The Rock: Weapons, Concepts and Builds (Patreon)

Continuing from last time, we're now going to look at the Gear which Tanks primarily use, and then take these concepts and put them into action with some examples. We'll start with the weapons, then we'll look at the best 'pure' armor sets (non-Mongrel) for tanks, and then we'll move onto some more exotic things.
Weapons:
When selecting a Tank weapon, it is important to understand that you want to be working towards one of two tasks - completing Shield Mastery (early game) and mitigating the amount of damage you take outside of the monster's turn.
The first one is pretty straightforward to understand, you want a shield for the additional protection it provides (the other source of Block - "Sword Tanks" are pretty bad because Swords are not defensive) and at Master the ability to step in and take a hit for a fellow survivor.

When it comes to selecting a shield to train with, your ideal choice is the Beacon Shield (or one of it's two upgraded forms), but otherwise you're probably using one of the following:

• Knuckle Shield (Gorm)
• Leather Shield (Leather)
• Blast Shield (Dragon King)

The Feather Shield isn't suited for the job due to it's very low strength compared to its position as a mid-game shield and the Scrap Shield is in the same location as the Beacon Shield so you'll almost never bother building it.
Of the three options you see there, the Knuckle Shield is pretty much the only choice in the early game and the Leather Shield is honestly miserable to train with. So, surprising, the best choice to increase weapon proficiency for shields outside of the top ones is the Blast Shield. It has an enticing (1/7+/4) attack profile, which is not bad. The accuracy is a real pain, but shields rarely are accurate, so you live with it.  The speed and the strength is what makes this a suited tank weapon, and that nicely brings us onto the requirements for the ideal tank weapon in general.
When you are selecting an offensive weapon for your tank, your aim is to reduce the amount of damage you take during your own act. Monster reactions (and traps) often cause survivors to suffer negative effects, especially if the attacking survivor cannot crit. As a consequence, the most important traits for a tank weapon are low speed and high damage. High accuracy helps as well, but it is not as important as the first two elements.
Low speed allows you to contribute to the fight, but it reduces the chances you'll hit the trap and also reduces the number of reactions you take. You want a low reaction to monster turn ratio so you can allot most of your resources to soaking the monster's actions, this is why you'll sometimes see Tank survivors simply move and then activate block. That is the best reaction to AI card ratio in the game 0 to X (X is usually 1, but sometimes 2 or 3). 
High Damage is important because it allows you to maximize the effect of your low attacks, and this comes in a few different forms. The primary one is having a high strength weapon, you want high strength because of the design of monster reactions. They are three types, reflex, wound and failure. You cannot do anything about reflex ones unless you can crit, so they are not a consideration for strength values. However, Wound and Failure ones are two sides of the same coin.

• Vs. Wound reaction: Score wound, get harmed; fail to score wound, safe.
• Vs. Failure reaction: Score wound, safe, fail to score wound, get harmed.

I hope this simple pairing explains why high strength helps. But to put it with some simple maths, if we assign a +1 to any positive results and a -1 to any negative ones they break down as follows:

• Vs. Wound reaction, Success (1 - 1) = 0. Failure (-1  + 1) = 0
• Vs. Failure reaction, Success (1 + 1) = +2; Failure (-1 - 1)  = -2

This gives an approximate value of +2 for high strength (successes) and -2 for low strength (failures)
Now, this is a very, very simplified version of this equation, in actual fact the value of scoring a wound goes up a lot more against harder monsters and the value of reactions swings wildly depending on the situation, for example a Retch response from the Gorm that hits your head is horrifically bad to experience, where as a monster running away from you is relatively mild.
Still, what you can see from the simplified version is that you want to be succeeding more than you fail. Successes contain a total of +2 (0+2) while failures contain a total of -2. This equation also demonstrates why low strength weapons are such a gamble, you end up getting more of the two failure categories, which is way worse than the two success ones. 
The other half of 'damage' is the ability to deal multiple wounds in a single blow, triggers like Devastating X and Savage are desirable because they reduce your time to kill the monster. Clubs are also desirable because they have that ability inbuilt in their mastery.

The Perfect hit trigger feeds into the mastery very effectively, and this is in part why Timeless Eye is such a good mastery for Tanks. Also, as mentioned last time, there are a lot of Club abilities that are triggered on perfect hits.
However, if we are going to distill all of this down into a single weapon that demonstrates exactly what a tank is looking for, we can do no worse than the not so humble:

This weapon has pretty much everything we've been describing above, it has a good accuracy, low speed, high strength and it even has Deadly and Devastating 1 when you get the affinities matched up. The only downsides this one has is the Frail drawback and the fact that it is two-handed.  For clubs I consider the Skullcap Hammer, Bone Club and Riot Mace to be the best choices as these are all either very, very powerful for their costs or they have AI manipulation abilities.
This means that most tanks are going to be rocking either Grand Weapons or Clubs. However, there are two other categories that are viable for Tanks - Whips and Katars.  Whips provide a lot of AI manipulation in People of the Lantern thanks to the Rawhide and Oxidised Ring whips, but they require a lot of strength to make them viable early on, so they are probably better used by Bruiser class survivors (more on them soon) rather than pure Tanks. In essence Whips are viable if you are able to make use of the Provoke ability printed on two of them, sadly one of those whips is campaign specific and the other has terrible statlines. So it's rare you'll see a whip Tank.
Katars are the other option, and they are one I rarely see discussed. To be more specific, there is one Katar in particular that is an amazing Tank Weapon. The Dung Beetle Knight's Digging Claws.

Digging Claws tick most of the boxes you're seeking in a tank weapon (especially when Calcified), they don't ever get Deadly or Devastating. They also get a couple of benefits from the spec/mastery.

When you are attacking with a single Digging Claw + Weapon Spec, you're never eating the reactions unless it is the trap and the mastery has synergy with Leather Armor + Shields, both of which reduce the amount of ways you can get knocked down. (Again you'll notice how good Timeless Eye is for tanks that take this route)
Other great weapons include; Skleaver, Dragon Slayer, Perfect Slayer, Juggernaut Blade, Griswaldo, Rib Blade, Calcified Juggernaut Blade,  and in the axe category the Greater Gaxe & Counterweighted Axe are worth mentioning, but Axes do have downsides, unlike most weapon types, so you're probably better off letting the damage dealers (DPS) wield them.
OK, so this one has gotten out of hand again (it turns out Tanks are a seriously deep subject), which means (sadly) there will be a third part. But before we move onto that, I am going to close out with standard builds for Tanks and discuss them a bit.
Early Game:

We discussed this Tank a bit last time, so I'll skip on the details here.
Mid game:

As you can see, Leather + Zanbato is a perfect combination for a tank. You gain the ability to ignore bash, collision resistance in shield spec, Insanity to protect, survival gains and +2 evasion (to stack onto other +evasion benefits).
Late Game

We have a selection of Clubs here, note that you lose two movement if you can't complete those red affinities. So sometimes you end up going Bone Club + Second Club instead of Gloom Hammer + Monster Grease or you drop down to 2 movement.
Second note; Gloom Hammer is somewhat difficult to use as a tank, you need to be very clever with the positioning of your damage dealers and support. You should always aim to be the nearest survivor in field of view after the Gloom Hammer has triggered.
I apologise for putting this one into three parts, I do try and avoid these multi-part articles where I can, but Tanks are such a deep and important subject it's hard to skimp on it. Next time we'll wrap things up (I promise) with a look at some of the more unusual, but powerful tanks that you can get when you wander outside of the core builds!