No seriously how in the warp do you expect this monster to function? Because as it sits they are like assassins in VT2 with a major counterplay removing design change. They lack a significant visual queue, well what do I mean by this, in other games this type of enemy will often have a visual queue to help identify the target in the rush of gaming an exaggerated animation a bright artical of clothing, even glowing eyes. Assassin as an example had its glowing green blades and telegraphed high ground based movement(even when grounded and running among a horde it could still be spotted but reacting to it was still on you.) The dog lacks all of these in practice.
Now in a perfect scenario sure a sigular special enemy you can see coming won’t fold a match but the moment you have any significant number of the medium sized palid grey brown and green zombies on the screen you will never see the small palid grey brown and green dog coming and it can easily end your run. The dog has quiet or null roaming sounds and comfortably hides itself behind even the smallest poxwalker. I will repeat, the monster that can disable you from playing the game and end your run has no visual distinction from anyother infected type mobs, in practice if you are fighting any number of enemies you will not see the dog until someone saves you. Heck even the simple bomber has their glowing bandolier of nades and they are no where near as threatening as a dog in most situations. Now you may think oh thats silly how can you not see it and I’ll simply remind you that there are not only 1 but 2 out of our 4 total modifiers reduce player visibility and lighting affects. Why did you take the assassin style disabler and make them feel awful to hunt and look for which is made feel even worse by half the mission modifiers.
SILLY Side tangent why does a dog pouncing person A through person B damage person B’s hp through toughness but not damage the intended target? This ruined a penance for me in case you were wondering.
Anyway love the game keep up the good work bubs.
Edit: I understand you can easily ping them to see them better but I’m disabled in such a way that anxiety spamming any key really isn’t viable. This visual design choice just makes the game harder in a way that its spiritual successors L4d2 and VT2 did not and it just feels like I’m being punished for my disabilites and not my gameplay related short comings.
My usual advice to a lot of people in this case is to pull the tried and tested tactic from BF series.
Spam the spotting button like your life dependent on it if you are uncertain of an enemy, and even if you do see them clear as day.
That thing is a wallhack of sorts as it prioritises Elites and automatically tags them, so even if you don’t see them, as long as your reticule was in the same zip code as the creature you were trying to tag, you will tag them and now be able to follow them.
Another one is obviously to learn the spawn points. There are only so many of them and vast majority of them are easy to narrow down based on the audio cues you do get. The moment you hear the howl for example that indicates a dog is on the loose, you just listen closely to the barking sound to narrow down which direction it roughly comes from and that most often narrows the possible lanes the dog will be coming at you to 1.
I’m not adverse to it being hard to spot, it fits the aesthetic of the game. But my biggest gripe with the hound is that in VT2 you could push the assassin off someone by using the block-push, but here you have to kill it to get it off. Practically nothing else works that i have observed personally, maybe a nade, but i’m not sure.
I was in a game where i was a bit separated from my group due to scripture hunting, was fighting a small horde on a platform above my team and a dog came around a corner like a furry missile and insta pounced me.
The rest of the team was cut off by another horde and could not get to me, but this super hero veteran managed to perfectly lob his grenade to land on top of me and blasted the dog away.
Nice to know regarding the nades, i main Psyker so no nades (sedge) but the stagger amount though, imo is just too much since i personnaly have never staggered a dog off someone before killing it.
The disablers in this game sadly are over tuned, we have the dogs who are hard to hit as hell and then the trappers which takes a player out of commission completely, then the Mutant that also takes a player out of commission for a significant duration and seems to have a rather large grab hitbox making it hard to avoid some times.
In VT2 iirc (havent played in a while) there was only 1 disabler that you had to kill outright (the life leech i think it was?) while all the others could be interrupted easily assuming you could get to them through a horde to do a block/push and none of them required a lengthy interact animation to rescue (barring the man-catcher hooking you and stringing you up but that you could interrupt with a push long before he starts the hanging animation).
The only thing i don’t like about the dog is his wonky movement.
Also i would be happy if i could put my Ping keybind on mouswheel up again like in Vermintide. That made spam pinging way easier.
@Cinax
I like the Mutant much more now since i learned to farly reliably dodge him. But I also think that either his tankiness or his behaviour after a failed grab could be tweaked a bit.
The Trapper I think is perfect. Many good soundcues, dies quickly and easy to dodge. He feels very fair to me.