How To Tackle The Turtles

Turtle teams look terrifying on paper: tons of stone skin, ally attacks, big passives, and Leonardo ready to nuke your entire team the moment someone drops low. In practice, though, once you understand how the mechanics actually work, the Turtles have some notable weaknesses, and there are several ways to beat them almost 100% of the time.

This guide breaks down how Leonardo’s team functions, what really does and doesn’t trigger his passives, and the most reliable strategies to tear through the four-turtle defences in Arena.

Most turtle defenses follow a similar pattern:

• Go-second, slow, built for reaction and punishment.
• Multiple turtles in stone skin, sometimes with Lightning Cage.
• Defensive relics like Aspect of Siroth, Last Laugh Amulet, Wand of Submission, etc.

The key piece is Leonardo’s “TMNT Unity” A3:

• It only triggers when an ally’s HP drops below 50% but stays above 0.
• If you take a turtle from, say, 60% straight to 0% HP in a single attack (even multi-hit as part of one skill), it does not trigger.
• It only triggers from attacks, not from debuffs or indirect damage:

HP Burn ticks. Poison ticks. Bomb explosions. Reflect damage. None of these will set off Leonardo’s Unity A3 or similar passives.

Donatello adds another layer:

• He can cleanse all debuffs and prevent death/equalise HP when an ally is about to die.
• That prevention can be bypassed by multi-hit skills, the first hit “saves” them, the second/third finishes the job.

Once you keep those two constraints in mind (attack-only triggers, and “below 50% but not dead”), countering turtles becomes a puzzle with several clean solutions.

Bombs are one of the best answers into turtle teams because they:

• Completely ignore stone skin interaction on the hit itself (bombs are debuff damage).
• Don’t trigger Leonardo’s or Donatello’s passives, since the damage comes from debuffs, not attacks.

The basic idea:

• Bring a strong bomber with high ACC.
• Use Increase Accuracy from someone like Lady Kimi or an alternate-form buff champion so that even a high-RES Donatello can’t reliably resist.
• Optionally add Increase ATK to ramp the bomb damage and some buff removal to clear stone skin/block debuffs where possible.

The main risk is Donatello:

• If he’s very high RES in stone skin + Lightning Cage + maybe Feral, he might resist the bombs and then cleanse.
• Buff removal isn’t 100% because Lightning Cage can protect buffs and stop you from stripping the important ones.

So bombs aren’t perfectly consistent into the every variant of the Turtles, but they’re still a very high-win-rate option.

Komidus: the Premium Bomber

Komidus is basically the “free win” version of this plan:

• He places bombs and instantly detonates them on enemies in stone skin or with less HP than him.
• Turtles are usually in stone skin and have less HP than a chunky Komidus, so they just explode.
• Donatello cannot cleanse or save anyone because they’re already dead the moment the bombs land.

The only time this fails is if the defender goes extremely deep with Feral/huge shields on everyone. Even then, pairing Komidus with a bit of buff removal usually cleans things up.

Because Leonardo only reacts if they survive below 50% HP, raw nuking is a valid plan, especially once you have high-end gear.

Two main approaches:

One-Shot Donatello, Then Leonardo

• Kill Donatello in a single skill first. He can’t save himself.
• Once he’s gone, Leonardo becomes much easier to delete with a big nuke.

This isn’t perfectly consistent:

• Reaction accessories can turn your crit into a non-crit, leaving Donatello at 20–40% HP and proccing Leonardo, which is bad.
• Aspect of Siroth can also reduce damage so he falls below 50% without dying.

It’s still a solid mid-to-high-success strategy, but you accept the occasional failure.

Multi-Hit Skills to Bypass Donatello

Multi-hit nukers like Marius A2 or Gizmak form 2 are excellent here:

• First hit: Donatello’s passive triggers and equalises/saves.
• Second/third hits: finish the target off anyway.
• The turtle ends the attack dead, so Leonardo’s Unity doesn’t activate.

This also works on Leonardo himself if you can strip stone skin mid-skill, but Lightning Cage and RNG make that less reliable. Still, multi-hits + good damage are a very real way to punch straight through Donatello’s protection and never see the scary counterattacks.

