Pox Hounds have been very frustrating for me personally. They have led to more team wipes for me than anything else I’ve faced by a large margin.
-They are the most difficult enemy to stop
-They incur the greatest consequences if you fail to stop them
Compared to Mutants for example… Mutants are much easier to dodge, much easier to shoot, and even if they grab you, they’ll eventually let you go.
The pox hound often moves in ways that are so sporadic, they’ll just teleport right on top of you.
The way the hound teleports onto the player often feels janky and unfair. Damaging the hound while it is in mid-air often does not stop it from connecting with the player anyways. Dodging the hound’s pounce seems to be undoable most of the time, as it seems to just lock onto the player and teleport onto them, even if the player has leaped a large distance out of the way of the initial trajectory of the pounce.
The hound is often very difficult to shoot, difficult to stagger, and knocks back and damages players who weren’t even pounced on. And the consequences are the most dire, because you’re essentially dead unless a teammate can help you.
If you could at least give us a means of practicing against the pox hounds in the Psykhanium, that would at least allow me to learn how to time my counter pushes better, so I don’t get mauled every time.
Please consider reworking this enemy, or at least giving us a means of practicing against it in the Psykhanium, so we have more reliable counter play. Thank you.
The hound you need something with decent stagger power to shot it,some weapon like recon rifle doesnt stagger it
Funny enough how purgatus and flammer can constanly lock it down,or make it become a rocket dog when it jump to you
They have to be hard to stop or people would just run off without fear. It would be VT2 all over again. It would be nice if they stopped at 1/2 life. Literally, disablers are 75%+ of the reason I have losing runs, and it isn’t often that someone went rogue.
I don’t like how they interrupt me during horde clears. I’m supposed to look for it, and time my block push this thing during my fight?!
As much as I love playing the game, I couldn’t be caught dead in a dogs mode lobby.
During horde events or monstrosities disabler spawns should be cut in half or non-existent.
I haven’t lost a round to dogs more than once in a very long time, but I still want them to be less of a buggy mess. When they start glitching it really pulls me out of the experience. It’s very common for random people on the team I’ve never met before to all see the same buggy behavior and comment on how broken the Pox Hounds are and how FS needs to fix them.
I would go so far as to say this is usually the only thing to break radio silence on team communication outside of a “gg” at the end of the round.
Imagine if the assassin rats from VT2 couldn’t be reliably dodged, and you had to push or attack them with perfect timing the way some VT2 veterans do it ? But you also have shitty server lag ? And their movements are erratic, unpredictable, and it’s unclear who they’re targeting ? And their attack hitbox is H U G E ? And they inflict HP AOE damage on their pounce ?
That’s the dogs right now.
It’s not really a matter of ‘git good’ or ‘skill issue’. A lot of people have learned to deal with them, like the insane amount of gunners on higher difficulties. It’s a matter of bad design.
One time I saw a dog pouncing on my teammate so I shot it in mid-leap and it teleported 30 feet into the sky and came back down in a flat spin spiral dive, like it was swinging around a firemans pole by it’s mouth, and then landed on my teammate and pinned them anyway. This is after they said they fixed the UFO dog bug in the last patch.
Dogs are clearly broken on several levels and we can’t even call them difficult yet because that would imply you can overcome them with skill alone.
Lost count of the number of times i hear the doggo spawn howl in an otherwise empty room and the team just conpletely ignore it, runs into a new room and then gets confused as to why they get pounced.
The directional sound on those dogs is extremely well done.
The initial howl echos, but the grunting and scratchy steps they do is so well done that i can nearly always track them through terrain and predict where they will come into LoS.
Then stagger lock them before they can even pick a target.
If the squad stays within coherency, Dogs can be killed before they do any real damage even if they do pin someone.
Dogs are only a threat to people who run off and leave the squad behind.
I really hate to sound like a typical “git gud” response, but i feel like the extreme difficulty in dodging them elevates them from a nuisance into an actual priority threat.
If we could dodge them as easily as a Mutant … theyd be complete non issues.
I think its good to have something that needs a bit of teamwork to deal with instead of being able to render them harmless with a single dodge.
This is the part I would disagree on, quite a few special sound cues seem to disappear in some cases. You hear the howl of the found or the mutant spawning, but then you don’t hear it when they get closer. I have a fairly decent sound card (Sound Blaster Z) and above average headphones.
Everything else, regarding stick together, pushing and paying attention still applies. I wouldn’t mind however if specials stopped jumping at you through enemies hit boxes.
