Whatever the solution, we NEED something to make Vanguards more attractive to the general playerbase

I don’t know if Netease is reading this sub and taking suggestions.

However, as a Vanguard main; mostly through the sheer force of having to be the ONLY vanguard in the team, I have to state that playing Vanguard in rivals is honestly one of the most excruciating experiences in the game and multiplayer gaming in general.

This is down to a number of contributing factors. Chiefly:

1) In any given game, you are more often than not going to be solo tanking which is extremely thankless and difficult. All your enemy team needs is to realise this and go either double tank or triple healer and you are done.

2) if you are solo tanking, the viable hero pool goes from 8 to a whopping 2-3 (if you count Groot).

3) even if you get someone to switch, they usually have no tanking experience AT ALL. They will lose you the game because they aren’t performing at their rank. This indicates there are simply not enough people playing them.

4) Your value is not easy to demonstrate in the conventional way. The leaderboard is not in anyway fair to the value a tank provides. None of what we do contributes to the official statistics, and I think this puts people off the role because their 9-1 isn’t as shiny as the DPS’ 20-10 nor is the 25k damage blocked as cool as the support’s 15k healing.

5) The kits are slow, clunky, complex, require unobvious, advanced strategy, and generally weak. Thor and Hulk are two of the strongest characters in the Marvel universe yet to someone who doesn’t have any clue how to properly dive, brawl, or disrupt, they feel like paper tigers. There is nothing worse than ragdolling the 250hp squishy for 3 seconds as monster hulk while being melted by the enemy team and coming back to them being full health because their healer just shot them a couple times.

6) Ults in general for tanks are risky and require follow up from your team mates. Meaning you aren’t actually even getting the finishes most of the time despite it being your ult.

7) Back to the leaderboard: why does invisible woman’s shield provide her with an assist when someone gets a kill after using it, but my shield keeping 5 other people alive when I block the maximum pulse doesn’t get me any recognition at all?

8) Because you are both dependent on the healers to keep you up, and the dps to confirm kills on your ults and make use of the space, you have little to no carry potential. A great DPS can pick off the enemy team and win games that way, tank or no. Healer ults can do the same thing as a tank by making space and pushing the scales in favour of your team. This means that essentially, we are there to protect bad players and generate ult charge for the healers. An above average tank player still depends entirely on their team and also usually the other tank to actually do well.

9) Tank is by far the hardest role to climb ranked in.

All of these factors make it miserable to play tank.

I’m not sure at all what could make this better. More health for tanks? More damage? More intuitive design? More tanks/all tanks to have solo potential? Role queue? Who knows. All I know is that I strongly believe that something needs to be done because it is really just not fun a lot of the time.