LogFAQs > #938646393

Depends mostly on how much damage the individual enemies can do and how much health they have. If they're a serious threat, bursting one down can make incoming damage more manageable than trying to handle all of the damage for long enough to AoE the whole pack down at once, but that's only true if they have a small enough health pool that they can be burst down quickly enough. If individually killing them takes longer, then you need to handle their full damage long-term anyway, so it's better to AoE them for the greater damage output and just deal with the incoming damage until the pack's gone. Similarly, for really big packs, killing one enemy won't have a significant impact on their damage, so AoE's the way to go.

Of course, it's also going to depend on pack sizes and relative damage values for the attacks. If a single-target attack does 4x the damage of an AoE one, obviously you don't use AoE for anything less than 4 enemies (maybe 3, if AoE is lazier and it's not a serious enough fight to warrant min/maxing). I feel like that goes without saying, though.

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