Flanking:

General Positioning for Flanking: Circumvent the enemy tank by finding a route around them straight to the carries and supports. Usually requires a roundabout path away from team to the side. Easiest when enemy is too far pushed up, hard to do when enemy is close to their forts. Try to crash on the enemy team at the same time as your team and hold down targets for your team. (Note: Only a few tanks put out threat by themselves on the enemy carries. Better to focus targets with your melee/dive buddy to ensure you get kills)

Best Heroes for Flanking: Arthas, Muradin, ETC

Best Heroes to pair with: Sonya, Malthael, Greymane (any dps that like to dive onto backliners), Lucio (gives speed and shield for dive), Tyrael (protects the dive from getting womboed when you group on a target)

When to use Flanking: Whenever you have a strong advantage and the enemy pushes up, whenever the enemy is overextended and exposes their carries to flanks from the side, when your team’s general goal is to dive the enemy backline



Things to keep in mind when Flanking:

Cut Deep: Deeper flanks may take more time but usually are more rewarding. Remember, you only get 1 shot. Synch up with your team: You may see the perfect 5 man mosh, but it doesn’t mean jack if your team is all retreating because they just took their entire healthbars from Azmodan poke. Coordinate with your dive buddies: Easiest way to flub a dive is to split focus. All jump the same target and then move on when they’re dead. To the tank, that means cc’ing the target for your melees to attack. Most objectives encourage flanks: Infernal Shrines, Dragon Shire, even Volskaya, most objectives are built so that the team holding the objective is easily flankable while defending. It’s ok to let the enemy hold a point for a little so that they pack themselves into the objective and make themselves vulnerable to flanks. Sometimes posturing is enough: Flanking is for when the enemy is overextended and vulnerable. If they see you early and back off appropriately, the flank is already doing its job in keep them off their goal. Don’t kill yourself forcing the flank to happen.

Puts threat on the priority targets

Take little to no free damage while engaging

Less transparent than engaging from the front

Heavily punishes backlinecentric comps

Prevents the enemy from pushing up to far

Forces the enemy frontline to back up to their backline, causing them to group for aoe dmg

Super intuitive and satisfying to do

Weakness of Flanking:

Only can really happen if enemy overextends

Requires a divebased team comp

Just suicide if team gets properly peeled by enemy tank

More of a punishing positioning than one to just put you ahead



Conclusion: Flanking is, as I’ve said many times, fairly intuitive. Approach from the side and get on the priority targets. Just make sure to focus targets with the rest of your team still. For all the intuitiveness of the technique, it’s surprisingly hard to do consistently. Simply put, proper flanks require coordination from the whole team to crash at the same time. Because of this, flanks should not be relied upon to win you the game, and instead should be used as a punishing mechanism. Even just doing a single proper flank will put the fear in your opponents and make them less likely to push their luck again. The key as a tank is just paying attention to your melee player and make your job making his job as easy as possible. Lock down the targets they’re looking at to start the cascade. With dives, the first kill is the critical point. If you can get the first kill cleanly, the rest will fall in line. If you can’t get that first kill, or the first kill takes up too much time and resources, disengage and reset. Even 4v5, if the enemy team has positioning and cd’s and you don’t, the fight will not be a win.

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Gating:

General Positioning for Gating: Stand off to the side (in fog of war if possible) at about the midpoint between teams. You should be able to back off if rushed by the enemy squad and should be out of range of their team so they cannot dismount you. If the enemy team ever pushes past your midpoint, collapse on the heroes that advanced and try to keep them from disengaging so your team can kill them. If the enemy team does not do anything aggressive, you’re doing your job, so hold your position, or look to roam to other lanes. Try to stay mounted as much as possible.

Best Heroes for Gating: Muradin, Tyrael, ETC

Best Heroes to pair with: Tassadar (allows another ally to step up and frontline for you), Sgt. Hammer (laid back dps that wins unless hard engaged upon), any long range dps that requires the enemy to hard engage to answer

When to use Gating: During Laning phase or sieging when you do not have the ability to engage from the front, the enemy team has active threat on you, or you simply do not need to be in front of your team to keep them alive.



Things to keep in mind when Gating:

Abuse vision: Part of the strength of gating is that the enemy never knows if they’re fighting a 4v4 or a 4v3. When you’re out of vision, often people will engage thinking they have the advantage, even though you were always in range to punish. Stay mounted: Since you’re not actively fighting, try to stay mounted as much as possible. The extra movespeed lets you get engages and picks you wouldn’t normally be able to get and lets you back out easier if the enemy team rushes you. You still need to protect your team: If the enemy happens to land a good engage, or an enemy ganks your lane, putting you at a disadvantage, swap to a more defensive position and help peel for your team. This tactic is reliant on your teammates not running to their deaths, but sometimes these things can’t be helped. Collapse quickly: There is a fine line to traverse with how far up is overextended for the enemy team. Collapse too late, and you risk your team dying. Collapse too soon and you miss your chance at a kill. I suggest erring on the side of caution here.

You don’t take free damage. Ever.

Playing fog of war is critical at high levels to making engages happen

Very high reward potential in kills

Allows your healer(s) to focus other targets

Provides enemies significantly less information that playing the lane standard

Allows for roams and plays in other lanes while maintaining pressure on your own

Weakness of Gating:

Very unintuitive and tricky to pull off reliably

Reliant on teammates to not die to initial engage

Gives enemy pressure to push out waves before your team

Can be chased off position if enemy dedicates a single hero to finding you and keeping you dismounted

Requires a tank with some mobility



Conclusion: Gating is honestly the most ideal position for a tank to hold in laning phases in that it allows them to both protect their lane and make plays in other lanes. That being said, it’s also the hardest position to pull off consistently of all that I’m listing in this guide and does require some basic competence from your teammates, making it unsuitable for HL at some levels. That being said, Gating is super important for high-level tanks and required for playing against some heroes like Garrosh or Tychus who output too much threat on you as a tank for you to step up normally. I suggest all players who wish to play tank at a high level to try introducing this to their gameplay and to watch Korean professional play for much better demonstrations than I was able to show. As I said, they were the ones that introduced me to this style of tanking and they play it much better than any other region.