Shoot The Medic First / Video Games

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• The Meadow Bugle airframe, more commonly known as the M Gear, is not only the healer/mechanic class in Ace Online, it's also the airframe with the highest defense, presumably to keep the brigade's healers from getting swiss-cheesed by the A Gears on sight. M Gears that form the head of any spearheading formation of B Gears are always aimed at first, to break up the flight formation.
• In Achron, the CESO Blackbird can repair units at speeds so fast it can greatly affect the outcome of a battle. The "Smart Idle" upgrade makes healing units (such as the Blackbird or the SOP) use their healing ability automatically if there are any injured friendly units nearby. This leads to them attracting a lot of focused fire. If you just send your army to attack without targeting a specific unit, they will target the medic.
• In Age of Empires if an enemy squad has a priest/monk, it pays to get rid of him as early as possible. Monks not only heal their own side, but also convert enemy units.
• In Age of Wonders, cleric-type units, which boast the Healing ability, can only do so once per game turn (and thus once per battle, or not at all if they already used healing before battle), but tend to be targeted anyhow because they boast a reasonably powerful ranged magical attack. More advanced units with Healing also tend to be targeted quickly because they usually possess other, dangerous, abilities, and finally, Leaders are always targeted first, when practical-more pointedly than potentially having healing spells they can cast multiple times per battle, they tend to be the most dangerous units on the field.
• Anarchy Online
  • The Doctor profession is fairly easy to kill in the beginning of the game, but towards the end requires a coordinated effort from a strong force to take down, all this while throwing out gigantic 'Battle Group Heals' that give ginormous amounts of life to every ally in the immediate vicinity, and this isn't counting the ultimate 'nyah-nyah' heal...on top of all this, Doctors are unlike 'clothies' in other games in that they tend towards HUGE amounts of hit points and nano points.
  • The Adventurer, the nominal backup healer, has various tiers of healing capacity, and the ability to both evade many normal hits as well as soak up damage on top of all that.
  • The Meta-Physicist, the closest healer after that, typifies the 'priest' stereotype and also was Made of Plasticine for most of the game's history until they were made Nigh Invulnerable.
• In Batman: Arkham Knight, the Medic mooks can revive three downed enemies. Further, they can apply an electric charge to enemy soldiers so that Batman will take damage if he makes contact with the now-sparking foe. In practice, this means that you should use Silent Takedowns to pick off the medics before wading into the brawl, but a later upgrade to the Disruptor gadget allows remotely sabotaging the medics' equipment so that they electrocute themselves when trying to buff or revive enemy mooks.
• Battlefield:
  • In the original game, medics were not quite that powerful (slowly heal one soldier while standing next to him), but still quite a nuisance since their submachine guns have low recoil, and their ability to heal means you have to essentially start over if you die and try to come back for revenge. In Battlefield 2, they can instantly resurrect dead teammates to full health, which makes them an even more important target. They're also extremely capable fighters on their own already, given the same full-size assault rifles as the Assault class - good luck taking out an entire squad of them.
  • In Battlefield: Bad Company, Medics get machine guns that are absurdly effective in close range and generally still half-decent for quite a distance past that. In Bad Company 2, the M60 in particular was horribly overpowered for quite a while, making it one of the first times in the series where a team would generally be made up of half medics and half recon instead of all recon.
  • Notably in Battlefield 3, the Assault class has to choose between AOE healing or an extra assault weapon (either a grenade launcher or a shotgun) for the first class ability, but once the defibrillator (revive device) is unlocked it's always the second gadget, which can make them priority targets in certain circumstances. Of course, in practice, Battlefield is so fast paced and it's hard enough to take down any enemy, that actively targeting a medic is more a case of luck and aiming in the right place. Actually trying to only target medics will just get you shot by the rest of their squad.
  • The Engineer class is the 'medic' for Vehicles. Often people will buddy up as a tank driver/gunner combination and work in tandem to keep their vehicle operational. Some vehicles have enough capacity to hold three people. Trying to take out a tank with 2 engineers repairing it is impossible for a single infantry player unless they can kill the engineers first, or can sneak up and plant C4 or mines on the vehicle.
• Healers in Battle for Wesnoth are convenient, but they can't build up a unit's health back up any faster than a stay in a village could, although unlike villages they're mobile and can treat multiple adjacent units at once — what makes them targets is that they're Combat Medics with annoying special attacks (be they accurate-in-any-terrain magical ones or the Elvish Shaman line's Entangle) while at the same time being reasonably squishy.
• The medical stations in Bioshock and Bioshock 2 can be used by the Splicers to heal themselves. You can destroy them, or hack them so that they would poison those wounded Splicers instead.
• Borderlands:
  • In the General Knoxx DLC for Borderlands, the Crimson Lance have many types of soldiers and one of them is is a Combat Medic. While these guys only use standard rifles to attack you with, they set up turrets that heal the other soldiers, which can get annoying real fast unless you quickly destroy the turret or kill the medic. These guys also show up when you fight Knoxx and can restore his health completely if you aren't paying attention.
  • Borderlands 2 features the Hyperion surveyor, a flying autonomous Attack Drone that doubles as an impromptu medic to Hyperion units. It can repair damaged Loaders (including the tough and dangerous Badass Loaders and WAR Loaders) or grant shields to unshielded units. Worse, Constructors like to digistruct the little buggers. They tend to be priority targets due to both their darty, flighty movement patterns and the fact that they don't take a lot of damage to bring down (at first).
• In Brütal Legend, the enemy AI has an amazing ability to seek out and attack Thunderhog units (AKA Lemmy) no matter who else is on the field when playing as Ironheade.
• The first Call of Duty features this memorable line
  Medic: Man, they're shooting medics too! They're not-
• Chrono Trigger:
  • A boss that you fight on your way to escape the castle in 1000 AD, the Dragon Tank, has a head that occasionally heals its parts, each of which has a separate entry in the Bestiary.
  • The Mother Brain boss in 2300 AD is accompanied by not one but three medics. If you take out all of them though, she Turns Red.
  • The Lavos Core looks like a Flunky Boss consisting of a humanoid-looking part in the center and a "Lavos Bit" on the left and on the right. The Lavos Bit on the right can revive the other two, so normally you'd want to kill it first. However, unless at least one of the other two parts are dead, it will take almost no damage from attacks, so, in this case, you have to kill the medic last (and you will, since you win the fight immediately once you kill it).

• City of Villains:
  • The final battle of the Lord Recluse Strike Force, acknowledged as one of the hardest battles in the game. 8 PC villains vs 8 (grossly overpowered) NPC heroes. For the villains to have any chance of winning it is vitally important to knock out the heroine Numina first, as she can heal and even revive downed heroes.
  • The Imperious Task Force has the final battle against Romulus, this time powered up by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien and assisted by three identical black energy creature thingies, one of which heals him. You wanna kill this one first.
  • The Roman SURGEONS don't have any offensive ability, yet are always targeted by players first with overwhelming force and much hatred. Good thing these events take place hundreds if not thousands of years before the Geneva Convention.
  • As for players, there's actually much less emphasis on healing because buffs and debuffs are so much more powerful. So taking out the Defender first is usually a good idea, not that the enemies can take advantage of that. Although the rules are different in PVP, barely anyone does that anyway.

