City of Heroes Tanker Leveling Guide
How to Play the Tough Super Heroes in this MMORPG
City of Heroes and City of Villains leveling is straightforward. Although these games give the player the opportunity to role play a comic book hero or villain in an mmorpg, the games mechanics are similar to those used by other mmorpgs. The tanker, who can be represented by characters such as Superman or the Incredible Hulk, fills the same role as warriors do in high heroic fantasy mmorpgs.
The word "tanker" refers to the ability of this archetype to take a lot of damage. The tanker stands at the front of his group being beat on by opposing non-player characters while the other members of their group do their respective jobs. Leveling a tanker in this comic book based game is not difficult. This brief guide walks a player through the through City of Heroes leveling procedures.
Starting Out as a Tanker
Neither City of Heroes nor its standalone expansion City of Villains contain classes that depend much on gear. The superheroes abilities are innate to the character, although players can have their characters earn influence to enhance their power sets. These enhancements drop from opposing enemies, are given out as quest rewards, or can be bought from certain shops in the game. Enhancements need to be upgraded, and enhancements can be combined to make them more powerful.
City of Heroes leveling as a tanker is achieved by going in and taking damage from the mobs. If a player is soloing, he needs to do damage at a slow deliberate pace using one of his power sets. The invulnerability power set is considered to be the most powerful tanker power set, but fire, ice, and stone skin can all be beneficial to a characther. Invulnerability and stone skin are defensive powers while ice and fire are offensive powers.
In addition to the primary power sets mentioned above, each City of Heroes archetype gets secondary power sets. The ice and fire secondary power sets have the same abilities as they do in the primary set, but their effectivenss is reduced. The other two powers in the secondary tanker power set, battle ax and war mace let the character wield a weapon.
City of Heroes Tanker Leveling by Grouping
The role of the tanker stays the same when leveling or grouping, although a tanker character who is soloing must keep an eye on his it point total. The tanker must keep aggro in groups while the other members of the group do damage, heal or perfrom crowd control. Tanker characters that do their job well allow the other group members to perform their group roles.
Resources:
Champions: the Superhero Role-Playing Game
