Houndmaster is ridiculous

That is a very common and obvious strategy to completely counter the dog and even waste time making the killer respect a pallet in fear of wasting more time from both getting stunned. If ur grabbed in the middle of nowhere, thats kinda on u

So ive heard her being buggy but ive not experience any issues myself playing her or seen others have issues.

I have like 20+ videos I could show you on how buggy she still is with her dog. Its terrible.

Shes kinda like clown in a few ways. 1: her power involves speeding herself or slowing down survivors 2: pallets are the main thing that help you in a chase. 3: she lacks map pressure like clown but slight less because she can send the dog to scare some people away from objectives before reaching it. 4: because the gens fly while playing as her , the houndmaster players verrrrry often resort to hard tunneling right off the hooks or slugging the team to win. Otherwise she has one of the most busted "just leave" powers that ive seen so many people die to while t bagging at gates.

There is very poor chase ai when it comes to wall accents on in door maps. Shes insanely weak on rpd because every single wall has a pillar sticking out of it

I mean yeah, she is ridiculous, but not in the way you wrote, she is ridiculously bad.
I was the one who said "she is in the good spot" after buffs, but hell, I never overrated anything in this game THAT much. It took one week to survivors to understand how to play against her and I don't think I won a single match with her since then (I play for hooks, no hardcore tunneling or sweating, just enjoying my chases).
In best of the best case scenarios she is low B tier killer against good survivors. But yeah, she is probably pub stomper against Sables who can't watch behind in chase for their life and drop pallet instantly. But let's be honest, who is not pub stomper against these players?

I think she is in a decent spot rn.

She still has a lot of bugs and clunkyness in her kit, Houndsense still does almost nothing, and half of her add-ons are bad.

The only part that could be toned down is the dog's vault speed, aside from that she needs buffs.

Again, I'm not reading all that. But if your struggling to loop this killer, thats a skill issue, shes balanced, get over ur one negative experience against her and move on.

Edit: i looked at all of those clips and can confirm none of those survivors know how to counter the killer or they just didn't win 50/50's which most powers don't even affect. For example, the Adam in the first clip insta stunned the dog and tanked the hinder instead of wasting time on the pallet to try and doible stun which he likely could get since when that pallets up, its not a 50/50

Pls actually develop experience before trying to make insane claims about an already hard to play character who is perfectly balanced with her dozen bugs.

He would not get a double stun because Wacek has "developed experience" and would simply… not walk into the pallet. Adam would have been hit there essentially no matter what he did. At most he would have been hit through the pallet trying to stall the drop. If you think survivors can react to a killer's swing with a pallet drop (let alone if a dog is also pulling them to and fro) you are the one that needs to actually play the game. In the vast majority of cases they get hit trying to do so or baited into dropping it by the killer faking the swing, not least due to the killer latency advantage. Not to mention that not instantly stunning the dog carries the risk of the dog pulling one out of the pallet, or to an unfavourable side of it. And apart from the obvious plays such as "going around the pallet" or "waiting to see which side the survivor will drop the pallet from" and "hitting the survivor through the pallet", there's also the option of equipping Enduring and brute-forcing pallets, then instantly sending the dog over them.

We'll see how "insane" my claims are once the next bigger update rolls around. I think claiming she is hard to play and perfectly balanced is much closer to anything resembling "insanity" than my take that she is overtuned in some respects and has an imbalanced ease of playing as vs. against ratio. The dog does most of the work for the killer, next to no aim or timing required because he'll just path around stuff and pounce from a generous distance and hold them long enough to guarantee a hit no matter what.

Facts my guy

Finally someone who gets it. All those survivors are terrible, the killers counterplay is clear, just read the fandom wiki an dknow her kit, its so easy

I'll try to keep this brief since you are self-proclaimedly averse to reading, on a discussion forum no less.