• Healers in Clash of Clans fly over the battlefield healing any injured ground troops and having one can easily turn the tide in the user's favor. They can't heal themselves and their flight means only anti-air defenses can harm them, so it's best to have anti-air defenses spread throughout your fort in case an invading player has one.
• Command & Conquer:
  • In earlier games, generally the side with the weaker (early-game) infantry is also given a Medic unit to compensate. The expansion to Command & Conquer: Red Alert also introduced a Mechanic, who was a Palette Swap of the Medic who repaired vehicles in a flash. However, since infantry often die before they can be healed, and the Mechanic can't follow tanks into combat, this trope is averted.
  • In Command & Conquer: Renegade in the multi-player, enemy engineers and medics can be a serious pain in the ass. Especially if you're Nod. Given enough of them (even the free engineers), a tank can be repaired more than you can damage it. On siege maps, it's a very common tactic to have 3-4 technicians or Hotwires (350-credit super-engineers) per vehicle on the side that's laying siege. The only ways to break that siege is with more engineers/techies/Hotwires backing up your vehicles, plus at least one sniper to pick off the enemy. A single GDI Mammoth Tank with two Hotwires repairing it is nigh-invulnerable.
• In Company of Heroes, players can build medic stations that spawn unarmed medics that go out into the battlefield to retrieve wounded soldiers. When enough soldiers are gathered, they are formed into a free infantry squad for the player. Needless to say, allowing your opponent to do this is a bad thing, so it becomes a gameplay imperative to shoot the medics. The AI won't automatically target enemy medics though, so the player has to manually give the command.
• Cosmic Break has this fiendish Moe Robot Girl, Melfi, that shoots healing arrows and can still use healing bits. They charge faster than others support units too, making them the ultimate healing support units. Everyone just loves to kill her.... Until her Chibi version came out. Now everyone's conflicted.
• The Midgard healers in Dark Age of Camelot doubled as mezzers, which in the early days of Camelot were ridiculously overpowered: no resists, no break out of mez panic button, no progressively decreasing mez duration, no nothing. A real "We win" button. Ganking the healer was so prevalent that Midgard tanks often carried round shields into battle instead of the much better kite shields, because it made them look like healers and hopefully they'd eat the first wave of backstabs/nukes/mezzes/arrows.
• Dark Souls:
  • Dark Souls:
    • It's possible to take a shortcut in the Depths that skips a large majority of the area and lets you go straight to the boss. This is not advised, since this means you wouldn't have killed the Channeler found early in the area, who can now buff the boss's attack power.
    • The skeletons in the Catacombs will just keep Pulling Themselves Together every time you kill them unless you hunt down and kill the necromancer in charge first, or use a divine weapon.
  • Dark Souls III has Princes Lothric and Lorian. In the second phase, Lothric will continuously resurrect his brother on death. The fight only ends when you kill Lothric, which is made difficult because Lothric is in a very hard position for most weapons to reach.
  • Dark Souls III also has hollow priests, who appear in conjunction with Lothric knights and cast constant damage and healing buffs.
• In DC Universe Online, if one of the OMAC Nanosmyths is in the room NOTHING IS KILLABLE till you take the Nanosmyth down and even then the heal effects remain for at least 3-5 seconds after you kill them, if you want to survive the mission you must drop them fast.
• A particular boss in Demon's Souls can be resurrected indefinitely until the player realizes that some mook is in charge of keeping the boss alive. This mook is not (technically) even in the boss room.
• The Glyphid Warden in Deep Rock Galactic heals its allies as well as boosting their defenses whenever it's near them. This can also apply to any Elite Mook that's active like the Dreadnaughts. Naturally, you'll want to kill the Wardens quickly so that you can kill the other bugs without issue. There's also the Korlok Tyrant-Weed, which will keep summoning several sprouts to protect the core and it will also summon healing pods to recover health.
• The Bishop Chessmen in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening can heal their fellow chessmen, so better flail on them first and fast since they can also spit out lightning and create a localized explosion.
• Devil May Cry 5: Green Empusa can heal the other demons, thus Nico specifically states in her report that they should be killed first.
  Nico: The green stuff in their butt ain't any kind of blood-it's a healing nectar that'll fix up other demons' wounds in no time at all. My recommendation: Kill these first, before they make themselves a nuisance.
• Diablo II has Shamans for the various enemy types, who can revive their minions over and over, even from far away, making killing them a top priority. Even worse are the unique shamans, which can revive other shamans, making killing them a top priority even among other shamans.
• Healers (and monster units that have healing abilities, such as the Succubus) are almost always the first target of choice in Disgaea games. The second? Anything that has a stat buffing ability... Which is also something that Healers specialize in.
• When playing Doom II, whenever Arch-Viles appear, they should be given top priority, both because of their very nasty line-of-sight flame attack and their habit of resurrecting dead monsters.
• Dragon Age:
  • In the Dragon Age: Origins DLC Warden's Keep, there is a fight against a boss-level Rage Abomination which is accompanied by a quartet of zombie mages who constantly cast healing spells on it. The fight is basically impossible to win until they've all been taken out (which is easier said than done, since they themselves will resurrect several times before going down permanently).
  • In the Legacy DLC for Dragon Age II, if the player takes a particular path, Hawke and party will encounter a Revenant backed up by three Arcane Horrors, each of which casts a spell over the Revenant that, taken together, make it literally immune to all forms of damage. In this case, you have no choice but to shoot the medic first.
• Dream of Mirror Online:
  • The job system that lets every player to have their own healing skill, and dedicated healers to wear enough defences to survive the team warriors. As they can buffer allies and resurrect (a skill that requires both specialization and a specific weapon type), it's better to deal them first.
  • The Septic Snake (a combat monster) can call for help, attracting the Herb Snake, a monster that automatically heals nearby snakes. The Herb Snake, if attacked, calls for help, attracting Septic Snakes...
• Atomic Power Robots in Earthbound 1994 are able to restore health to other enemies by "replenishing a fuel supply". They explode when killed which inflicts serious damage to your party, forcing you to put up with their healing until you've wiped out their allies in order to reduce the damage from the explosion.
• In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, always kill the Necromancers first, otherwise any other mook will have barely hit the ground before they raise it again. Things get even more complicated when you have to fight multiple Necromancers at once, since they can raise their former comrades to rain more destruction spells upon unsuspecting players. For this reason, you don't just kill Necromancers first, you make sure that the fallen foe is either disintegrated or zombified by you before anything else has the chance to raise it.

