The effects of the talent do not line up with the description. Couldn’t determine whether the talent is bugged, or the description wrong, during testing. These are the issues:
“Enemies knocked away by your Cyber Mastiff’s Pounce” is incorrect. Bleed is applied only to targets that are pinned to the floor (humanlike enemies). It does not ever apply to Ogryn, Mutants or Pox Hounds. Perhaps this is intended and a description issue.
Bleed is not applied on every Pounce. The ability description implies that bleed should apply on every Pounce, however this is not the case. I have not been able to determine what the condition to applying bleed is, it appears to be random. If this talent has a cooldown or a random chance, it should probably be listed in the talent description.
When the dog pounces/disables a human-sized enemy (excluding ogryn, mutant, poxburster, pox hound, monster/captain), it creates a non-damaging explosion with a 2m radius. This explosion deals mainly stagger but also applies this talent’s bleed stacks to targets within radius.
I have not found a way to reliably trigger this. Its somewhat often (maybe 50%). Spam pinging. Sending the dog from close vs far. Nothing seems to make it reliable.
Okay, did further testing with this in mind. Nearby non-pounced enemies reliably receive Bleed. Pounced target receives Bleed occasionally. Unclear which outcome is intended here.
The pounced target receiving bleed stacks is arguably unintended. Explosions have a close radius and a max radius. Each radius has a damage profile assigned. The talent is set up to apply bleed to targets between the close radius (1m) and the max radius (2m) where the specified damage profile applies; targets within the close radius – which naturally includes the pounced target itself – should not have bleed applied to them.
Here’s a crude graphic, highlighted green is the AoE applying bleed:
My working theory how the pounced target can be affected as well is that the target hit zone (center_mass), which is targeted by the explosion, sometimes ends up in the AoE, considering that hitbox size might vary and that hitbox alignments can be janky while enemies are in motion.
