Houndmaster is Very Complicated: High Potential, Doesn’t Necessarily Need Buffs but Needs Cleaned Up
I think that The Houndmaster has a huge amount of potential, and she seems potentially very strong. However, the power is quite frankly nearly impossible to use without bugs, and is a little difficult and clunky.
It took me a full day of playing on the PTB before I started to get the hang of consistently using the dog successfully - she is very difficult to play and I think playing her on controller is going to be very difficult. She may end up being like Singularity, in the sense that playing her well requires quick flicks and camera turns that console players just can’t make.
I am a little cautious of rushing to over-buff this character to a point where dodging the dog feels unavoidable - I have found decent success after some time of practice on PTB, but she is by no means easy to pick up.
The Dog constantly runs into walls and gets stuck on obstacles, and constantly nothing ends up happening from this. The dog will constantly not follow highlighted search paths or chase paths, get stuck on things that the path previews doesn’t show it getting stuck on, and honestly makes her very difficult to use. Often, if the dog was separated from me, Chases and Searches wouldn’t initiate at all even if it showed a valid path while casting. If these problems could be cleaned up, her performance would skyrocket and she would feel much better to play.
I do think one of the few buffs she could stand to have is adding a very brief period after a Chase dash where she can add a new redirection; the Redirect Chase command prompt ends very quickly, often before I even realize that I have the opportunity to redirect.
I do believe that it’s very difficult to tell how balanced this character is when she is so very difficult and inconsistent to use. Her bugginess and lack of ease of use significantly impacts her performance and makes her seem and feel much worse than she may actually be, and I think this killer has amazing potential if she were cleaned up.
Comments
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I think I agree the Chase ability is mostly fine minus needing some bug fixes/cleaning up.
However, the Search ability is laughably bad. The radius around the dog is so tiny at first and it's not reliable at all, and in general it feels like using Search often locks you out of your chase power for too long, especially since the cooldown doesn't start until the dog actually makes it back to you.
And that Knotted Rope addon (40% cooldown reduction on basic attacks when grabbing with the dog) needs to be changed, that's just an old max-stack STBFL which got nerfed for a reason AND it stacks with STBFL.
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