Battle of the Tanks – Heavy Weapons Guy VS Braum

You remember a while back I did those Battle of the Healers articles? Well, I recently spotted this week’s free hero rotation in League of Legends and saw a guy called Braum. And I played him. And he’s like our beloved Heavy. Since I had previously compared Sona, the mute healing song girl with no legs (seriously, she has no legs) to our beloved Medic, I thought it’d be amusing to compare the Heavy with this Braum fellow.

So yeah, what are we looking at here? Two burly, strong men, with no hair on their heads and thick Russian accents, with a desire to protect people and access to some very large weapons. In one case, they’re protecting a slightly smaller healing person, in the other case, they’re protecting someone who does shitloads of damage. In both cases, their targets are of a huge amount of value if killed by the enemy team.

What does Braum do, you ask? Braum is a huge, melee-based tank with a very heavy door as a shield. His abilities consist of getting 4 hits on you to briefly stun you, leaping to your defense, slowing you with large amounts of ice and standing in front of you absorbing damage. Heavy can do some of those things too, depending on what weapon he uses. Braum is designed to literally absorb incoming damage. Heavy’s a bit of both, he can both absorb and deal a ton of damage.

We come to the hypothetical idea of these two strong men meeting each other in a bar and perhaps getting into a fight. Heavy VS Braum.

When it comes to weaponry, Braum has a supposedly unbreakable door which he uses as a shield, while Heavy has a minigun. While yeah, that door is pretty damn strong, since other guns, explosives and other weapons have been known to break it (see: Caitlyn, Jinx, Varus, Ashe, Ziggs, any other champion using bullets or magic) and Heavy’s minigun is no different. Actually, since Heavy’s minigun isn’t restricted by magic or the laws of gravity and physics in general (seriously, that thing must be hard to even lift, let alone fire), it’d probably tear through that door in no time.

On the flip side, Braum has a LOT of mobility. Way more than Heavy. Yes, Heavy can run fast with the Gloves of Running Urgently, but Braum can literally leap to protect his friends. While carrying that giant door. The only acrobatics you see from Heavies are jump-revving and the art of airviching. Not quite as the same as leaping in front of your marksman ally to protect them from the incoming gank. Braum also has the ability to knock people into the air, but that’s not very effective on the hard-to-knock-up Heavy. He does come with lots of slows, which would ruin Heavy’s already low mobility.

Problem is, Heavy and Braum protect their targets in different ways. Braum works as a tank, taking hits for you while you kill the enemy. Heavy defends you by killing everyone. Either way, they get the job done.

In the end though, they wouldn’t fight. You’d find them in a bar, drinking and sharing stories from the battlefield. Because they’re nice like that.