• The so-called Logistics Ships in EVE Online are critical to any fleet of significant size. Targeting them first is so effective that, in some cases, due to capacitor chains between the ships, taking down a single logistics ship (either by blowing it up or jamming its sensors) is enough to completely break down the repairs.

• In the last boss fight of Fate/Grand Order's Singularity Okeanos, Medea Lily is a specialized healer and she comes in a fight with a Demon Pillar. However, because of the gameplay mechanic, she can't heal as much damage as you deal, while the Demon Pillar has Area of Effect attacks that hit multiple times. The entire enemy team is limited to three actions per turn, and as long as Medea is active, she uses two of them, limiting the number of attacks the Demon Pillar can use in the first place. By killing the Demon Pillar first, all you have to fight afterward is a little girl with ineffectual attack power and insufficient healing.
• In Fat Princess, if someone on the other team has a Priest behind them, you're likely to go down quick if you don't kill them.
• In Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, enemy Menders, Plague Doctors, and any other units that can heal or buff should be taken out as soon as possible. Otherwise they will heal, and buff, and revive the units that you just killed (sometimes with full health) unless you do something to prevent their resurrection.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy IV
    • Cindy can revive her other two Magus Sisters —Mindy and Sandy— so if the player doesn't catch on fast enough, death is inevitable.
    • The Giant's CPU is accompanied by an "Attack Node" and a "Defense Node". The Defense Node can effortlessly undo whatever damage you've dealt to the CPU, which means destroying it should be a priority. In the DS remake, due to the relative strengths it's actually far easier to take out the Attack Node first and save the Defense Node for last, despite The Smart Guy flat-out telling you to shoot the Medic first (because they left his dialogue unchanged).
  • Final Fantasy VII: The "Materia Beast" can heal itself very fast toward the end of the battle and is colossal pain in the ass to the unprepared player. it's good to poison it so it's healing won't be as effective, other monsters and bosses will heal themselves too.
  • In Final Fantasy X, when you battle Seymour the first time, he has two guards who cast shell on him and protect on themselves. They will intercept any physical attack directed at Seymour, and they will recast their spells if you use Dispel. They will also heal Seymour if his HP gets low, but that's not likely while they're still around anyway, because they also use high potions on themselves whenever they're hit. There are only two ways to kill them: either steal a high potion from each of them to disable their Auto-Potion ability, or use a technique that one-shots them (generally an Overdrive). Or just keep attacking them till they run out of potions, as they will use a potion even if they've only lost a single hit point.
  • Final Fantasy XI:
    • The Beastmen imps are healers in Campaign. The healing isn't normally a problem, however. It's the powerful area buffs that drive players nuts, especially Phalanx.
    • Players who heal other players who are on a monster's hate list will gain hate from that monster, proportional to how much health was recovered. If a healer is having to curebomb people to keep them alive, particularly if there isn't a dedicated tank present specifically to keep hate off of the healer, monsters will decide that eating the squishy one keeping everyone alive is the best course of action.
  • In Final Fantasy XII, casting healing magic makes it more likely for any enemies nearby to target the caster. Better use Decoy to redirect their attention to your resident meatshield.
  • The cat-type enemies in Final Fantasy XIII-2. Best case scenario, they're annoyances. Worst case scenario, you are faced with a healer who spams area-of-effect healing magic while surrounded by very powerful fighters and has wayyyyy too much HP for you to take down quickly.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, if enemies aren't being attacked or distracted enough, they will zero in on players who are healers due to healing magic generating a lot aggro. In certain battles, there will be enemy healers present and you'll want to take them down first. In PVP, healers are always the first ones to be targeted by other players.
  • In the Final Fantasy Tactics series, White Mages or any units who can heal, revive, and buff are always your main targets. Sometimes they not only just heal, but may have abilities from other jobs to fight with. For instance, one storyline battle has a White Mage who sometimes is also given Calculator skills. If you don't kill them as soon as humanly possible, you will regret it dearly.
  • The enemy AI in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance will always try to go after units with jobs that are considered "high-priority", like White and Red Mages, not caring about what stats or other abilities said units have on them. There was an instance where a Viera White Mage was attacked by a Gladiator (ignoring a weakened Sage nearby), only to miss thanks to the Viera having the Reflex R-Ability. She then promptly dispatched the Gladiator with Last Breath.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Enemy priests not only have the ability to heal the foes from nearly dead back up to perfectly fine, some of them can put the units to sleep. It's best not to ask any random player how many characters they have lost because of an enemy healer with a Berserk staff...
  • When fighting Zephiel in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Bishops with Physic staves will spawn from staircases at the top of the map and heal him if you don't kill Zephiel in one turn (not happening without a Crit) or kill the Bishops before they can heal Zephiel.
  • The enemy AI will always select a unit that can't fight back first, in addition to preferring the unit with the lowest defense. Not only can unpromoted healers not fight, but they're generally the physically weakest units. This means that the enemy will attack the medics first in almost all situations.
  • In some games, enemy units that are wounded will purposely retreat to be healed by their priest. This is particularly frustrating in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 and Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War due to the prescense of enemies with Fortify. In Genealogy, Fortify heals every unit within a ten-tile radius, which covers entire enemy armies, while in Thracia, Fortify will heal every enemy unit except the healer. At least in Thracia you could capture some for your own use. In Path of Radiance, this also means taking advantage of the heal bushes, but that is more annoying than an actual threat.
• The bubble mages in Flinthook literally render everyone invulnerable until they are taken care of.
• In From the Depths, many ships and aircraft carry "Repair Tentacles", devices which can repair allied ships at astonishing speed but cannot repair the craft they are mounted on. Killing an enemy boat being repaired by tentacles requires one to utilize either massive overkill, or to simply shoot the support craft repairing it. The Twin Guards faction field attack helicopters that carry around their own little repair drone, making them annoyingly difficult to kill.
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, eliminating the enemy crew without destroying their ship (which is generally a more rewarding option) is out of the question if they have a medbay, as they can run to it to receive continuous healing that even without upgrades will outpace your crew's damage rate... unless you can damage the medbay or block access to it, such as by hacking into the door system, which shuts down doors across the entire ship; or hacking into the medbay itself, which not only shuts its doors but can also turn it against its owners by harming them. However, there's a counter for every way you can sabotage the medbay.^{For example:} Laser fire can be absorbed by Deflector Shields, missiles can be shot down by defense drones, bombs and mind control can be blocked by supershields, hacking drones can also be shot down by drones or disabled by supershields, etc.
• zOMG!:
  • Although the game does not have player classes, it does have a few rings that grant healing abilities (and one of the ring sets is titled Medic). The simple act of using a healing ability once on another player is often enough to draw aggro from the enemies that were previously menacing the patient (or to make new recruits in a boss battle initially target the healer).
  • Some enemy types can heal their cohorts, such as Tiny Witch Doctors. Unfortunately, there's no visualization for this besides seeing the HP bar jump back up, so you may need to read the updates or the wikis to figure out who the medics are. Still, the only enemies capable of healing seem to prioritize on healing themselves, which would help a new player find out about their existence. It kinda doesn't, since only three enemies heal others, and one is too fragile to be noticed, and the other two come coupled in swarms of other enemies where people would rather use targetless AoE attacks.
• Gears of War: Kantus monks (svelte, high-ranking foes with penchants for funny hats and belts) have the ability to completely heal any Locust grunts within the range of their powerful screams, regardless of how much damage the poor schmucks may have incurred. To make matters worse, Kantus have a nasty habit of cartwheeling around, hurling ink grenades and their screams can immobilise any player characters within range. However, Kantus are not immune to getting a chainsaw through the chest cavity.

