So I did an article when I first switched to Doomy3. It spoke mainly of my reasons for wanting to play him, but based on the vote we did last week I think I need to go into more depth about his current strengths in certain key matchups and some of the things I’ve learned.

For anyone who missed last week’s article, I asked the Trollblood community to pick the best three casters. Doomy3 came in as our 6th best caster with just over 30% of players considering him top three. I don’t just think he’s one of our best casters. Right now, with the tools we have and the Meta that sits around him, he is the best caster in trolls.

Feat

So in Mk2 many of the most popular casters in trolls had a soft time walk feat. Whether it was Doomy1 stopping opponents from spending focus or fury, Grissel2 increasing overall armour for your infantry brick to ridiculous levels or Grim1 reducing speed and stopping charges so he could spend another turn picking apart, Trolls often ran casters with defensive feats that allowed us to throw a massive counter punch. Doomy3, Ragnor and Gunnbjorn all hard timewalks in MK3 and not a surprise that all three of them are considered strong casters. Doomy3’s can be shut down with Grievous Wounds, but I haven’t seen a list that brings enough to worry me so far. Even then if someone brought enough Grievous Wounds to do the job, most casters can’t stand toe to toe with Doomy’s kit even without a feat.

The second part of his feat is an additional die to hit for beasts in melee for a turn. Often you’ll not get a chance to use this, because you’ll feat defensively to help you survive the alpha strike, but when it’s useful it really is a great benefit. Remember you can boost on top of the additional die so four dice to hit. This is especially good when you’re fishing for criticals. My list includes both Mulg and a Storm Troll which both have excellent critical effects.

Spell List

Admonition:

Genuinely considered amazing on any caster, this spell is especially strong when paired with implacability. One of the main ways to get around Admo is by knocking the model down, with a throw or a slam. That isn’t an option here. In many lists admonition goes on your biggest threat to allow you to play more aggressive. Due to the inclusion of a Mountain king in my list that isn’t the case here. Instead Admonition is often used to defend the MK. You can do this by standing between the MK and the thing that wants to charge it and using admonition to move away if they charge Mulg instead, or you use it to admonition in the way of a charge lane so the MK can only be charged by one heavy. Either option allows you to trade effectively. Movement in your opponents turn is always really valuable.

Implacability:

Troll players often complain about not having power spells. This is a power spell and what’s beautiful about it, is that it’s very Troll in nature. It’s a denial effect and one of the best defensive spells in the game. It shuts down the game plans of so many casters, pulls, drags, slams, places and knockdowns. Your opponent can’t be tricky and generally has to fight you in a fair fight. The more you play the list the more you realise how much of the game it shuts down. People value control effects and Implacability takes many of them away.

Repudiate

We start to move into the toolkit nature of Doomy3. The reason he is so strong is that he possesses so many answers to different questions. In this case, we’re talking about his anti spell package. The ability to get rid of a spell is interesting. It usually means you can get rid of a defensive buff like Arcane shield and then kill whatever the spell was protecting. That’s interesting and useful, but Doomy does so much more. Doomy can strip an offensive spell and then mini feat and even potentially combine it with arcane suppression. If you did this on a Synergy caster he’s suddenly looking at paying four focus to cast Synergy, again you are taking away your opponents tricks and on top of that you’re doing damage.

I recently played Doomy3 into Strakhov2 at a local tournament. The matchup is obviously awful as I brought a beast brick and he brought thirsty Iron Fang Pikemen with access to Last Stand. Repudiating all of his upkeeps to keep him focus strapped was a huge part of keeping myself in the game. There was no hot swapping of abilities and the damage I dealt from three Repudiates in one turn was critical to me assassinating him.

Stranglehold

Another fantastic toolkit spell, but the truth is it becomes situational with this list for a few good reasons. Firstly Doomy has no access to an arcnode so he needs to be within 10 inches of his target. Secondly he often has so many other things to do: filling the stone, casting implacability, handing out animi, repudiating a debuff off an enemy or just camping fury to stay alive. This means that stranglehold has three main uses in Doomy 3 lists:

A nuke for killing a key target. Doomy lists are often low on modes and attacks and it’s not uncommon to need to use the spell as a nuke to stop someone contesting a flag, finish off a jack or beast that was left on one of two boxes or even kill an incorporeal solo. Doomy has no gun and often Stranglehold can be used in a similar way.

