Yes. Only one works or the other. When ideally Focus Target and dog tag should stack.
The dog literally is spending so much time running around bosses that the debuffs it puts on bosses fall off. Check it yourself in the psykanium. I think that’s bad behavior and should be changed.
It’s already available in the game in mortis trials, it’s super fun! So long as you have remote detonation selected as a talent you have the possibility of getting it. Check it out 0=
As @Rvl said earlier, there is no variety if you want to use Mastiff. Bleed and electrocution are must pick and do all the heavy lifting, everything else (except for the britleness maybe) is objectively useless, I would like some extra utility for the mastiff damage nodes like extra shock collar charge or AoE or faster recharge rate, increased boss latch time (or even infinite), etc.
I actually think dog’s damage skill nodes are not needed at all, because they barely do anything. More utility/support/teamplay interactions would be much better and fun to use.
Is it really so onerous that you have to work in tandem with the mutt to get full bleed stacks on a boss? Arbites does have several bleed blessings available. With puncture even being the meta pick for the guns its on. And there are similar options for brittleness. Not to mention how teammates will often supply their own stacks.
If you substitute other words in for “mastiff” and the various debuffs you can say much the same about most things in the game. For instance, nearly every keystone in the game has next to zero variety. Same for weapon blessings. Or what mark of a weapon is good. Etc.
And how would any of those hypothetical options not also be “must pick” talents that “do all of the heavy lifting?”
Not so much onerous as very inconsistent.
do yall really take the bleed talent?
I always felt like it was way too point intensive. My dog build is basically whatever works for Lone Wolf, minus two points to grab electric pounce and the extended dog range
The dog applies stacks on every pounce it does as it continuously attacks non-human-sized enemies. On human-sized enemies it pins them and keeps biting without reapplying stacks. The behaviour is consistent on these targets, it is simply different between the different targets.
So then the feedback point here really is just “I think the dog should do significantly more damage (& stagger) without me having to do anything”?
Yes, I know all of these behaviours about the dog, I’ve played Arby a lot too. The class & the dog perform strongly in every game mode, difficulty and map combination available. It’s a class with almost no weakness.
Yes of course? It requires zero investment to reach just like nearly everything else in the Arby tree, it’s a lot of extra dog damage for the mere cost of 1 point. My usual arby tree looks like this.
It’s a very, very mildly annoying part of the tree because I don’t like the talent it leads into, but both talents that lead into it are good. And, well…
It does this. Granted this was me running lethal prox bistol to maximize the dogs AoE. But it’s still a large chunk of damage from one talent regardless.
Hell, you don’t even need to do that. Literally just take the electrocute talent and otherwise completely ignore the dog and it does a ton of work all on its own.
People sleep on the dog so hard.
This was likely done for a reason. Mods like this exist, that extra control over the dog makes it quite OP
For some reason many people don’t control the dog and then wonder why dog isn’t doing much.
That’s the thing, you don’t even need to control it yourself. Especially if you take the anti-ranged talent that gives him a 45 meter range. He’ll just go kill half the map while you’re fighting a mauler ball or whatever.
People just don’t notice how much the dog does presumably because it’s just passive output that’s just silently running around making sure things never become problems.
Do you live in alternative reality? It’s the only way I can explain why your takes are so bad and out of touch as of lately. Mastiff without bleed talent is going to kill “half of the map” by itself… Strange it never happens in my games for some reason.
No, it was like I said from the start, for monsters it should stay latched on or stay very close to make using remote detonation more intuitive.
Not that I wouldn’t love to see some other updates that make things feel better. Like for example if you attack a pox burster with your dog having voltaic mandibles the pox burster just dances around like crazy and you can’t even push it. It would be nice if it worked more like smite in that regard. Right now unless the pox burster is very far away you’re basically griefing your team. It’s definitely not the interaction I expected to happen the first time I tagged my dog to one.
Arbites is strong, and it feels like it’s in a really good place, I have a ton of fun on it - I’m just saying that there are things that could be more intuitive.
Do you live in an alternate reality without obvious hyperbole? When left to its own devices the dog can easily pull around ~100k damage in a normal auric hishock mission. That’s quite a lot of free damage. Especially considering most people in random aurics barely do more than 500k damage total.
plus by default the dog it’s really kind of a crutch cause it’s immortal and can help you in case you are grabbed by a mutant or pox hound. along with disabling temporarily maulers etc.
i’m also in favor of not giving any more free dmg to it.
and i think remote detonation it doesn’t really feel bad cause it’s so good when used properly, for example you can use it when the dog is biting a bon where inside someone is getting grabbed and you can use the explosion to save a teammate. the stagger explosion from it it’s so good.
leader Agayek 
I only take the shock jaws talent or whatever the grut it’s called
Yeah after bothering with it for a second I’m back to not bothering with it.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t work well at the points where it works.
I’m saying that points where your dog latches onto a monster and the jumps clear of the monster create gaps where it can be difficult to time a remote detonation especially when a lot is going on. You have to pay attention to the dog’s location which can require a bit of effort because you have travel time and then the fact that even if it’s on the monster it could leap clear at any moment and waste the remote detonation.
You have that level of complexity versus “just throw a grenade, we’ll even give you a line perfectly showing its trajectory”