• Golden Sun:
  • In the games, the Star Magician would be a very easy fight... if he couldn't summon Refresh Balls to spam healing Psynergy (Earnest Ply in Lost Age, Pure Ply in Dark Dawn, both heal 1000) whenever necessary or possible. While there are other high-threat balls, guess what dies first if you plan on winning.
  • And done in-verse in The Lost Age, when Karst and Agatio plan to trap Mia because she's both the party's healer and a Water Adept (they're both Fire Adepts).
  • Aiming for the medics is also a good plan when dealing with Mars Clan girls, but for different reasons. Menardi and Karst are both serious threats in their own right, and have access to the One-Hit Kill attack Death Scythe.
• In Guild Wars, you pretty much have to kill monks and ritualists if you want to kill anybody else. Especially in the smaller (4-man/6-man)arenas. Fort Aspenwood is the worst example, since if there's more than one or two healers the Luxon team can't win without either being very good or very lucky. Even the monsters get into the act, especially in Hard Mode.
• Half-Life:
  • In Half-Life 2, Resistance medics will occassionally join your squad during the Uprising. As they can provide infinite healing (with a cooldown) to you and other rebel fighters in a pinch, it's usually a good idea to prioritize their survival over others in the squad.
  • Black Mesa adds medics to the ranks of the HECU soldiers fought in the original Half-Life. They'll heal their squadmates if given the opportunity, so it's advisable to target them first.
• Halo:
  • Engineers don't technically heal units (discounting Halo Wars) but give enemies quadruple shields.
  • Promethean Watchers hover over the battlefield restoring the depleted health of Knights, and in Halo 4 are even able to bring them Back from the Dead for a short period after "death". Add their ability to Catch and Return thrown grenades as well as shoot you themselves, and it's a very good idea to dispatch them the moment they pop up.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has the legendary creature Kel'Thuzad. He continuously resurrects every fallen creature at the end of each turn, which is a game changing effect in a CCG. He can very swiftly turn the tides of an otherwise even match into a loss if not dealt with immediately.
• In Heroes of the Storm, you can aim for and kill the Medic/Support heroes and make teamfight that much easier, but almost every Medic/Support has abilities that make them hard to kill, or punish attempts to dogpile on them. Uther in particular is so tanky, he actually has 'Damage Taken' stat tracking, which usually reserved for Warrior heroes. It is generally more efficient to bully and isolate the Medic/Support away and kill the fragile Assassins first.
• Illusions of Loyalty:
  • If mages are present in Eutorian patrols, they can heal everyone, and by a considerable amount of health. However, that can be dealt with by using Wilder’s Silencer on them, and re-applying it when it’s about to run out. The real priority should still be the other soldiers, as they deal a lot more damage than the mages ever could.
  • During the boss battle in the Forest of Woe, all plants can technically support each other and do some healing. Your real priority should be Weeping Blue, however, as it can outright revive the other plants.
  • During the battle with Archmage Adam, he is the medic, who can heal his Minotaur and even re-summon it if killed, as well as occasionally summoning Lesser Painspawn and healing it as well. However, he's also constantly being guarded by the Minotaur, so doing this is difficult. Moreover, while you can use Silencer on him, he'll cure it with the medicine in his pouch on the next turn. Still, that may be preferable to him doing anything else.
• While Jagged Alliance 2 does first aid more or less realistically, the opposing forces aren't going to avoid shooting them, but given that their commander has already committed any number of human rights violations, this makes sense. Also, the medics (as ex-military or never-military) tend to be armed and dangerous themselves, with no qualms about shooting the bad guys just before patching the good guys' wounds. This moves them right out of protected status.
• In Kagetsu Tohya Nanaya is getting pissed off because every time Shiki is close to death, such as being a severed head looking at his body, Len resets the day and Shiki is back to normal. Eventually he decides that even if it's breaking 'the rules' Len has to go first. Fortunately, Kouma Kishima shows up and pulls an Eviler than Thou off.
• In Kingdom Hearts:
  • If you let Crescendos run around, they heal everything to max health, but in Kingdom Hearts II, if you use a Reaction Command at the right time, they will drop HP orbs. Not very helpful if there are more than one of these little buggers and you can't hit them all at once, e.g. Chicken Little.
• League of Legends:
  • Support champions are often the first casualties in a teamfight. They tend to fall into 2 categories: healers or shielders (such as Sona, Lulu and Janna) that can make it much harder to remove the damage dealers and are usually the least-tanky champions on their team (due to getting a much-lower budget than other champions and usually being lower-level); and tanky initiators (like Leona or Alistar) who are the ones who go in for their team first to start the fight and draw a lot of fire (and unlike toplane or jungle initiators, it's often a suicide mission for them since, despite being inherently tanky, they again have a lower item budget and average level).
  • Soraka, the Starchild, is the only champion in the game explicitly designated as the dedicated healer (an archetype Riot Games consider highly unhealthy for MOBA games). Almost her entire kit is based around keeping her teammates alive, with a powerful, incredibly short-cooldown heal skill that allows her to top her teammates up to full health from practically nothing in a matter of seconds, but costs her 10% of her own maximum health per cast and cannot be cast on herself. One of Soraka's teammates is almost unkillable as long as Soraka stands by them, spamming Astral Infusion every few seconds, but as soon as the enemy turns their focus onto her she's likely to die instantly, especially if she's been industriously spending her own HP healing others. Soraka is often the lynchpin of her team's strategy, making them almost indestructible as long as she lives but prone to folding like damp cardboard as soon as the enemy gets to her.
• If you're playing Left 4 Dead in VS mode and you're the one who protects everyone or heals others (or if you are just that good of a player), you can bet your life that the infected players will all target you, although this is usually less because the "medic" is a threat (since the main goal of Infected teams is to simply separate & then constrict the individual survivors until they become "downed", and not necessarily to kill them), and more because a "medic" survivor and their "patient" will both have to stand completely still while the health pack is being used. And if there's a Spitter and/or a Jockey/Charger nearby ...
• In The Lord of the Rings Online, healing generates massive amounts of aggro, and the damage-dealing classes may have trouble getting it back. The classes with a build available specifically designed for tanking have special abilities they can use that trump even healing, but if those skills are on cooldown, your Mini is probably going to die.
• Lost Odyssey starts off by showing us what happens when healing magic is applied en masse to an entire army. The Khent soldiers are cutting down Urhan soldiers, but then the killed soldiers keep getting healed back to full effectiveness right in front of them. The Khent soldiers would have had to target the healing mage tower to have any hope of winning this war of attrition, had a giant meteor not fallen on everything.
• Lunar: Silver Star Harmony: Ghaleon is actually a bit of Artificial Brilliance; because he won't just randomly attack, he'll try to go for Jessica first since she's the main healer.