Late game if the mountain king dies you will sometimes find a need to trade smartly instead of using a brute force approach. Without Rage to hand out it’s often worth throwing a stranglehold out to control a beast or jack so you can pick their force apart piece by piece.

Sometimes someone will threaten you early game with a piece you can’t deal with. An example would be your opponent running a jack at you and using Magnus2’s feat so you can’t move towards it. Another example would be Kalyssa stopping charges for a turn. In these occasions an early game Stranglehold can be absolute money.

The spell is absolutely amazing, but just be wary of getting too greedy. If you’re plan is to walk up turn two and stranglehold their colossal, you’ll be left standing 10 inches from their caster and if you don’t break armour it does literally nothing.

Unminding

People often talk about awful spells on cards and usually they are too expensive for the caster to use or they are one of two nukes and the other is clearly better. Unminding fits neither of those categories and yet is truly terrible. It only effects beasts and so is incredibly limited in terms of target, but that isn’t even the biggest problem. The main issue is that it’s incredibly tough to think of a situation where casting this spell would be the right choice. If you’re casting this to steal a strong animus then you’re either leaving a frontline beast within 10 inches of your caster or you’re trying to target a support beast who is usually too far back for Doomy to be within 10 inches of. Seriously taking Primal off a gorax or Force Aura off a Krea seems good in theory, but when will you ever end up within 10 inches of them.

The only real two uses I believe exist for this spell are reducing the fury of a beast so your opponent’s caster no longer has a transfer target and you can assassinate them or stealing rush off a Titan Gladiator in a beast brick that lacks any other source of pathfinder. You would of course have to be sure that no other beasts can get to you as you’ll be pretty exposes, but stealing pathfinder in that matchup could be huge. I’ve played quite a bit of Doomy3 and neither of those situations have ever come up. I live in hope though, but even if it is terrible, who cares? The other spells are money.

Mini Feats

Call of Troqal

Casting animi for 0 fury is absolutely amazing. If you gave me a caster with this as a feat and a decent spell list I’d honestly consider it. The fact it’s on Doomy 3 here in addition to an even stronger feat and a great spell list is baffling. Lets look at some of the uses that I regularly get out of this amazing mini feat:

Mountain King can threaten 12 inches with rush and then cast rage on himself so he still hits really hard with 6 attacks when he gets there. You can even trample and buy four attacks to kill most heavies.

Send in Mulg with Rage or rush and then pop Arcane Suppression at the end of a killing spree to make the retaliation that much harder. (More Expensive spells or animi)

Send an Axer in on it’s own with rush to thresher with 2-3 extra fury to boost or buy more attacks.

Send the storm troll in with lightning fists on a bunch of infantry.

Put Rage on the mountain king with Doomy and then use the mountain king to put rage on another beast that Doomy would have been unable to get to.

None of those abilities are corner case. You will genuinely use them all the time and they are brilliant.

Hand of Yolandi

Remember earlier when we talked about soft control. This mini feat increases spell costs and upkeeps within 14 inches. This is great on its own, but really strong when combined with Arcane Supression. This is soft control and as we already mentioned it will hope you

Strength of the Molgur

An extra dice on all warrior model attacks, dropping the lowest seemed counter intuitive when we first saw Doomy3. He doesn’t really like running infantry as that gives your opponent something to kill on your feat turn. The Power of Dhunia theme further supported the notion that you don’t want units with him. The mini feat works on all infantry though:

It works on Doomy3 himself who can make sure critical spells land. Do you have a turn where a Stranglehold absolutely has to hit, time for your mini feat. Remember it works on spells.

My list has two Northkin Shamans. Most of the time they act as a cloud wall for Doomy, but as already mentioned this list can struggle for quantity of attacks. On a turn a Shaman could theoretically charge a target and battle wizard a MAG 6 POW 12 spray where all those attack rolls get the extra dice, remove the lowest.

Even the Krielstone can benefit. Yes it’s not Plan A, or even play B or C, but if it’s late game and you’re against an opponent who is in range, why not signs and portents, pop strength aura on the stone and send them in on something, You might be amazed at what they can sometimes kill on the charge if they hit. I feel knowing when to use the stone late game is one of those skills that every Troll Player needs to develop.

