Why do people consider the tank underpowered?

I can't fathom this. He is the absolute best close range class in the game because HE DOES NOT HAVE TO GRAPPLE to be effective. He can be mobile the entire time while fighting multiple targets and dealing persistent Damage over time from fire. He gets a free 100 health (thats a GOLD armor endorsement), which puts him at anywhere from 300 to 400 hp, depending on how much armor he takes. He has two crowd control moves (blind and charge 3) one of which can be used at any range, and the other gauranteeing victory at close range. These are on close to 5 second cool downs with only bronze skill recovery.

For anything other than close range, he has a hit scan rail gun. Hit scan means it operates like the sniper rifle. The bullets have zero travel time, as opposed to most of the other projectiles in this game. The rail gun in combination with the product grenade is a very powerful combination at medium to long range. He is on par with the gunner, assault, etc at medium to long range (though he cannot give suppressive fire nearly as well as those two).

He is probably 2nd best bot farmer, and best/2nd best bot PUSHER in the game (there is a difference, because while the assassin is good at farming, she should rarely stay with her bot wave as they march up a lane). Death blossom kills entire bot waves at melee range, and product grenade 3 stuns and kills entire waves at range. The cooldown on these skills is instant to 5 seconds, as opposed to the support's airstrikes.

The tank does not give a damn about firebases. Product grenade 3 + flame thrower = dead firebase, follow with charge and you'll kill that support too.

Take what I said about firebases, and apply to most turrets. Product 3 is an amazing siege tool at range and jet gun distance.

He stuns a jackbot every 5 to 7 seconds.

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Weaknesses

Weakness: Move Speed, very slow.

Compensation: Charge 3 on a 5 second cooldown. Jet pack. The tank has better mobility than the gunner when played properly. Jet pack lets him dodge slam with ease, and hover over traps to get in charge range. Oh, and he has double to triple to even quadruple the health of most other pros.

With gold armor, the tank has 300 base hp, and 400 after passive three. With silver, he has 250 base HP, with 350 after passive 3.

The gunner has a base 200 hp with a max of 300 if he takes gold armor.

The Assault has a base of 150, with a max of 250 from gold armor.

The Support has a base of 125 (and an undisclosed amount of health increase from his passive) meaning his max is 225 + his passive with gold armor. (Probably at or less than 300 total hp)

The Sniper and assassin have a base of 100 with a max of 200 from gold armor.

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Weakness: With good timing, Grapples/Slam/Assault Charge 3 can cancel charge 3.

Counter: Jump before charging. Slam will miss. Grapples will not work on airborne targets. The tank can charge in mid air. Use this.

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Weakness: VERY slow juice gain, as it should be. The tank is amazingly versatile and powerful without juice PROVIDED YOU LEVEL UP AND ARE GOOD WITH HIS SKILLS. With juice....*shudder*. BLOSSOM BLOSSOM CHARGE BLOSSOM BLOSSOM YOU HAVE SCORED A PENTAKILL!

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Weakness: Big. You are a big target. There is no sugar coating this. You are still more evasive than a gunner if you need to be with Charge 3. Also a hit scan rail gun lets you pop in and out of cover to harass better than the gunner at range. Also, you can take deploy 2 for instant health regen behind cover if you are taking too much damage at range. But yes, you will get shot. A lot. You are tough enough to handle anything but sniper headshots.

Oh, and to top it all off, you spawn bouncers, which are pretty nice as far as bots go.

So...why is it people say he is underpowered? He is out shined by NO ONE at close range, and only really the sniper at long range (putting him on about equal footing to the assault and gunner). Mid range is his worst area (outclassed by gunner and assault), and the tank has ways to compensate this (blind a target, charge to close distance, jet gun, then death blossom, or simply leave the conflict with your 300-400 hp).

My theory is that people play with the wrong endorsements. IMO the tank needs

Gold Armor/RoF (+100 HP, or +21% fire rate)
Silver RoF/Armor (+14% fire rate, or + 50 HP)
Skill Regen (-20% skill recharge time)

Your call on if you want 7% increased fire rate, or an effective extra rank of your passive. Skill Regen is mandatory at bronze for 5-6 second cool downs on your crowd control abilities at level 3, and skill regen bronze is probably the most effective bronze endorsement in the game. (you go from 0% to 20% reduction for bronze, and only up to 32% reduction for gold.)

I love the tank. He's fine as is. I don't think many people would consider him underpowered.

He's been listed as the second most underpowered class on this forum according to polls, and replies to various topics on the forums indicate people think he needs a buff, such as adding a slow to product grenade 3. He is also poorly represented or even absent from people's fantasy team comps in other threads.

Hes underpowered?? Wtf??? I pwn with the Tank, hes actually one of the most useful classes in the game.

