The Blitzer is a bit of an anomaly in the dire troll stable. He doesn’t hit as hard as the Mauler, EBTD or Mulg and has less reliable shooting then the Bomber. Many often question his value at 9 points, arguing that it’s better to pay the 1 point more for the Bomber and well, most of the time, they’re probably right however, the Blitzer does have a role and he does offer a number of things to a troll player that are otherwise not available. Lets go through them:

The support caster’s best friend:

The Blitzer has an award winning yet often overlooked Animus, while he can use it on himself (more on that later) handing your caster the ability to extract himself from combat is not to be overlooked. Granted you can argue that he should never have been there in the first place but it happens and when it does, having a Blitzer on the board helps.



I’ll have me some threat range:

The Blitzer has the highest built in thread range of any of our trolls. Yes, eDoomy can send Mulg a fair way across the table but it takes alot of effort and the Blitzer can hit things alot further away (rather unreliably but still). It has a built in threat range of 18’ before you augment it (8’ charge + 10’ range on the gun) and it can easily be increased to 22’ with Farstrike. Other factions can do better but that’s other factions. We beatface pretty well but being able to easily reach out and hit something important in the backfield is sometimes rather important and the Blitzer gives troll players that option. The Blitzer will come in with D3 S13 shots, all of which are boostable. It won’t take down a heavy but it can remove those irritating support solo’s and it’s possible to kill more than 1 in a turn.

I’ll have my cake and eat it:

Because of gunfighter and virtuoso, you can kill whatever you charge (obviously target dependant but the Blitzer is still a dire troll) and then shoot allowing you to derive substantial value in any given turn, should the combat not go your way, you can still pop the animus and then shoot. One of the downers of using a Bomber is that once combat is joined and he’s engaged in combat the shooting stops. With the Blitzer, that aint the case.

Synergies

The Blitzer works well as a tag team with either the Pyre or the Slag troll. The main reason is that both of those trolls add a significant range attack to the party, depending on what you are more worried about (infantry or constructs). They also have superb animii of their own that buff the Blitzer to the point where it almost competes with the melee dire trolls in terms of damage output and significantly increases its versatility.

The caster’s that best with the Blitzer are our range of support casters, all of whom make good use of the Animus. Grim has the ability to debuff targets while Calandra with her feat and ability to reroll dice increase the reliability of the Blitzer however one caster above all seems to have been built for the Blitzer, Cap’n Gunbjorn. Firstly, if you happen to be taking a theme force, tier 1 drops the cost of both the Blitzer and the Bomber by one, always welcome but where he truly shines with the Blitzer is his spell list. Drop Explosivo and guided fire down and suddenly you have 1-3 boosted POW 13 attacks a turn with the first shot being a AOE 3 that also happen to be magical. Throw down a rockwall to prevent charges and the Blitzer can cause many a headache for your opponent, allowing you to pick off targets at range while limiting counterattacks.

Conclusion

Trolls don’t exactly struggle when it comes to superb options for your heavy beasts and you can certainly be forgiven for going for the Bomber over the Blitzer however the Blitzer does give you a number of options and he is a ton of fun to play.