Field Marshall: Hyper Regeneration

Seems almost throw away at first. Lots of casters have super cool field marshall abilities that empower their whole force with extra offensive or defensive output. Doomy’s is a bit more subtle, sure I’d love Field Marshall Countercharge or kill shot or two extra speed on a field marshall, but if we’re honest Doomy doesn’t need any more power. They gave him Hyper Regen and it means that his beasts are just that little bit tougher, but it also stops any order of activation issues. You never have to worry about activating your caster first or spending a fury to heal a box on your beast. Instead your beast will activate and heal it straight away. This is fantastic and hard to appreciate until you see it on the table.

List

Doomy3 (Power of Dhunia)

Mountain King

Mulg

Earthborn

Axer

Storm Troll

Max Stone + UA

Whelps

Shaman

Shaman

I’ve posted this list before, but it’s nice to have it hear as a reference point before we go through matchups.

Matchups



Haley2:

The first move obvious point is that you can stop the offensive TK’s. Your opponent can’t turn your beast around and feat leaving you facing the wrong way with a jack wailing on you. They can still TK themselves, but at that point it’s basically energizer. You also have a strong time walk feat which you can counter feat with. What’s more interesting is that the current list is taking advantage of the Storm Strider and features several lightning guns in the form of a Reliant, Hurricane and 2 Fireflys. This seems really strong against Ghost Fleet, but it’s a win for us. My version of the Doomy3 list features an Earthborn and a Storm Troll both of which are immune to all shooting in the list other than the handcannons. The Lightning fist animus can also make your caster completely immune to shooting. This literally means you can sit on zero camp with implacability up in the middle of the board and as long as they can’t get a jack into melee with you, you’re basically 100% safe. Use your tools and you have the advantage here against Haley2. Who would ever believe that?

Fyanna2:

Another Meta bogeyman Fyanna2 seems really scary, but this is definitely a good matchup if you can get a few practice games. First thing I need to stress is you need to save your counter feat. The idea is that you let them alpha and remove a heavy, preferably the Earthborn and then you counter feat go in and hit them hard knowing they won’t be able to do much into your feat the next turn. Also understand the limitations of their list. They will need to fury swap to chew through their beef and that means Admonition won’t be up on either Angelius. Remember that when Admonition is up you can use your admonition to follow them when they move away. Also remember your soft control, if you can get Fyanna within arcane suppression and Hand of Yolandi it can be really hard for her to utilize her tools. Remember as well that you have shamans, which can use chiller to drop enemy defence on feat turn. You would assume they would be high priority, but I Legion players are often way to concerned with all the other threats in the list to go after a free solo.

Remember as well that the Mountain King has Deafen on his spray lots of answer for a high def skew in this list.

Vyros2:

Vyros is a bit of a dark horse right now, but you might very well see him with Griffons and a Helios. He was the initial reason I switched to Doomy3 as he pulls in beasts and kills them for fun when you don’t have implacability. Doomy3 takes it all off the table and without the gun that Colossal is potentially overpriced. Vyros 2 is the big offender, but any Helios will struggle vs Doomy3. Keep that in mind.

Butcher3:

He’s making a strong resurgence due to him being one of the best Khador answer’s to ghost fleet. This is a horrible matchup for Butcher and quite often your Khador opponent will drop their other list if at all possible. The issues comes that some pairing don’t have a proper answer to Doomy3 and need to drop Butcher. Your first tool is Implacability, being able to stop the drag is absolutely huge. It means that Butcher should not be able to kill multiple heavies in one go.

Secondly you have the spell control. Arcane suppression and Hand of Yolandi mean that those Flashing Blades are suddenly super expensive. You also have Deafen on the mountain king, which can spray Butcher to stop him charging the next turn, though be aware he will get Vengeance. It may also be worth considering Stranglehold late game.

Conclusion

There we have it, some of this I’ve covered before, but the rankings last week made me feel we needed to go back and look at Doomy3 again with some of the things I’ve learned since I started playing him in March. He is so strong right now against what’s good in the Meta and he is really worth your time.