, ripping a warped owlbear-zombie-horror-thing's putrescent face off with phantasmal dragon claws following the blades of my daggers. Ate every single attack that came my way, aced all the Concentration checks they caused, and averaged around fifty damage a turn because I remembered two-weapon fighting exists and is much better than usual with TT active. Is TT an objectively terrible spell that does nothing to protect its own concentration whilst turning off spellcasting in exchange for moderate-at-best buffs to melee combat? Absolutely - but that owlbear left our team's less sturdy warlock all the way alone while I was in its face nearly matching the GWPAM halberdier fighter for damage output and making my temp HP and thicc Con score do its job.
We won that fight handily and our team's primary healer (Celestial lock) was left unmolested to shoot freely and heal as they deemed fit because Kitty Wizzerd had the option of engaging on the front lines and pinning the second of those two unusually crunchy and unpleasant aberrant horrors in place. Halberdier could only hold down one, somebody had to stand in front of the second and take the eating. Broke every last single rule of 'Holy Trinity' combat in the doing, and you know what? It was awesome, and the right choice for that fight in that moment with the resources I had available to me.
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I know, I'm saying that everyone keeps acting as if just walking past and ignoring the barbarian is some uber-powered move that wins the entire combat in one turn. No. Because the barbarian will just move up behind you and keep hitting you whilst you're ignoring them. If you ignore them, guess what? They're not taking damage. The biggest problem on the battlefield is on full health and wailing on you whilst the wizard just casts shield again and again. You're taking all the damage and the barbarian is taking none. I'm not saying anything about how the fact they can still attack you makes someone a tank, or whatever else you presume I'm saying. What I'm saying is just what I said word for word, that ignoring the frontliner is going to be bad for you. Yes you can hit the wizard, but the ghosted fighter is right behind you and he's about to action surge. I don't care for y'all's beef with warcraft and MMOs and I'm not arguing with your point of whether or not you can "MMO tank" in 5e or whether X Y or Z counts as tanking.
You gotta pick your poison, deal with the damage dealer or deal with the mage. Ignoring either one means you get assaulted by the other.
Monologue in the spoiler:
One of the many reasons DMs focus on the barbarian instead of jumping past them to the caster is simple. It's the same thought process that comes with DMs not casting banishment on the GWM fighter immediately. It feels bad. In the banishment example, the player is out of the combat for a whole minute or until someone breaks the baddie's concentration. It feels like shit for that player, they aren't having fun. They're checking out of the game whilst everyone else gets to do their thing. It makes sense, the BBEG sees the warrior is very clearly the biggest threat damage-wise on the field, so they need to neutralize them as quickly as possible to save themselves and so they can kill the others more easily without someone at their back. But that player is feeling like shit.
If you play tactically every fight and always have your enemies ignore the tank and jump towards the caster, the players won't have fun. The caster feels targeted and singled out and the tank feels like they wasted their character because none of their abilities ever come into play. Their high AC means nothing, you just make them roll saves all the time instead of hitting them. Their long reach and sentinel feat doesn't do shit when everything just runs 3 squares out around them because they can see the tank has a polearm. Everyone will feel like "omg the DM is being adversarial and is always against us in every fight."
I was running an combat oneshot once, the players finished a fight but we still had to play more for the session to count for rewards on the server we play(ed) on. A player asked if they could fight a dragon and I was like "Sure." Everyone was a melee character except for the hexblade who had eldritch blast. That dragon never landed. Smart dragons don't land. I had the dragon fly up out of range of eldritch blast and/or dodge while it waited to get its breath weapon back and then it would rush back down and smoke everyone. That's what a smart dragon would do when they see that none of the tiny little shits under them can reach them. They didn't win that fight, but they got him close, especially when I let the rune knight yeet the barbarian onto the dragon while it was low enough. That's when they started actually having fun. The rune knight afterwards would chide/tease me about how I put up a melee party against a flying creature and never had the creature land. Now I stand by the fact that a smart dragon would never land, I told him just that. Smart 👏 Dragons 👏 Don't 👏 Land 👏 He kept saying that "but dragons are vain, they land and fight you on the ground because they are so confident that you're weak and they will take you head on." I just stated again, Smart 👏 Dragons 👏 Don't 👏 Land 👏 But the point of it is, they would've had more fun if I had the dragon land. It would make more tactical sense for the dragon to never land, for the archers to just target the wizard, for the lich to counterspell your revivify/healing word, for the big bad walking demon armory to run past the paladin and uppercut the sorcerer, etc. But will it be more fun?
Now I will say, that this style of having the enemies going after the physically weaker PCs or not having dragons land, etc, is something I do a fair bit. I know that treading this road leads to quite a bit of player complaints. Sometimes I stick to my guns and sometimes I look back and feel like I ran a bad game. It's about balance I guess idk. I don't know how to end this last paragraph.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
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I'm playing a gishy multiclass of Swords Bard, Swashbuckler Rogue, and Hexblade Warlock and in our next plot arc it looks like I'm going to be the only melee focused character so I'm pretty sure I'm going to be the tank and actually I'm looking forward to it. I don't have the Panache ability yet, but I'm gunning for it. I can't wait for the session when I can draw my rapier, point it at a significant foe and tell my party, "This one is mine" while they run past because I just deactivated their opportunity attack.
With Glamoured Studded Leather, a shield, the shield spell, and Defensive Flourish as well as Booming Blade on my OA, I think I will do a decent job.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
This: 'Tanking' needs is more of a what is needed at the moment and isn't locked to a particular class/subclass at all. I played a monk, with my son who did play as an ancestral barb, and the duo worked well together, based on the assumption that my son would focus a target, and I would unload on them. It was only about providing the monk advantages and NOT protecting the rest of the party necessarily (as lizardfolk, we thought they should learn to protect themselves.) But I've seen fighters/bards/hexblades do similar things.
And just like Yurei's experience, my best tank for a campaign was a Bladesinger. She could dance in melee and her silly high AC made her a nightmare. Until she met spell casters...then she turned someone into a giant ape, and they became the tank. Because ignoring the huge monkey in the room generally was a bad idea.
More fun, and less focus on the "Best" anything. Best for one group, might be mediocre for another.