Turtles are usually low-RES and slow outside of a possible RES-stacked Donatello, which makes them good targets for:

• Skill cooldown increase effects (“lockout”).
• Buff removal to rip stone skin and other defensive buffs.
• Follow-up bombs or nukes.

A typical approach:

• Open with a speed booster.
• Use a champion like Lady Kimi plus a dedicated lockout champ (e.g. Yumeko/Warlord-type) to put their actives on cooldown.
• Then lay down bombs or heavy damage while they flail on A1s.

Caveats:

• Leonardo’s Unity doesn’t care if his A3 is on cooldown – it’s a passive trigger, so he can still smack you if you drop someone below 50%.
• Donatello can reduce allies’ cooldowns again later.
• Ally-attack A1s can still add up to surprising damage if you let the fight drag on.

Lockout is excellent when combined with another plan (bombs, burns, block damage), but it’s rarely a complete solution by itself.

Because Leonardo and Donatello only react to damage from attacks, debuff damage is incredibly powerful into turtles.
Best options:

• HP Burn is king. Stone skin takes extra damage from burns and burn ticks do not trigger Unity or death prevention.
• Poison can work, but stone skin blocks poisons, so it’s a bit more awkward.

With the right setup, you can absolutely melt a turtle team:

• Use champions like Gizmak, Vulkanos, or other strong burners.
• Stack relics like Skull of Treason (more burn damage) and the Incinerate blessing (up to 100% more burn damage in PvP).
• Burns quickly strip stone skin, push multiple turtles under 50% HP, and even kill them, all without ever waking Leonardo’s passives.

This can feel unfair for the defender once you have the relics and blessings in place.

These are the two safest ways to beat turtles once you own the right champions.

Block Damage

Champions like Helicath or Niamhe can put your team under block damage for multiple turns.

• Leonardo cannot kill into block damage, so he can’t remove your buffs.
• Raphael can ignore block damage only via his Berserk-boosted A2, and it’s extremely hard for defense AI to sequence Berserk, A2 and death triggers correctly.
• Michelangelo can still stun, but he’s not going to win through solid block damage on a well-built squad.

To make this safer:

• Add cooldown increase or control to reduce the odds of Raphael ever lining up his ignore-block-damage hit.
• Put Protection sets on your block damage champion (e.g. 9-piece) so that even Leonardo’s buff removal can’t strip the buff reliably.

Unkillable (Best Counter)

Unkillable is even better than block damage:

• Raphael cannot ignore Unkillable.
• Leonardo has to kill to strip buffs, which he simply can’t do if you are Unkillable.
• Their entire game plan falls apart.

Examples:

• Classic Maneater comps: speed boost → cooldown increase → 2-turn unkillable → safely nuke or bomb.
• Lady Noelle + Sir Nicholas. Noelle’s A2 acts like a rotating 2-turn unkillable on a 3-turn cycle when paired with Sir Nick. Sir Nick’s A3 covers the gap, giving you near-permanent unkillable. The turtles simply can’t push through it; you take your time and dismantle them. As long as you don’t mis-time your buffs, turtle teams become target dummies.

A few extra tricks worth mentioning:

• Reflect damage (or Volcardiac Heart): Unity hits into your reflect shield can literally kill Leonardo with his own attack. Again, this is reflected damage, so it doesn’t trigger additional passives.
• Consistent crowd control: Hard stuns, freezes, or sleeps can lock them out if you account for Wand of Submission and don’t rely on just one CC source.
• Polymorph/Sheep: Turning Leonardo into a sheep or similar disables the scary passives temporarily, letting you kill the rest. Risky since Leonardo could be using a Wand of Submission Relic.

Putting it together, an ideal anti-turtle team usually combines two or more of:

• Speed boost + Increase ACC.
• Cooldown increase/buff removal.
• A main kill condition: bombs, HP burns, or a reliable multi-hit nuker.
• A safety layer: block damage or unkillable.

For early-game accounts without these tools, turtle teams will feel oppressive. Once you have access to bombers, HP burners, and especially unkillable/block damage, they flip from “unbeatable wall” to “free points” very quickly.

Master the triggers on Leonardo and Donatello, bring one of the hard counters above, and the turtles go from nightmare Arena defense to just another farmable meta team.