[Micah]

Good question Hellboy.

Your best bet for small horrors is 5 (or 10 with a ring) flying units with the best offensive potential you can get. Non-magical weapons need not apply unless they've got multiple attacks or enough strength to get a 1-hit kill due to ethereality. Basically this means spring hawks are your only safe bet for most nations, and at 20 air gems for 5 it's probably not at all worth the investment. Blowing 20 gems to keep someone that's not that important alive is not a good deal, even if they could always kill a horror before it moved.

I guess if you have a slightly marked commander that was very important (Cast a global maybe, and got a mark from a booster you slapped on him to get the spell off, or a powerful battlemage you keep in the back where his bodyguards will be safe) you might want to try 5-10 spring hawks if you're rich in air gems and strapped for pearls, since empowering is a bit more expensive. 5 hawks have somewhere between a 50-75% chance of dropping a lesser horror before it moves from the few tests I just ran, I'd imagine 10 would be a pretty sure kill (but at 45 air gems that isn't cheap, especially given the low liklihood that you'll actually get attacked with a low-level mark. Worth it if you just sunk a couple hundred gems into a global, perhaps).

Any normal-HP mage is pretty screwed once the horror moves, since they have a 12AN damage attack with a 13 attack skill, which I think comes after their life drain shot, so that's at another -2 defense.

My slightly flippant earlier response was pretty much because it was true. Your choices when it comes down to horrors really do narrow down to the following in 99% of cases when you're not talking about an SC commander:

1. Hope the mark doesn't actually trigger an attack
2. Cast Returning
3. Invest far more resources protecting a commander than the commander is worth
4. Die

Kitting out certain SCs may be a good plan, especially if you're using non-cursed equipment that you can pull off of him before he meets a Doom Horror...the problem being that you can't give an SC flying guards because they'll die.

An SC that has high enough defense (not counting a shield, I think, since their astral hook attack is AN), or that flies and hits really hard (Enough to kill a 22 HP, 15 prot ethereal critter with 13 defense in a turn) are the only ones that will stand up to a horror, since anything that's relying on protection or any kind of shield-based damage will get hit, and marked more. (Unless it's an MR attack, I'm not sure on that...if you get an MR roll to avoid the marks any decent SC should be fine with lesser horrors, but that's still not addressing the "guards" question)