I would call him underPLAYED but not underpowered.

The Tank is not underpowered because (Check all that apply):

[ ]I love Tank.
[ ]I "pwn" with Tank.
[ ]I saw a video of a guy on Youtube getting a good killstreak with it, so Tanks can't be underpowered!
[ ]Tanks are easy prey and I wish to keep them that way.

For the 3 or so people who don't fill one of these niches, do elaborate. I just figured I'd save us some time going through the "reasons" that are invalid and can therefore be filtered out.

It's not that they're underpowered... they have some bad match ups against common classes. Assault can kite them, gunner can just straight up kill him, he's an easy target to at least harass for decent snipers, and support just bounces around with the drain gun (this is only a pita with higher lag).

There's also his synergy issue from skills.

- You can't charge an enemy you hit with a level 3 product grenade (you blow yourself up)
- Charge is -pathetic- at level 1
- Charge tends to knock enemies away into mid range, where tank does NOT want them to be (I've actually knocked someone on to a platform and and above me with it...)
- Deploy serves no useful combat function against players (and also doesn't help in Blitz when jackbots come out because they destroy your stationary arse)
- He has several ways to waste all his jetgun ammo on a death blossom that doesn't actually hurt targets in range (being grappled out of it, just after juicing, while doing charge)
- Product Grenade, regular jet gun fire, and rail gun fire all take accuracy bordering on sniper level to hit someone (this wouldn't be so bad if not for easy mode of playing gunner)
- Jet Gun is grossly effected by lag (at least until the patch), making it do no damage 'white' hits on players. (This happens on support guns bunny hopping around more then anyone else for some reason)


He's not underpowered... he just needs some tweaks to make him flow better.

I actually think that the Assault is the most balanced class with the exception of Charge 3 throwing the victim way too far.

The Tank seems alright on paper but as noted above he falls short in actual execution. The medium range combat that is outside of the Tank's Jet Gun range is 80-90% of all combat and the Railgun is just not practical in most fights. The only reason why the Pyro worked in TF2 is because he was fast. Given the tortoise-like quality of the Tank, only a fool would fight one at close range and even a Gunner can destroy one head-to-head by spooling.

Also note that due to the small stream from the Jet Gun (and Railgun) the hit detection is always a bit off in moderate latency games. If the Jet Gun actually produced a contrail similar to a real jet engine then hit detection might not be so unforgiving.

Yes, the Tank needs some tweaking.

Yeah, I've actually described the Tank to someone as basically being the TF2 pyro, except slow and a huge target

A well played assault is capable of kiting a tank, and is probably the toughest foe for a tank to fight other than a base camping sniper. The assault dominates at mid range, so this is no surprise.

The gunner on the other hand is pretty much my second favorite class to fight against as a tank. Huge, slow, and very immobile when shooting the mini gun. Can and will always be blinded. Easy target for the rail gun. Can be out harassed at range provided the tank has the slightest bit of cover. The gunner only consistently gives me trouble at mid range. At close range, slam is easily dodgeable with jet pack and a jumping charge. A blinded, knocked over gunner does little damage (and is probably already dead).

His only poor skill is deploy, everything else works perfectly for synergy as far as I'm concerned.

The tank is fully capable of standing in the middle of a cluster and surviving with quite a bit of health if properly built. Charge usually takes you through the cluster instead of on top of it anyway (or just follow with a jump if you REALLY can't take the damage).

Lots of skills in this game are pathetic at level 1. It is good at 2 and amazing at three, so I don't know why this is really mentioned.

Another reason charge 3 is important. It knocks people down rather than back. (Barring odd physics glitches)

Agreed, deploy is very silly minus the health regen and moneyball sieging. Then again, the gunner has grapple.

I'll give you the grapple, but trying to counter death blossom with a grapple is a recipe for respawn. The other two are user error unless the game mechanics change, and don't make or break his performance.

The gunner has to expose himself much more than the tank to do any kind of damage at long range. Jet gun is EASY to aim. Product and hitscan take considerable skill, but certainly does not make him underpowered.

Lag related issues are stretching it in terms of balance discussion.

The 80-90% estimate is WAY off, and good tanks have very little problem closing the distance on any classes other than good assaults/assassins.

The tank has utility mobility rather than high base movement speed. His positioning changes are sudden and come in bursts. I've given my opinion on the gunner match up above. The gunner wins if he has enough of a drop. Even then, I've turned, blinded, charged, and killed more than my fair share of gunners.

Lag hurts every class in the game minus maybe the support, and is silly to hold against any class in determining balance.

