Looking to get the drop on your opponents in Teamfight Tactics? You’ll want to think more about unit placement! Placing your champions on the field may not seem as important as team composition or item set-up, but even the strongest team composition will fail if you don’t put your units in the right places. But we’re here to help! Our TFT Positioning Guide will give you the basics on how to place your champions, as well as exceptions to looks out for!
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Teamfight Tactics Positioning Basics
Positioning in Teamfight Tactics will be familiar to those that have played League of Legends, or any other auto battler. Units can be split up into roughly three types: Tanky, high health characters that don’t do much damage; high damage melee units that can’t take as much damage; and ranged damage units that can snipe foes from afar, but can’t take much of anything in terms of damage.
No set-up will fit for every single team composition, but some general rules can help and apply to most comps.
First, if a unit has a lot of health and can take some hits, you’ll want them on the frontline. Generally, more health means less damage per second (DPS), so you’ll want them to take hits for the units that can do more damage.
Melee units built to deal damage are a little trickier to position. You need to make sure they don’t get in the way of the tanks and eat damage, but you also need to make sure they can quickly get into the fray to start attacking. For these units, you can place them directly behind the tanks so they’ll move next to them after the tanks have gained the attention of other units, or to the left of the tanks, as generally, your team will be running to the right to meet the other team.
Ranged units don’t need to be up in the front to deal damage, so make sure to put them behind units that don’t have range so they don’t get in the way.
However, some classes and skills throw a wrench into normal positioning that you need to watch out for.
Assassins and Blitzcrank
Assassins start the match by jumping to the unit that’s furthest away from them. Blitzcrank’s ultimate grabs the opponent farthest away and drags as close as possible.
In a normal setup, you’ll want to have your ranged units farthest away from the ongoing scuffle, but that makes them easy prey for Assassins and Blitzcrank. Many teams will deploy one Assassin at least, so it’s within your best interest to put a unit that can take a few hits in the furthest spot from the opponent’s field. Alternatively, you can put your weakest unit in that spot so they get focused rather than your main carry.
Exiles
Exiles have a special Origin ability that, if you set an Exile away from everyone else, they’ll get a substantial boost in health. If you pull Yasao, you’ll want to keep that in mind when placing your team around the field.
Hextechs
Hextechs have a new ability players need to watch out for when placing characters. When at least two Hextech champions are on the field, at the start of the match a bomb will be thrown out that will disable equipped items on affected champions for 8 seconds. Given that items are very important in most team compositions, a Hextech team can quickly neuter your team to the point that they’ll be dead long before their items come back online.
How do you work around these bombs? First and foremost, you’ll want to have your units a little more spread out. Before Hextechs were released, most players would bunch their teams together on the left side of the map (unless they had Yasao). But now doing that will make sure the bomb affects as many units as possible.
The ability affects a champion with an item and the spaces adjacent to said champion, so the best course of action is to spread out champions with items across the field to limit the bomb’s effect. For more in-depth information about this new mechanic, head over to our guide on how to counter a Hextech TFT team.