If Wacek doesn't walk into the pallet, the adam frees himself from the dog

Fact: The dog holds survivors for 8 seconds. At the time Wacek arrived at the pallet, barely 2 seconds had passed since the dog pounced. Adam would have had to hold him for another 6. I invite you again to camp a pallet for prolonged periods against any killer and not get hit, let alone while there's a dog on you pulling you away from it.

camps a few more seconds on the pallet to lose hinder

Fact: Hindered lingers for 5 seconds. So now you want to camp a pallet for 11 total seconds.

Abt her "overtuned kit" u do realize her holding the dog until the survivor drops a pallet is essentially just dracula's hellfire right? Its your fault for camping it and baiting their power, just run away 💀. No ones gonna react fast enough to redirect their dog and grab u

I didn't know Hellfire curved around corners, pounced on nearby survivors at range and was able to be redirected mid-attack. Interesting fact!

And I thought this camping pallet thing and stunning the dog is an insanely good tactic? Suddenly you should "just run away". Huh. Interestingly enough, whenever survivors in these scenarios "just ran away" (even after successfully stunning the dog or even Houndmaster), he still got the hit seconds later, even at completely safe tiles. Curious.

the gamechanging bugs the killer has

What are those? Genuinely curious, I have only played a handful or two of Houndmaster matches myself. But from watching others play her, like KnightLight or Wacek, I didn't really see "game-changing" bugs. Sure at odd times the dog pathing is weird, but there's no consistent bugs that I saw, certainly none that have enough impact to reliably change the game.

The adam played that tile so bad she probably didn't need the dog the second time

Adam did not play the tile badly. He had two options: Try to make it around the safe side of the tile, or play the short side. Due to Hindered and the dog being back in 3 seconds, it turned out he could not make it around, but that was his only real shot of having a chance of surviving because playing the short side of this when the pallet is dropped is certain death even against a killer without an ability, let alone Houndmaster.

Yeah, the point of the dog is you have to dodge it, once you dodge it you get big distance, this person did not dodge it, and after stunning the killer just stood around and did nothing instead of running away. Also she went the wrong way around that loop, you want to loop that one clockwise.

The argument was about whether camping pallets to stun the dog is an "insanely good" tactic that constitutes reliable counterplay. These clips were meant to provide examples as to why I think that isn't quite true. Dodging the dog is a different matter. We could discuss how possible dodging the dog is in various instances, be it on tile play or in the open, and I could link countless situations even just from these few VODs from Wacek to showcase that "just dodge" is not quite that easy against a 40m/s (50 once pouncing) projectile that goes around corners and can be redirected, or whether you get big distance from this even if you do dodge (the redirect often forces you to dodge back into the Houndmaster). Or whether big distance is even all that impactful for that matter, when she has the dog back in seconds to Slipstream after the survivor and have him pounce on them from big distances, with a successful pounce guaranteeing a hit even from max. distance.

One of those situations would by the way include this same Sable at the same tile with the pallet still dropped actually dodging the dog but still taking a hit. Wacek himself said she actually was good at "countering" Houndmaster, later when she came to his chat and asked for things she can do against Houndmaster also saying she basically did the correct things. And yet she still died at 4 gens, with her chases not lasting more than 20 seconds. Curious.

I'm not saying the dog is undodgable, but it does not constitute reliable counterplay whatsoever either. Especially since it is often nigh-impossible to predict his pathing around corners and tiles, or impossible to react to quickly enough (at best you preemptively dodge in a random direction and hope he's not crossing your path or close enough to pounce regardless).

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with the proper rotation of that tile. After the pallet is dropped going clockwise opens you up to being mindgamed on the short wall of the pallet, instead you can just play the pallet on the long wall side. That she got caught by the dog trying to do so just shows that the ability makes even the safest of tiles (including shack) unsafe. And by the way, even if the pallet is not dropped, clockwise is not the "correct" way to run this tile against Houndmaster: the reason why the clockwise rotation is correct at a basic level is that it enables you to play for the window vault - against Houndmaster all you're doing if you try to play for the window is open yourself up to a more or less guaranteed dog pounce.

Survivor stuns the dog and then just starts panic vaulting, of course they are going to get hit.

