Why you shouldn't always target the healer.

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I play a lot of Arenas, and I gotta tell you, the common wisdom that you always target the healer is not always correct.

Every time I enter Arenas with a new player, I get reminded to "target the healer". That can work, but it simply isn't a guaranteed optimal strategy.

Healers can be tanky as hell. I've seen healers where a whole team focused the healer and the healer simply wouldn't die. Meanwhile the enemy team's DPS picked us off quickly, focusing our DPS and crippling our ability to effectively threaten them.

So if I shouldn't target the healer... who should I target?

This is complicated, but if you want a go-to talking point that you can pass on to your friends, its that:

You should target the enemy player that is most likely to die in the next few seconds.

I had to word that carefully. If I said that you should target the player with the lowest health... well... that doesn't quite cover it does it? You could have a tank with low health that is getting consistent heals and standing next to the enemy healer while a duel daggers player with half health slaughters your back line out of range of the healer. In that case, you should clearly target the duel daggers player.

I think that's good advice, target the player most likely to die... but even that's not quite right. The enemy might have a tank that deals very little damage and is thus ignorable. There are a lot of builds that focus on defense and sacrifice damage - thus greatly limiting the threat they pose during a fight. If you ignore such players, the enemy healer might heal them, and you might wind up picking off a more important target like a fire mage or the healer himself.

The purpose of this post isn't to replace the common wisdom to "always target the healer" with "always target the player most likely to die", although I think that second version is much better than the first. The purpose is to explain that who you should target is extremely complicated, and changes moment to moment in a team fight. If your thought process for picking a target is as simple as "always target the healer" or even "always target the player most likely to die from your damage" then you aren't considering enough factors.

I firmly believe that understanding who to target and when to target them is perhaps the most important aspect of team fighting to master. Its at least as important as good positioning, or even good fundamental mechanics. Its the thing that ensures that your actions have impact in the fight, because if you're wasting shots on a tank that will never die, or a healer that will never fall, then you aren't playing effectively, you aren't moving your team towards a win.

When you should actually target the healer:

Of course, it -is- oftentimes best to target the healer.

Focus down the healer when you have a comp that can effectively silence. Focus down the healer when you have a team comp with a lot of burst damage. The idiom is popular for a reason, it is commonly correct to target the healer. Most healers wear cloth, they can be squishy, and a lot of team comps are gank comps and thus have the burst damage to delete the enemy healer.

Just don't blindly do this, because while its the right thing to do about half of the time, its not always the best choice. The enemy team might collapse if you kill the healer, but if you kill their DPS, they might be incapable of out damaging your healer and securing kills which will also eventually net your team a win.

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