houndmaster search buffs
i've seen a lot of people talking about chase and a few talking about search. i was in the boat of people who thought search mode was useless, but after playing the ptb for a few days i gotta say i don't think it's useless at all, just very, very bad. a lot of cool tricks and mechanics have been coming up the more i experiment with it but it still needs a lot of touch ups and i wanted to make some suggestions.
i think the nicest suggestion would be a visual indicator of some kind of snug is barking. on one hand this would provide additional information to players who are not near by snug and his search, but i think the info would be very minor. i think the bigger benefit is it could help players who are hard of hearing, so it'd be more of a accessibility feature. the additional info would be nice too in making informed decisions on tracking survivors.
the other thing i really really want y'all to consider is making search and chase have separate cooldowns. search is a very weak feature and it feels detrimental to use, when snug returns you will need to wait for chase to come back which really discourages you from wanting to try using it. i think separate cooldowns would be really nice, whether you miss with chase and then send him off to try and get info on survivors else where, or try applying houndsense to survivors and then using chase to follow up and get value from it.
lastly, not as important imo but just increase the range of it. snug isn't going to damage survivors outright, they have ways to tell if he's coming, i think a longer range is like the least that could be done as a bandaid fix to the general issues of trying to place a precise marker in certain locations.