League of Legends’ next class update will focus on tanks

After recent class updates targeted marksmen, juggernauts and assassins with varying degrees of success, Riot Games’ balance team for League of Legends is targeting tanks for its next update, as announced in a blog post Tuesday. Tanks have been chosen as the focus in part because of how many champions in the class have a flat mastery curve, meaning the bulk of your improvement on the champion comes in the first few games.

While we will systematically be looking into the Tank class as a whole, we will be primarily focusing our kit work on initiating tanks, which we call Vanguards. We want to give tanks more mastery and skill expression, as well as unique identities. This doesn’t mean we want every tank to require high mechanical skill, but we do want players to feel like the more they play a champion the better they get at that particular champion.

The update will focus primarily on the Vanguard subclass, which is made up of diving and initiating tanks. Many of these champions received huge buffs this preseason with the addition of the Courage of the Colossus keystone mastery, which often gives them the ability to dive in and start those team fights without dying, even when outnumbers.

In the post, Vanguards are described as "basically different versions of Amumu—they go in, do some AOE CC, then stand around doing ambient damage to the enemy team." The team will attempt to take a hard look at defensive itemization as well as the champions in the tank class.

Here’s a list of Vanguards in League of Legends. You can probably expect at least four of these to get major updates, and most to get minor tweaks.

• Malphite
• Amumu
• Leona
• Zac
• Gragas
• Rammus
• Mega Gnar
• Sejuani
• Rek’Sai
• Sion
• Nautilus
• Skarner