• Mass Effect 3:
  • Cerberus Combat Engineers can set up gun turret tripods, repair the tripods' shields, and also repair Atlas walkers. They are high priority targets, especially in the moments before they remove the folded up turret off their back.
  • The Marauders are Reaper-fied turians who can buff their fellow husks. The in-game codex states that Alliance marines have standing orders to take them out first.
• In Master of the Wind, Ariel attacks the dungeon fairy attempting to give the heroes an option to heal and save during their fight. The Fairy survived, and was given an honorable delicacy for this.
• In Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, the player has to shoot the Japanese medics, only because they fire Nambu pistols at you. Your own corpsman is armed with a .45 pistol, and he tends to get shot as well.
• In Mega Man X: Command Mission, leaving a Preon Medic or Preon Doc alive after all other enemies are gone nets you a 25% heal and them running away. That doesn't stop you from killing them before they run, though.
• Many enemies in Might and Magic series, especially in games 6-8, will attack the cleric first.
• The Ender Dragon in the "end" of Minecraft is assisted by crystals that heal her from atop large obsidian towers and explode when destroyed. Oh, and did we mention that the dragon is effectively unbeatable unless every crystal is gone?
• Two instances in NEO: The World Ends with You, both of which are designed to piss you off.
  • At about half health, Motoi will use his FundMePlz app to get his mooks to donate yen for buffs and heals. You can abort these transactions by sniping the mooks until the timer expires. If Motoi has no followers around, he'll use an unstoppable instance of FundMePlz to summon more of them.
  • The Tropicaleon can literally lick the wounds of its allies in order to heal them. You'd probably kill them first if they weren't factoring chameleon Noise that can become untargetable throughout the fight.
• One of the later battles in the original Neverwinter Nights has a medic capable of performing an infinite number of resurrections, and while you may be able to resist their blows, you'll never progress to the end of the game unless you Disintegrate him, shoot him, or otherwise remove him from the equation. Frustratingly, one of your allies - Linu - can serve as a light Medic for the enemy by casting Harm on undead, which heals them...but it is a very easy way to take down Aribeth.
• The Sentinels in No Man's Sky tend to be assisted by tiny drones that can bring their allies to mint condition in a flash, so if for some reason you have to fight Sentinels, you would better target those drones first (it helps that they are quite weak and can't repair themselves). Even your HUD brings attention to them by displaying a spanner icon over them.
• In Ogre Battle, killing healers first tends to be bad for your units alignment. (This same factor is also applied to other "good" aligned units, such as Paladins.) Played straight with evil units, who get bonuses from losing alignment like that...
• Several bosses and mid-bosses in Opoona are flanked by healing enemies during their boss fights; in particular, the early-game Figureformer. They're especially important to take out first because all fights, including boss fights, are timed. If you don't defeat the big boss quickly, you'll automatically lose due to the ticking time limit.
• Overwatch: Supports that can heal are usually high on the kill-list, since they make their entire team stronger when they're around. Mercy especially gets this as she's able to resurrect fallen teammates. Reasons like these are why most healers have defensive abilities to improve their ability to survive: Mercy can quickly fly toward party members, making her hard to aim at and letting her keep a friend nearby almost constantly; Lúcio can run up walls to make himself a more difficult target; Brigitte has a shield to block attacks; and Moira can become invisible and quickly dash a short distance away to confuse her enemies. Ana has no such ability because she's a sniper and should be mostly out of the fray, but instead packs a tranquilizer dart that will put her target down for up to a five second nap, usually more than enough time to rejoin the safety of her team.
• Alastor in Painkiller is supported by the healing statues, which should be destroyed before dealing with him.
• Support champions in Paladins are the backbone of a team, keeping their allies healthy in the heat of battle. Naturally, they are top priority to be taken out. They can also have their healing diminished by purchasing the Cauterize item during a match, which makes attacks reduce enemy healing for a short duration.
• One boss in Parasite Eve has 3 targets on its body and one of them acts as a medic, healing itself or the other targets. While this "medic" doesn't heal very quickly, it can be troublesome if players hadn't leveled up Aya properly or power up her guns.
• PAYDAY 2:
  • Day 6 of the Hoxtons Housewarming Party introduced the "Medic" special enemy who can heal any unit that happens to be close to him from near-death with a 2 second cooldown per "patient". Despite being a special unit, he appears the most frequently among the special units. As a result, he switches up the "enemies to kill" list a bit, with Medics being the highest priority to take out, moreso than Tasers, Cloakers and Bulldozers!
  • The Medicdozer is a bodybuilding hospital intern constantly firing a taser that embodies Harmful Healing. You're doubly expected to shoot this 'medic' first, especially since he's busy killing you and his patients. Without a medical license.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3: During the Strength-Chariot Full Moon Boss, both of the bosses can revive the other one if one of them is beaten. The trick is to kill both of them at the same turn.
  • In Persona 4, enemies often come in groups consisting of one or more strong enemies mixed with weaker monsters. The weak ones will buff the strong ones, and the strong ones will then deliver a world of pain on your party. Taking out the weak ones first is therefore often the smarter move.
    Depending on which version you play, this also works for the enemy. The protagonist aside, your party has access to two dedicated healers: Yukiko and Teddie, who both have access to team heals and status removal spells.
    • In the original version of the game, they also happen to be the only ones whose persona doesn't lose their weakness when it ascends, gaining a second resistance instead. This means they're the only ones who can easily get the "downed" status (during which they take additional damage and risking the dizzy status, which makes them skip their next turn), a weak spot bosses are more than happy to abuse.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time has the Healer Zombie featured in the Penny's Pursuit levels, who uses roman magic to not only heal zombies for a great amount of health, but also cure them of any negative statuses (such as poison and hypnotization) while also being immune to most of such statuses. The almanac entry for it even outright tells the player to "take this one out as fast as you can if you don't want your life turned into a pit of abject misery and despair".
• In the second half of Northwind Field in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, Delibird will randomly warp near the enemy to heal them with Present, a move that usually has a random chance to hurt its target, but it's never the case here. As more than one Delibird can spawn and heal its allies, they must be defeated first to prevent them from healing them.
• The Enablers in Psychonauts 2 can make other enemies temporarily invulnerable while also making them faster and more damaging. You'll need to take them out first, or at least stun them with Telekinesis or burn them with Pyrokinesis to stop them from buffing other enemies (especially tough enemies like Heavy Censors or Panic Attacks).

