In MMORPGs and MMOs, there is the trinity: Tank, Healer, and DD. But where does the name Tank actually come from?
In many role-playing games and most MMORPGs, we always encounter the same roles: Tank, Healer, and Damage Dealer. Different classes can usually be categorized into one of these categories.
Why a Healer is called Healer and why Damage Dealers or DDs, whose main task is to deal damage, have this name should be clear. But where does the term “Tank” actually come from?
What is a Tank?
A Tank is usually a character that engages the enemies first and binds their attention. The Tank often wears better, thicker armor or ideally has more hit points than their other companions. Other representatives of this type bind the enemies to themselves, but have a high evasion rate and can thus avoid attacks.
While the Tank is thus engaged with the enemies and draws all their wrath upon themselves, DDs can happily slice up the enemies while Healers keep the group alive.
Different classes can fall under the category “Tank,” such as Warriors, Paladins, or Knights.
Where does the name come from?
The term Tank for a character with a high number of hit points can be traced back to the early 90s. At that time, multi-user dungeons, known as MUDs, were very popular.
These text-based predecessors of MMORPGs were played in the 90s over Usenet. This is a worldwide electronic network that emerged long before the World Wide Web.
Usenet content was presented in pure text form. In addition to discussion forums of all kinds, various text-based games were also played.
The term Tank is attributed to these multi-user dungeons. An earlier source is not known.
In the discussion above from 1994 about the game BatMUD, a medieval role-playing game, a warrior class was already referred to by players as “Tank (big guy with lots of hit points)”. By 1996, the term was so widespread that it was included in a book about web games (via Wikipedia).
How exactly players came up with the term is not definitively known. Whether tanks – in English Tanks – played a role in the naming is also unknown. However, it can be assumed that the term “Tank” spread rapidly among players of popular MUDs, similar to today’s gamer terms, such as “sweating”.
It is most likely that a text-based role-playing game from the early 90s is responsible for why we still refer to big guys with lots of hit points in MMORPGs and other games as Tanks.
Which games use the term?
Especially in online games, we constantly encounter the term Tank today. In World of Warcraft, for example, various specializations for the classes Warrior, Paladin, or Death Knight fall under the category “Tank”.
In other MMORPGs and MMOs, there are also characters that specialize in protecting their teammates, such as Final Fantasy 14, The Lord of the Rings Online, or EVE Online, where some ships can endure more than others.
Even in the team-based shooter Overwatch, the different heroes are now categorized into the three familiar categories: Tank, Damage, and Support.
You can read about why loot in many games has the familiar color code here:
