How to tank.

[siegfriedliner]

I really liked tank classes in 4e and most of them had multiple ways of "tanking" because the guardian at least thematically falls into the model of a tank I think it is worth exploring how classes "tank" in other games to provide context to their mechanic in this one.

Now perhaps the simplest way to encourage enemies to attack you is just be next to them, in most editions of DnD most enemies could attack more often and do more damage to creatures adjacent to them. So when presented a choice between attacking an adjacent target or a far away one they would usually pick the one in their face.

Pathfinder 2e can quite often works like this, most gm unless they have a reason to do otherwise will have enemies targets creatures who are adjacent to them rather than move.

This was actually more true in older editions where every creature had an attack of opportunity as potentially being hit moving towards another enemy was a solid reason not to move. So a heavy armour fighter in 2e can tank by moving adjacent to an enemy who isn't adjacent to another of your allies and force an enemy to waste actions or take a hit to attack someone else.

A guardian can do this too and perhaps better, if they move adjacent to an enemy than hampering swing the enemy is forced to no only move but to try and shove them out of reach (not easy to do with a reach weapon) to attack another target.

The next way the guardian could tank was through damage mitigation using usually a reaction to reduce the damage an enemy was doing to an ally, the champion can do this with all of their main reactions and so can the guardian with its main reaction, it can mitigate the damage to allies in fact better than than the champion but at the price that it takes all that damage to itself entirely bypassing its heightened defences.

This can lead to a weird situation where an enemy want to target the guardian but isn't confident it can get past his defences so targets an ally to hit the guardian. Luckily will the guardians lack of offensives chops there is less reason to want to prioritise taking the guardian down so the situation shouldn't come up that often. A Guardian who want to live is going to need to learn fairly quickly not to attempt to intercept all the the attacks.

This brings us on to punishment, if an enemy attacks your allies you can attack them back, in 2e this is so far only achieved by a paladin with their retributive strike. But there are few better ways to demotivate enemies from attacking another ally than by both punishing them for attacking an ally and mitigating their damage so its quite likely they ended up taking more damage out of the exchange than the ally they are attacking did.

Next we have mathematical adjustments this is where our taunt feature comes in, where you apply circumstance penalties to an enemy attacking an ally. I 4e the fighter could apply a -2 penalty to attacking an ally by targeting an enemy with a melee attack. This could prevent enemies attacking an ally all by itself but for the fighter it was a key part of their punishment mechanic because they needed enemies marked to directly punish (attack) them for attacking an ally. Taunt definitely works to provide mathematical adjustment to discourage enemies attacking your ally but again it does so by mitigating your own defences (in a similar vain to intercept attack) making you more vulnerable. Which means that without a really solid amount of combat healing (which unlike the champion the guardian doesn't get natively) it will be very difficult to keep the guardian conscious.

The final method of provoking enemies to attack you is doing a substantial amount of damage to encourage enemies to want to take you out of the encounter. Most martials can do this though I personally rate in 2e the barbarians as the best in house for this type of tanking, they have lots of hit points and do a lot of damage so I often in play see them targeted with much greater zeal than other classes in fact they also get a little bit of mathematical adjustment with their rage penalty and potential clumsy penalty making them really tempting targets.

So from this my main takeaways is that all classes can tank so hey don't be afraid to get in your enemies face if allies are in danger and that actually the champion is really very good tank with options to tank pretty much every way one can tank. The guardian is a good tank class but it is the most vulnerable tanking class I have seen in any edition and depending on how its played its very risk heavy class features could get it knocked out of the combat to early to really be a fully effective.

PS I forgot slowing and confusing enemies and healing are also very good ways to protect your allies too #castercando.