• Ragnarok Online:
  • Anything less than a dangerously zealous effort to take down a high-level priest will likely not succeed. Many would go so far as to say that the priest is the real tank of the game....
  • Paladins can tank and they make for decent (if far less effective than high priests) healers AND can link with allies to reduce damage taken. They are also one of the few classes that can naturally (i.e. without great gear) survive one hit kills, have strong AoE, and can hilariously kill other players by simply standing there and allowing their opponents to die from the reflected damage simply because they have far more health than pretty much any other class. Paladins may not be able to out heal damage as well as a priest, but potion spamming in this game pretty much makes them invincible against anything but massive team effort.
• In Ring of Red, eliminating a Medic squad will drop a unit's ability to heal its infantry escort.
• In Robopon, if a healer has the Revive+ spell, battles can turn into very long, very tedious battles of attrition. Rule of thumb: If it looks female and/or cute, kill it. No exceptions.
• RuneScape:
  • In the mini-game Pest Control, players try to destroy portals to another dimension that the Void creatures are coming from, and protect the Void Knight in a fortress. Said portals are healed by Spinners, and it's pretty hard to take one down without first killing the Spinners, not that many people don't try to kill the portal first anyway. The Spinners aren't very tough, but they're often defended by Brawlers and, like everything else, can be spawned infinitely.
  • There is a specific combat room in the Dungeoneering skill, where players must kill four exiled summoning creatures to pass through. Any experienced team will ignore the warrior, ranger and mage at first in order to wipe out the healer.
  • In the Monastary of Ascension dungeon, the Capsarius monster can rapidly heal other Ascended to full, as well as deploying a forcefield that reduces all incoming attacks to Scratch Damage at best. She cannot use these abilities on herself.
• The first rule of engagement in Ryzom's Player-versus-Player scene: Casters are a primary target. Merely killing the healers isn't enough as due to the game being classless, Casters that were originally focusing on DPS magic can switch to healing in a snap and revive their downed teammates, thus meaning that your problem is no less smaller than it was before. Killing the casters means that players originally working as Tanks and support gunners have to switch to healing magic, and by the time they can start healing it's more than likely that you've already killed them.
• In SD Gundam Capsule Fighter, there's a collection of Mobile Suits who are specialized in healing. Usually classified with the "Repair" tag on their name, they're the same suit as usual, but with an added Repair weapon. This goes into annoying levels in the mission "Destroy the Apsalus II", where there are two Acguy Repairs who will heal the Apsalus II to full health if you don't kill them. Oh, and they have Lock-On Jammer, meaning you have to MANUALLY target them after a certain HP percentage.
• The biomechanical Larva in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is constantly healed by the several generators placed around the room.
• In the original Shining Force, enemy priority 1A is Straight for the Commander as his death is an instant loss for the player, and if he is out of reach, Shoot the Mage First. The GBA remake downgraded the Mage step, making medics the second priority.

• The enemy AI distributes their attacks pretty evenly in Skies of Arcadia, but most of the bosses target Fina, the party's Squishy Wizard, first (her stats are lower than the others', learns all magic types quickly, and three of her special moves revolve around healing and regeneration, with the last one being able to revive all of your other party members). Vyse is usually the other target for bosses (if you level him and buff him properly, his power can exceed Drachma's). Making it even clearer the designers knew all about this strategy, one of the bonus bosses in Legends punishes the player who dares to try this. When fighting Rupee and Barta, not only does attacking Rupee first make Barta start spamming his super move, it gives Rupee a super move where he goes berserk and throws his bodyguard into a party member. Not bad for a little guy who doesn't even want to be a pirate!
• Whenever Life Spell Punks appears in battle in the Skylanders series, the NPCs talking to the Skylander will always recommend that you defeat them first because of how quickly they heal other enemies.
• In Sonic Unleashed, the healer things in the Night Stages can heal anything and everything but itself. Normally, this isn't so bad, but in the DLC stages where there can be millions of enemies in a compact area...
• In Sore Losers, Rebels have the Rebel Medics, who heal their allies with First Aid. Ferusian military instead uses Medical and Repair Droids to aid human soldiers and other droids, respectively. All of these are primary targets for your party, since they can cancel out a turn’s worth of damage with a single heal.
• In Spiral Knights, there are two types of healers, Silkwings and Goblin Menders. Silkwings have to hug their heal targets and have an AOE heal on death, but separating them makes them easy to deal with. Menders, on the other hand, are absolute pains in the neck to deal with. They can heal at a range, faster you can do damage. They have AOE shield and heal abilities. And on Tier 3, they can raise their allies from the dead. Kill the menders FIRST.
  • The only issue is when Silkwings are surrounded by a mob of enemies. Hitting any enemy BUT the Silkwing will cause it to change position to heal the creature you just injured. This can be a problem if you're in the higher tiers, since you have to keep moving to avoid losing health. Oh, and while you're moving, so is the mob; and the Silkwings tend to stick themselves RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE. Have fun.
• StarCraft:
  • In Starcraft: Brood War, it's advantageous to take out the medics first when fighting against Terran marines. When fighting against troops in Bunkers, SCVs become quite annoying, since they can repair during the fight. Unfortunately, the AI does shoot the SCVs (though not usually medics).
  • On the other hand, the Zerg AI partially averts this, as the Terran Medics prove to be surprisingly high-priority targets for special powers, such as the Queen's Spawn Broodling ability, which kills them outright. And how.
  • In StarCraft II units have different priority settings as part of their unit data, which determines how big of a target that unit is when the enemy attacks. Though it might take a few seconds you'll find in most battles now the enemies go for the Medics first thing.
    • In Multiplayer, killing Terran Medicvacs not only denies the Marines, Hellbats, and Mauraders healing, it also denies them their transportation, making it much easier to clean them up.
• Star Wars video games:
  • The final boss fight of Knights of the Old Republic has Malak using captured Jedi to heal himself. If you kill them first, he can't heal.
  • In pre-CU Star Wars: Galaxies, the Combat Medic was one of the most broken classes in the game, as not only were they the only class (out of three healing classes) that could cast area-heals, they also were capable of laying down poisons and diseases on their enemies, which were typically virulent enough to render an enemy PC incapable of acting in combat until they found a Doctor capable of healing their wounds.
  • In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the best way to deal with griefers is to make sure you kill the healing companion they're using first, then kill the griefer. BioWare tried a workaround where you can't bring companions into PvP areas.
  • It also applied in reverse during dungeon raids. Take, for example, the Deathwatch Bunker which was, up until the NGE, the hardest dungeon in the game. Part of the challenge was in the fact that one of the players in your party had to be a non-combatant crafter so you could use the forge at the end of the dungeon to make a piece of Mandalorian armour as a reward. You would think this fragile little non-com would be your most valuable member who had to be protected at all costs. However, every single guide published on the matter specifically stated that your crafter was second in priority to any Doctors you brought along, as they were the only professions capable of resurrecting dead characters.
  • One boss fight in Jedi Academy has the lightsaber-wielding boss accompanied by a pair of Force users whose primary role is to heal said boss. The fight is in fact Unwinnable unless the two healers are taken out first.
• One of the enemy types you encounter in Stories: Path of Destinies is an ethereal blue Raven sorcerer who casts magic to empower his allies rather than fight you directly. Kill that one quickly, or you're going to have a MUCH harder time with the rest of them.
• Suikoden:
  • The Golden Hydra final boss of Suikoden has three heads. The first two heads deal damage. The third head can't attack, and instead heals and revives the other two heads. Guess which head dies first?
  • In Suikoden II, the Final Boss looks like a giant wolf with two heads. It has four attackable areas. Both heads and two legs. Throughout the whole battle, one of the legs will not do ANYTHING AT ALL, while the heads attack with physical and magic damage and the other leg deals out debuffs. That is, until you have almost beaten the boss, and the passive leg will revive the other parts and heal them. Unless you have a godly party, the only thing you can do is reset and Kill The Medic First.
  • Suikoden III has the Luc's Wind Phoenix form with the Elemental Orbs around it as the Final Boss. The Earth Rincar summons an area-wide Force Field to negate magical damage while the Water Rincar heals the Wind Phoenix and its orbs, so you better take out these things first before the Wind Rincar can rip your party apart.
• In Sunrider, PACT Support Ryders can heal their allies and cure them of status debuffs as well as inflict those same status debuffs on you, such as stripping away your Deflector Shields to leave you vulnerable to lasers or shutting off your flak so you can’t shoot down incoming missiles. And they are aware of their Squishy Wizard status, as not only will PACT Supports hang out at the back of enemy formations where they’re safely beyond the range of your kinetic weapons but they also have strong shields to prevent you from sniping them with lasers.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Axem Pink in Super Mario RPG is the only Axem who can heal, and the official strategy guide suggests taking her out first, as do many FAQs. This is actually bad advice. Axem Pink has a 25% chance to cast her heal, and then a 20% chance to heal the character you're attacking. The first one to take out is the Axem Ranger's Squishy Wizard, Axem Green — he's going to be doing by far the most damage to the party with his spells, and on the tiny chance that Axem Pink heals him, his defense is so low her heal will only recover one attack's worth of damage. Pink should be taken out second.
  • Paper Mario: White Magikoopas in the first two games can heal their allies. The first game also had Medi Guys, Shy Guys in little white flying vehicles with a red cross on the front. They also restore other enemies' health. Your partners' Tattles in both games uniformly recommend going after them first.
    Goombella's Tattle: That's a White Magikoopa. It's a Koopa wizard dressed in white. Max HP is 7, Attack is 4, and Defense is 0. It attacks with magic and can replenish its allies' HP. Better hit it first, huh?
  • Also, the battle against Bowser and Kammy near the end of Thousand-Year Door, where the only real sane route (provided you're not using one of the game's many Game-Breaker strategies) is to throw everything you've got at Kammy and then worry about the much stronger, more durable Bowser.
  • Fawful in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. The boss has a jetpack that also acts as a grapple hook, a ranged weapon, and a healing unit. So no matter how much damage you do to him, his jetpack will put him back to maxium health. You need to swallow the jetpack and have Mario and Luigi destroy it before you can defeat him.
  • In the last fight against Kamek in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, Kamek creates three other clones of himself, the white one being the healer. The thing is, if you manage to deplete the main Kamek's HP while the white one is still alive, the white Kamek will simply heal him, meaning you need to kill the white Kamek before you can actually win the fight.

