Focus Targeting

Yea We Lift (thanks, Radikal Noise, for pointing out this blog) is one of the best 5v5 teams around, and lucky for us, they have a blog!

One of their recent posts talks about focus targeting and how their mage prioritizes potential foci:

1) [The other team's] main CC class (usually mage, sometimes warlock). This lets me see the poly coming before it lands and often gives me the time to pre-spam dispel or make my way out of LoS to avoid it myself. It's also a very reliable way of knowing when to cast SWD to break yourself out of polys (which is really not as hard as it may seem). I tend to use this in the smaller brackets (2v2 and 3v3) where avoiding CC can be game breaking. There are some really nasty CC chains that can put you out of commission for long enough to end the game and being the only dispeller on my teams, I really have 1 on-call break every 2 minutes.

2) Our primary target (the one we're trying to kill first). This is often my choice for 5v5 games since getting poly'd and CC'd myself isn't as big of a deal. In most cases I'm the focus target and even when I'm not, most teams will put their CC on dps (aka the warrior/mage) rather than the secondary healer. The only CC that I get hit with relatively often in the 5v5 bracket is fear, so as long as I keep fearward on and have my trinket up, I'm in good shape.

This is interesting to me, as I always, always put the enemy's primary healer on focus so I can Curse of Tongues / Fear / Death Coil them to my heart's content to keep them from getting the heal off when we pick our first DPS target. Only after the healers are dead to a switch my focus to their mage (or another caster class if there are no mages). But the bold text above is also interesting to me...DPS gets CCed more than healers in top brackets? Hmmmm....going to have to try this out.