Arena Strategy: Target Switching

The most powerful tactic that many teams employ is the Target Switch. There is nothing more rewarding than lining up a juicy heroism-fueled lava burst, chain lightning, lightning bolt frost shock combo on an unsuspecting victim that hasn’t got a clue that there is an Armageddon worth of pain coming towards their way in a moment. Hitting someone where they’re not ready is extremely useful. Sun Tzu, over 2500 years ago, said: “Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilfull in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”

So, today, we’re going to learn about target switching — how to recognize it and how to avoid it.

The best way to strike at your enemy is when they are alone. You will be able to concentrate all your damage onto one person, and you’re surely able to swiftly kill someone in a 3v1 situation! So the best target switch is if someone runs out too far out by themselves! There is nothing threatening about a warrior that charges across half the map to get to you, if you just all attack him at once chances are he will die. That is why positioning is so important and why pillar use is important. The best scenario to kill someone in a target switch is to have them come to you!

The other kind of offensive target switches are when your opponent does the opposite of charging to you — when they pull back. So let’s say your team strategy is to try to kill a druid. That’s all good, but if they run behind or really far away, you can’t really get to them. So what you should do is quickly pick someone who is not running back, and everyone damage them. This is very useful because you make two people at once play defensive, the person who you were originally attacking and the new target.

The third type of switching is the most difficult but most skilled. Let’s say it is an even match and your two teams are ducking it out, trading blow for blow, evenly matched. So the best way to switch is when someone uses a defensive cooldown. There is no point pounding that druid when he’s got barkskin, or the warrior with shield wall up, or the hunter who has got a row of hots on them. Learn to recognize buffs that are defensive cooldowns and call quick switches off those targets. There’s no point in casting a lava burst into a rogue that has just blown cloak, but by switching to that mage you might put their whole team off balance and make their healer confused.

With excellent target swaps you are surely more likely to land kills.

Similarly, there are really two ways of recognizing target switches

If you’ve got yourself feared all the way out of position to the other side of the map, you’re likely to be a target for your enemy. They will see that you’re all by yourself and focus their fire on you, and you’re going to be helpless. However, sometimes you might even wander out yourself behind out of LoS of your healer or just really far — so you must watch out for that. You don’t want to give your opponents too many opportunities to fight you when the balance of power is in their favor. So, be careful not to run too far.

The other way to recognize target switches is to look at buffs and debuffs. If a priest is purging someone randomly all of a sudden, or the warlock is starting to put dots — the target switch is incoming. Be sure to position your unit frames somewhere not too far from you so you can recognize based on buffs and debuffs when there is a target switch that is going to come. And of course, even if you aren’t a healing class, you can do something about this. I often wind shear, hex, thunderstorm and earthbind totem just in time to save my teammates from taking any damage at all! It’s as satisfying to land that extremely high damage target switch onto your opponents as it is to cast a few well placed interrupts to stop the opposing team dead in their tracks.

 

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