Thinking about the words, though, made me think the “tank” in “tankmage” is a little redundant. The tanks we have are more like walls. They’ll provide some cover while the artillery hides behind them. Actually taking the idea of a modern tank and implementing that idea into an archtypical character design is fairly interesting. Powerful and resilient, but requires tactical wisdom and support in various fields to mitigate its vulnerabilities.

All I can say it; it works! And great too, because nerfing a character is practically impossible :)

Antix: That is true. However, for the social gamers, which includes lots of the RPers, this provides the ability to customize the character as desired. For the powergamers, it offers a lot more options while (hopefully) preventing them from becoming too over-powerful compared to non-powergamers, and for the greedy, well, for them it’s just a matter of adding in a loot system, I suppose. But that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

Zubon: The Kheldian is very close to what I’m talking about here, particularly in human form. However it is, again, a case where the designers tried to do a hybrid in a game that had dedicated classes already. If they port the Kheldians over to CoV, I think they might be better and more well liked over there. One big issue with them, tho, is that they have no real mez protection unless either on teams with Controllers/Dominators or in their tank form, which makes their human form a lot less useful than it could be, particularly since getting mezzed turns off almost all of their protection.

This feels like a good point to link City of Hybrid Damage Dealers. City of Villains: City of Heroes as it would have been done with another year’s experience. As it was done, really.

Because of this Developers must make games that cater to different needs and wants, a basic marketing principle.