I do not know whether this has something to do with coding or connection quality or servers or animations or who knows what, but pox hounds move around in ways that makes it near impossible to shoot the bastards at times.
If they were actually properly grounded and obeyed laws of physics, I imagine this would be less of an issue, but as it stands they can move so fast and erratic that it genuinely appears at times as if they are warping around. Especially with how fast they can change the direction of their movement.
There were also instances of them pouncing a player without an actual pounce. Just ran up to someone and bam.
It would be really appreciated if those things got perhaps a little tankier to compensate, but at least moved at a speed and manner that befits an actual physical entity. Oh they can be made fast in a straight, sure, but once there - their ability to suddenly sprint in the opposite direction or change directions without any visible inertia should be heavily limited (don’t get me started on mutants sprinting 180 degrees around corners).
I am not expecting the animation and coding department to suddenly make them use walls to bounce off of to change directions (which admittedly would be cool), but can they at least not seemingly teleport around when engaged in close quarters?
First time I locked Brain Burst on to a mutant and jumped around a corner only to have him make a sharp right angle to slam into me I laughed so hard. Unless papa Nurgle is giving his creations the ability to counteract basic physics there are some hardcore issues going on with anything that moves at high speeds.
Not to mention how much health they have, and how hard they are to kill with ranged weapons as they bounce around like they just snorted 3 lines of cocaine.
The scaling on their HP from Malice to Heresy seems whack. They go from “just get a good shot off / couple solid melee hits” on Malice to “empty your magazine into it or keep hitting it until its cold cuts so you know it’s dead” on Heresy.
Recent changes to the dog have had a deleterious effect.
-Hounds do not register melee attacks while in motion (may be an issue with server-side/client-side synchronization.) If this is the case, dogs move faster than players can react, removing player agency.
-Window for dodge/block should be increased to account for network latency.
-The hound’s health is too high for a team wiping mechanism.
-If hounds have a smaller hitbox, this makes them more difficult to target for non-mouse users. Hitbox should be standardized across incapacitative mechanisms, i.e., Pox Hounds, Trappers, and Mutants.
-The hounds create a knockback/damage effect when pouncing on non-targeted players
-The sound triggers need to provide more directional information. Also, there should be a visual component for those that have auditory disabilities.
Whenever I hear a trigger for a pox hound or trapper, I put down the input device as there isn’t a reliable counter; this hits on the fact that this removes player agency.
Once you get a hang of it you can block push the pounce with some reliability, although mind you, not ENOUGH reliability, sometimes the dogs just dont register your push and pounces on you anyways.
The HP thing is pretty bad though, although i think it has a lot to do with damage resistance as well, for the amount of mobility and speed that thing has, you would expect it to not be tanky as well, but it seems to have some pretty high damage resistance to the body.
So even if you stagger the dog, it can sometimes survive due to its high hp/damage resistance, and since the dogs have a bad tendency to just tokyo drift along the floor when getting staggered, it sometimes has enough time to recover and run off before you can finish it off.
Pretty frustrating when you are already fighting a horde and several other specials and elites, and just sacrificed toughness and/or health so you could try and take out the dog to prevent anyone from being disabled.
I always duck around a corner and charge up my thunder hammer, nothing more satisfying than them running through the door face first into the hammer and being sent right back out in pieces while the zealot yells “die, hound!!”
On heresy i can unload 4 to 5 shotgun blasts to the hounds body before it dies. Thats half a magazine and definitely too much for an assassin style special.
Ever since the addition of the hunting grounds pox hounds have been broken AF. Running on ceilings, bouncing off of walls, no jump animation tackles. As many others have mentioned they are neigh impossible to dodge now where they could be before if you timed it right.
The “git good” crowd are to be castigated and ignored as they provide no serious input. Those that say, “well you can just push block them” while this is true it’s just an excuse or work around for the currently broken nature of the dogs. Yes, we can push block them (assuming the server side latency is in our favor) but that does not excuse a broken system that should be fixed.
There’s a netcode thing going on here, too, or the tick rate is just off, because hitting enemies while they are moving feels weird. Hit boxes might also have an issue, because I’ll be aiming at horde guy with a bolter and it will look like I hit him, but I’ll miss and he’ll stumble and keep moving instead of exploding like they usually do, sometimes even with a visual wound that they took the shot. You also get sticky attacks from everything, where regardless if you’re moving, they’ll still manage to hit you with their wind up, but this is far more noticeable with dogs and mutants who will pull you back to your previous location for their attack.
Yeah, lately I’ve been having to aim about half a crosshair ahead to hit things in motion, but it may be server distance when I’m playing from Australia with American friends.
