Tanks are not supposed to be damage dealers. They are first and foremost your initiators and crowd-controllers. That health and proteciton is there so they last long enough to actually do their job.
Your average carry, assuming he's actually doing the kind of damage required to kill a tank in less than ten seconds, probably lacks the defenses to engage an enemy team head on. That carry would be dead the moment he gets caught in a single hard CC. This is why tanks are needed, to give those carries an opportunity to jump into the fray without taking the full brunt of the opposition.
"But lots of non-tanks have hard CC!" Yes, but they lack the durability to initiate with them. Anubis, for example, has a ranged stun that's pretty easy to land due to its speed, but you will never see him initiating because by the time he's within range to stun someone, the enemy team will be focusing everything on him and killing him within mere seconds. It doesn't matter if a god can do tons of damage quickly, if they die instantly to coordinated attacks, they have no business doing the tank's job of initiation.
In regards to protections, I rarely ever find myself hitting the cap these days, unless I am facing a purely physical or magical team, which is rare in of itself. On average, you need four purely physical or magical defense items to hit the cap of 325 for that protection. This amount is quite excessive, and usually you just need somewhere in the mid-200s to be an ideal tank most of the time, especially against mixed-damage teams.
Then there's penetration... Raw pen is actually capped at 50, meaning the only possible way to actually penetrate more than 50 protection is with those %age penetration items like The Executioner and Titan's Bane. Raw pen items are really used more for killing squishy ranged gods, they do very little to punch through tanks that have 200+ protections. You must understand that without % penetrations, tanks would border on being unkillable without heavily focused attacks on them.
SMITEFire is the place to find the perfect build guide to take your game to the next level. Learn how to play a new god, or fine tune your favorite SMITE gods’s build and strategy.
Sunfall
<Veteran>
Prominent (29)
Posts: 588
View My Blog
TormentedTurnip
<Retired Moderator>
Awards Showcase
Esteemed (96)
Posts: 2246
View My Blog