• This trope is enforced in the collaboration DLC boss battle against Kirito and Asuna in Tales of Arise. Occasionally, Asuna can heal Kirito mid-battle, but the real reason this trope happens is that if you take down Kirito first, Asuna will promptly unleash her Mystic Arte, Unlimited Terrain Manipulation, and promptly cause a Total Party Kill (even your party members in the back line are killed from this, even though they're not present on the battlefield). This forces you to take down Asuna down first if you want to win.

• Team Fortress 2:
  • Medic can give his teammates overheal that lets them outlast their opponents and his Medi-Gun’s Ubercharges are crucial to breaking an enemy’s defenses or stopping an offensive push. A good medic more often than not is the deciding factor in whether his team wins or loses. It is for this reason that everyone on the enemy team will be laser focused on taking down the enemy Medic at any cost and The Medic needs his team (especially a Heavy) to defend him at all times.
  • While the Engineer isn’t quite as helpless as the Medic and will rarely singlehandedly decide a match in the same way he is, enemy Engineers and their buildings are all very high priority targets (Dispensers heal up to five people and refill their ammo, Teleporters get his allies to the front lines faster, and his sentry can lock down entire sections of the map).
  • Pyros, on account of being a mix of offense and support, are also a priority target since they can shut down Soldiers, put out burning players, separate Ubercharged medics from their patients, and disperse sticky bomb traps. A Pyro who protects the Engineer (nicknamed Pybros) is an even bigger target since they counter the three best classes for sentry-busting (Spy, Soldier, and Demoman) and can save sapped buildings with the Homewrecker or Neon Annihilator, meaning a good Engineer/Pyro combo can be near unstoppable.
• Doctors in Town of Salem can keep themselves alive one night and other people alive every other night. This makes them a high-priority target for the Serial Killer and the Mafia, who are both trying to clear the Townies out.
• Trials of Mana:
  • Inverted with Potos. They will only cast Healing Light on the entire enemy party when their own HP gets low. Thus, it makes sense to target the Potos last.
  • The Benevodon of Darkness, Zable Fahr. Once you kill the two heads, a third head comes out, heals the other two, and then they attack hard. Suddenly those other two heads don't matter anymore, you go for the new one that has the capacity to revive them...
• In Tzar: The Burden Of The Crown, priests can both heal and buff the allied units, and the Asian priests can fight back pretty well too, making them a real priority.

• In Urban Dead, while there isn't an explicit Medic class^note There is an actual Medic class in the game, but its initial skills make it so difficult to gain XP (which is notoriously hard in the game already) most players give up on the class before they reach level 2. to attack, zombie groups will tend to target NecroTech buildings because these are the only buildings capable of producing revivification syringes, which can return almost any character (particularly dead defenders) to life.