I play Assassin and Tank, and both suffer from the same issue: every Pro has a close combat attack. The Assault's Charge rarely misses the Tank because he's a huge target. The Sniper's Grapple takes a little more luck, but still works. The Gunner's Slam, combined with the lolslowminigun is a big threat. Support has a Shotgun, and every pellet will hit your egg-shaped arse. A good Assassin will avoid you , or spam shuriken at you and move in for the kill later. Enemy Tanks...a Tank battle generally comes down to who charges the other/uses the Railgun to the best of it's abilities.

There is no point of making a dedicated close-combat class when every class has an excellent close-combat move.

That said, the Tank can be an excellent long range class. The Product Grenade and Railgun can take down Turrets quickly. Edging Turrets with the Jet Gun is possible for the last two Turrets next to the Moneyball. A Juiced Tank tears the place up. Bots are nothing but Juice boxes and coins in front of you.

Once lag-related issues are sorted out, and you can Charge enemies without being plucked out of your Charge and golf-clubbed out of the Arena, there will be less QQ'ing. Until then...

I will have to disagree with that, mortar is a nice way to avoid being exposed as a gunner

Gunners+assaults+supports are better in closerange.

Tanks weapons dont do much damage at all, his skills have a somewhat poor synergy and he isnt that tanky in the slightest

Putting all opinions of this class aside, kicking *** with a class doesn't mean it isn't underpowered. Maybe you're just a good/decent player but could do a little better as a different class or maybe that class suits your playstyle/abilities. Under/overpowered is all within the context of the different options available to you.

fyi, All classes have a grapple. Tank has a grapple when his Railgun is equipped.

I used to mainly play Assault with some Tank on the side now it's switched.

I assume the tank is "underpowered" because it's the hardest class to play well.

This

I put up like a 32-19-5 game last night (which we won) as tank

Tank is easily my least played pro, the slow style isn't my thing

If you play the tank how its supposed to be played and not just try to face charge into them and wtfbbqpwn with the jet gun, the tank is an amazing asset to any team and far from underpowered

Now I do agree that charge and product3 has a lil iffy synergy but that's fine, just don't charge into your bomb...simple

Just like assault shouldn't detonate a bomb they are standing in the radius of ect

The tanks only real threat imo is the assault, noobgrapplerank3 means even if you close the distance on him and drop him to a sliver of hp, good chance is your still gonna die
and they melt you at medium range

the tank is a lot like the sin, he pushes lanes and destroys turrets like a champ!
And hes just plain scary when juiced

the rail does have some hit detection problems though, as much as i love it
But other then support all classes are having trouble with the lag

I think another issue with the tank could be the surprisingly small hitbox on the Jet Gun. I'm aware this simply means it takes more skill to hit with, but it can be a big problem in laggy situations and against a bunnyhopping target.

As stated elsewhere, I think the Tank's biggest problem is that most other classes have an answer to their close range combat. Gunner's outdamage them with their minigun, assaults can outrun you/hover and unload with their rifle or tag you with a bomb, supports take you out in two shotgun blasts or tag with airstrike, snipers can grapple you away (though they're not bad at close for a tank). Assassins are easy prey at close range, true, but only a noob assassin will stick in close combat with a tank.

All of this boils down into one very important point: Tanks require Charge 3 to fight other pros effectively, at least in my opinion. Charge 3 answers a lot of the Tank's problems at close range, since it will insta-kill the light classes (Sniper and Assassin), reduce medium classes to a sliver that can easily finished off thanks to knockdown (Assault and Support), and damage and stun the heavies enough to kill them off first barring a huge damage lead on their part (Gunner or Tank).

If you want to corner-camp the entire match then a Tank can be quite powerful. Other than that the Tank is not going to catch an opponent unaware. Playing styles are one thing but the Tank requires a specific strategy and any change in this formula makes him quite underpowered.

A Tank in the open is a slow, giant target. A Tank on the upper levels is a slow, giant target. A Tank that you can't hit, and hopefully can't see, is the only properly positioned Tank. The problem is that most maps do not support this type of playing style.

Whenever I see a Tank I don't attack them right away but think about where I want to fight them. Then I lure them into combat at range to see if they engage or flee. If they maintain their cover and fire back with the Railgun then you have the only response that works. If they ever leave their cover they are as good as dead. Now you can't always rush a Tank when they are in cover but you can harass them. Again the only thing they can do is stay in their cover and counter snipe.

With only one good method of playing a Tank I fail to see how playing style matters; you either conform to corner-camping or you die, a lot.

Later in the round, when the bots seem to spawn quicker and in larger Black Jack numbers, the Tank is phenomenal as a lane pusher and/or money ball protector. I've found the best way to approach as a Tank (if you want to be offensive), is to do so with a group of black jacks.

That isn't going to be much of a revelation to most people here, but Tank is starting to grow on me now that I'm using his railgun more.