@CrystalBlue Dogs are the bane of mage units. Of all the light melee units they are by far the strongest against mage units. Your Priests will often be able to deal with a few enemy light melee units if they are thieves or orcs. But dogs are just bad mojo for mage units. I mentioned in my above post that I only use heavy melee units fairly rarely and only against a few combinations of enemies. Well, most of the combinations I do use heavy melee against involve dogs. Specifically, enemy combos of dogs with heavy range or dogs with heavy melee are when I use heavy melee.
If I am against an enemy combo of heavy range/light melee or heavy melee/light melee and the enemy light melee units are thieves or orcs, I usually just send in 5 units of Priests. I would note that I have Dragon Abbey, a level 10 Fire Phoenix, and I usually have a 5 day mage building active when I am doing tournament and spire. With all this help, my Priests are good enough that they can usually deal with a couple of light melee units and suffer little losses as long as those light melee units are not dogs.