• In Warcraft III, a number of units are capable of casting healing spells. The ones to really watch out for however, are the heroes that possess healing abilities, most notably the Paladin, Death Knight and Shadow Hunter. Allowing any of these to use their abilities makes dealing any damage to the enemy army extremely difficult, making these guys a high priority target. The fact that the Death Knight and Paladin can't heal themselves is yet another reason to go after them first. Of course, both the Paladin and Death Knight are fairly durable Strength heroes that can end up being some of the tankiest units on their side, and both have abilities that make going after them even less fruitful, the Paladin having up to 45 seconds of invincibility and Death Knight being able to consume his troops to heal himself for 3 times said troop's HP, meaning you'd have been better off just killing the Mook.
• Warframe has 'healer' units in the form of Ospreys for the Corpus, Ancient Healers for the Infested, and Orokin Drones and Corrupted Healers for the Corrupted. Ospreys and Drones regenerate enemy shields while Ancient Healers provide damage reduction and emit healing pulses. Killing a Corpus squad or Infested swarm usually means targeting one of these units first to make it esaier to kill the other. The Grineer are not the kind of people to worry about things such as 'healing.'

• Wolfenstein series:
  • Wolfenstein (2009) has Scribes, who can project impenetrable shields over nearby soldiers, as well as Elite Guards, who can resurrect dead soldiers as Despoiled creatures. Needless to say, both classes of enemy are priority targets in a firefight.
  • In Return to Castle Wolfenstein and its standalone expansion Enemy Territory, the Medic class is by far one of the most dangerous classes. Not only can they instantly revive downed teammates, but as long as they have ammo, they can turn themselves into a literal One-Man Army.
• World of Warcraft:
  • One of the advantages of Paladins is shooting the medic just means that the big guy they're healing stops attacking you and starts healing the medic instead. As most healers have some ways to get out of trouble, this leads to a somewhat problematic situation of "Whoever you aren't shooting becomes a medic" even if said medic is inferior to a "real" one. While less notable, Priests, Druids, Monks, and Shamans can also pull it off to a lesser extent.
  • In the Faction Champions encounter of the "Trial of the Crusader" raid dungeon, the players have to take on several members of the opposing faction in psuedo-PVP, Arena-style combat with some of the PVP mechanics — making the opposing faction's healers the priority target.
  • Similar to Faction Champions is the Illidari Council fight in Black Temple. While you couldn't "kill her first" (the four NPCs share a single health pool), Lady Malande was more than capable of healing her group through most attacks unless you assigned specific roles to players to knock out her healing spells before she could cast them.
  • Lampshaded in-game. Lord Victor Nefarious is infamous for his quotes when his mooks are not doing a good job against the players: "Foolsss...Kill the one in the dress!" and "Concentrate your attacks upon the healer!" Of course, by the time you engage him in combat, he has conveniently forgotten that little piece of advice. He has other ways to mess with the healers, though.
  • Come Warlords of Draenor, it's Dragonmaw Warlord Zaela who rips off the "one in the dress" line early into the encounter with Dragonmaw orcs and beasts before Commander Tharbek takes the field in the WoD version of Upper Blackrock Spire.
  • The princess of Ironforge in Blackrock Depths would run around harassing your healer, and healing the crap out of Thaurissan. If you touched her at all — damage, crowd control, stuns, mana burn, anything — she wouldn't flag friendly after Thaurissan died and you couldn't complete the quest — both her father Magni (questgiver for Alliance players) and Thrall (questgiver for Horde players) didn't want any harm to come to her. ^note And then sometimes she wouldn't flag friendly anyway, but that's something different. So you had to just let her run around and try to burn the boss faster than she could heal him.
  • Healing generates threat towards all monsters in the area, whereas damage only generates threat towards the monster it hits. So if there's an unoccupied group of monsters around, they will ignore the tank and damage dealers and head straight for the healer. However it also doesn't take much to get them to forget about that and start trying to kill the one wearing more metal plates than an armoury.
  • Kael'thas Sunstrider, the final boss of the Tempest Keep raid, was a 5-phase fight. For the first 3 phases he'd have mooks attack you, and would finally join the fight himself in the 4th phase. However, due to a coding bug, he'd accumulate healing threat during the first 3 phases, so when the raid group finally got to phase 4 he'd have accumulated so much healing threat that he'd attack the healers and only the healers. It made the fight unwinnable, but it was an amusing bug.
  • Some boss encounters have mechanics that target players based on their role. There are some cases in which healers are almost never targeted (such as the Sha of Pride's Imprison), but others in which healers, due to being considered "ranged" players, might be very likely to be targeted.
• Lampshaded and enforced in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. During the practice match flashback, Garvel orders part of his team to focus fire onto Joran, who is implied to be the only Healer between himself, Noah, Eunie, and Lanz. Layla's reaction even implies this is a basic strategy that is taught to all First-termers in Aionios.
  Garvel: Just draw their attention. 'Cause what we're after here...is that lame duck.
  Hoope: Joran? But he's bottom of the class. Why bother?
  Garvel: Thing is, the brat's still a decent Healer. Get it?
  Layla: Ahh, right. So we're playing by the book here.
  Garvel: Pisses me off, but the fight'll be good as won!
• X-COM
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown has two examples.
    • Drones are weak, but have the power to repair damaged mechanical enemies (such as the Cyberdisc and Sectopod)^note even more aggravating in Enemy Within, where their repairs don't account for the Sectopod's new Reinforced Armor, so the 3 HP repaired counts as 6, and are often deployed in teams with such units; also, unlike the robots they accompany, in Terror Site missions the Drones will gun straight for civilians. You can shoot them down (with a little bit of difficulty because of their innate defense and flight-derivative defensive bonus), and indeed a Colonel Sniper with "In The Zone" and a laser or plasma rifle should be able to wipe out clusters of Drones in a single turn. Alternatively, you can neutralize a Drone by Hacking it with a properly upgraded Arc Thrower, and it'll stay on your side for the whole mission, and even repair your S.H.I.V.s and MEC Troopers once per turn.
    • EXALT Medics in the Enemy Within expansion are a inversion. Whilst the one-turn defense bonus their Smoke Grenade gives can be a pain, their Field Medic skill gives them three Medikit charges to play with, and Covering Fire lets them retaliate against XCOM gunfire, they have the poorest Aim in the entire game and will waste Medikit charges on themselves if they take even Scratch Damage. Elites aren't much more of a threat either - even with Regen Pheromones giving them and nearby allies 1 HP per turn and Dense Smoke doubling their Smoke Grenade's defensive bonus, their aim is still quite poor unless you're playing on Impossible. Unless they're actively helping their allies, they can be safely saved for last.
  • In XCOM 2, you should target ADVENT Shieldbearers first to bring down the Deflector Shields they will grant their allies. Shred their armor first, though.
• In Zone of the Enders 2: The Second Runner, Raptors equipped^note The Mummyhead chassis part itself can be destroyed when you incur enough damage on them most of the time with an outer Mummyhead chassis are able to repair any distant enemy orbital frames to full energy, thereby making them even more of a annoyance than they normally are with their Halberd and Comet attacks, so it's always a priority to destroy their Mummyhead chassis part if not the whole Raptor to avoid them doing that.

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