Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Cinco De Mayo: More Than One Remembrance

Today is Cinco De Mayo, kiddos!

But something else of note: today is a Tuesday, and if City of Heroes was still up and running this day would be a Tanker Tuesday.

Some background (taken from a fanpage I created ages ago on a now-defunct website):

Tankers are one of five original Archetypes for the City of Heroes MMO character designs. There's meant to be a role played by each AT, and a way of balancing these ATs out. Blasters are long-range damage dealers with little or no armor. Scrappers are close-quarters damage dealers with some armor to compensate for being in melee range. Defenders are healers and protectors with some attacks but not as powerful as Blasters. Controllers are literally crowd controllers, with some damage abilities but really their forte is Holding mobs at bay for others to wipe out. Tankers are armored front-line attackers that are shielded from head to toe, but with limited attacks.

There's not supposed to be one AT that is better than the others, but the Tankers kinda bend if not break that unwritten rule. Tankers can survive fights almost entirely on their own, if properly designed. Only Scrappers can match that, and even Scrappers don't get the higher Hit Point counts Tankers get that allow them to survive longer in battle. Certain Tankers (Fire, cough) have offensive capabilities that can rival a Blaster or Scrapper. A good Tanker can overcome the disadvantages of not having as many attack options as a Blaster or Scrapper. And an expert at playing Tankers can perform a game trick known as 'Herding', the ability to draw or 'aggro' a series of mobs together across an entire map if need be in order to kill enough of the mobs all at once. And to be perfectly honest, when confronting a high-level villain class known as Arch-Villain (AV), you NEED a Tanker there to get the job done because that Tanker is the only one with enough Hit Points and with the needed aggro control to survive the fight.

As a character build, Tankers became popular enough that entire teams were built around the Archetype.  On Champion server, the Tankers even formed an event on the first Tuesday of the month.

One month, Tanker Tuesday fell on Cinco De Mayo.  One of the main organizers, online name of The Ring, decided to throw a Cinco-themed Tanker event:

On the day of Del Dia Tanque itself, there was another large crowd of Tankers waiting at the designated spot in Kings Row. We grouped, we gathered, we danced, we waited for Ring to show up and start this gig. Ring did show, bringing along a special guest, Gen. Zaragoza himself! Sure, he was Level 1 and all, but the General had arrived to start the celebrations off with the proper style. We praised the General and then got the lineups going...


 We ran the Hess Task Force, with the ever-awesome MegaMech!


Ah, one of the best Tanker Tuesdays we ever had.

I miss City of Heroes.  I am not the only one.  The other hero-themed MMOs - DCU Online, Champions Online - just don't play well.  I guess I got spoiled on CoH.  Kinda waiting on a variety of potential replacement hero build MMOs - City of Titans is one, Valiance another - but it's shocking how there's few superhero MMOs in an age of a massive comic-book media wave of television shows and movie blockbusters.

Oh, and as for Cinco de Mayo, don't forget this:



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