Your friends or coworkers are all obsessed with some massively multiplayer game. They won’t shut up about DoTs, HoTs, mobs, pugs and noobs, and you have no idea what they’re talking about.

I’m about to do you a favor. This series will run down the basic game mechanics of MMOs, and hopefully make your time with your friends a little less stultifyingly boring, or at least comprehensable. (And frankly, a few of the people I’ve done pickup groups with could use a tutorial as well.) Today we’ll start with the lynchpin of any group, the tank.

In a nutshell, the tank is the big guy in plate armor who pisses off the enemies so much that they wail on him instead of the bearded old man in a dress who’s waggling his fingers and about to magically turn their blood into sulfuric acid.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be plate armor, of course. There’s non-fantasy tanks out there. But across games, the role of the tank is always the same: He holds them while other people hit them.

For this reason, the tank is usually the one with the best sense of how the fight is going. In a normal group, he’ll be the leader by default, since everyone else is reacting to what he’s doing. He starts the fights, picks out the strategies and issues the commands.

Tanks usually come with reams of defensive abilities. If they’re going to be the ones getting wailed on, they need to be able to stay alive. That usually comes at the cost of offense, which leads to problems with the next key concept in MMOs: Aggro.

Aggro, hate, threat… call it whatever you want, but it’s all the same thing. Each computer-controlled enemy in an MMO has a little set of numbers, usually invisible to the players, that determine who it’s attacking. Normally, it just goes by who’s hurting it the most. Healing spells also generate aggro for party members, as the monster presumably notices that if they go kill this priest over here, maybe the infuriating guy in plate armor won’t live as long.

Tanks usually have a number of abilities that are more threatening than average to use to keep the monster’s attention, but how effective they are depends on the game.

World of Warcraft, the biggest and best-known MMO, used to run tanks on the razor’s edge of aggro. It was a constant race to stay ahead of the damage-dealers and healers. Combined with the tank’s need to be a leader, this made for an almost agonizing experience. Imagine, if you slip up, not only have you lost for yourself, you’ve attracted the wrath of up to 39 other tired, frustrated players. Tanks were for people who took their fun seriously.

These days, with the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion, things are a little more relaxed. Tanks can hold aggro much more reliably. Blizzard realized that just getting beat on and protecting your friends can be a rewarding experience by itself.

 

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