Plague Doctor (Butcher's Circus)

Combat Skills
(All buffs and debuffs last for 3 rounds unless otherwise specified.)

Using a Plague Doctor
The Plague Doctor retains her role as the best Blight specialist in the game, but due to how DoTs can't deliver Deathblows in this game, her value instead lies in her ability to inflict Stress. Blinding Gas is especially potent, inflicting at least 20 Stress to the enemy backrow and reducing their ACC to make landing hits much more of a pain. Her Noxious Blast is equally Stressful and tags enemies with a strong 6-point Blight. Disorienting Blast is by far her most Stressful attack at a base of 30 Stress, on top of inducing Shuffle, Daze and corpse clearing to wreak havoc on enemy lines. Battlefield Medicine can provide a moment of reprieve to ailed allies at Death's Door. Incision sometimes gets included as an emergency skill should the Plague Doctor find herself pulled to the front of the formation.

Because the Plague Doctor operates almost exclusively in the back but has no way to compensate getting pulled forward, consider equipping the Exotic Snuff to counter her poor Move resist. Otherwise, ensure the rest of your team has movement skills of their own to help reposition the Plague Doctor. Other Trinkets to use include the Carnival Mask or Rotting Trophy to raise her Stress output, to be replaced with the Acrid Vial once unlocked.

Fighting a Plague Doctor
First and foremost: Pull her forward if you can. She's got very low Move resist which exposes her to skills like Come Hither or Daemon's Pull. Once the Plague Doctor is in position 2 she loses access to Blinding Gas and can't apply AoE stress to your party, giving you a reprieve against her while you work on everyone else. Ideally, bring her all the way up to position 1 so that she can only fight using Incision.

Her raw damage output is poor, and she works mainly through the spread of Blight. The Blight ticks for so much that that you cannot reasonably counter them with Restoration skills and have to cure them yourself. If you lack the ability to cure it, the best you can do is wait for your heroes to hit Death's Door before healing them.