Without having to stun the dog, she would not be in a position to even have to drop or vault that pallet. The point is that a reasonably safe pallet like this is not only instantly forced down here, but it creates a 50/50 since the Hindered would not have allowed Ada to make it around the backside of the tile (and going there would have opened her up to being mindgamed as well). She also did not panic vault, she demonstrated patience by not instantly vaulting and delaying the vault instead. Could she have played it better? I think so. But this simple, easy play by the killer instantly made this safe tile interaction rather difficult for her to navigate. That's the imbalance between ease of use vs. difficulty of versing I alluded to.

And mind you, even if she had won the play on the pallet, Houndmaster would have just had her dog back a second later, with Ada still forced to play the tile, and I bet at latest then she would have taken a pretty much guaranteed hit. Which was my point to begin with: Yeah if you can put yourself into a position of stunning the dog you at least create an opening not to instantly take a hit, but it doesn't do too much because now you are Hindered, forced to play the tile, and she has the dog back in seconds to pounce on you on that tile, over the pallet if need be. The fact that Wacek usually gets the hit without even having to use the dog again in these scenarios only makes her even more ridiculous.

The 4th one is just a bad pallet in general, any killer power that works similarly would have also landed a hit here, again, the first aspect of the power is dodging it, this person failed to dodge it.

Apart from saying again that dodging the dog is far from easy and at times downright impossible (again, he's insanely fast, regularly hard to predict or unpredictable, goes around corners, you have to keep playing around the potential redirect, he pounces from a distance on survivors at range, automatically seeks and pounces on targets after vaults), I can only reiterate that dodging the dog was not the point being contested, it was precisely about instances where the survivor (deliberately or not) takes the dog and tries to use the pallet against it.

And believe it or not, you can actually do something on rock fillers like this one (ridiculously enough, this is one of the "better" rock fillers on Yamaoka…). Yeah it's not really safe, but it isn't strictly unsafe either. The plays you make on it are associated with risk, but you can absolutely get decent time out of it and even successfully play for stuns and vaults. Only very few killers (most of them S-tier) would have been able to instantly play around this pallet from a distance and more or less guarantee the hit like she did.

You have a very big misunderstanding of what safe pallet is, because that pallet is 100% mindgameable if it isn't dropped. But again, this survivor went the wrong way around. If anything here the reason it happened was because of her bug, she aimed one direction, making the survivor think the dog was going that way, but the dog got stuck because it was bugged landing her a hit. One of the rare cases where one of these bugs actually helped the killer.

I'll gladly take you up on the challenge of measuring our game understanding. If you think this Coldwind haybale filler is unsafe and mindgamable, I'm sorry, you don't understand the first thing. You can see the killer over these haybales while the killer cannot see you. They are very safe if the pallet is not dropped. It becomes somewhat mindgamable when it is dropped, but even then is a pallet you would usually want to kick (if you don't have a chase ability to play around it) because trying to mindgame vaults on it can cost you a lot of time, especially since chase state can be broken on it due to not being visible to the killer, denying Bloodlust.

Also, there was no bug here. If you stand in front of an object, the dog will path to one of its two sides and around the object depending on where you are looking. He flicks his view in the last moment to send the dog to the pallet side of the tile. He showcases and explains this (and another trick) just a brief time later in the same match.

Whether the survivor "went the wrong way" is again highly debatable and there doesn't seem an objectively right answer to me. Had she not run to the pallet he could have sent the dog around the other side of the tile like he initially aimed for, and then gotten her at latest with a swift redirect, without her then even having the option to use the pallet. But regardless, the point here again is that she uses a pallet against the dog but still gets hit. The dog pulled her to Houndmaster's side by the way, so she could not drop the pallet from the other side. I guess she could have delayed the drop hoping to get back to the pallet again, but that opens up the risk of being pulled away even further, or Houndmaster hitting her from her side or then even having the time to go around the other.

To note again, my point isn't that there isn't anything you can ever do, that you can't ever dodge, that using pallets cannot ever do anything for you, that everything is a guaranteed hit. That's not even true for Nurse. My point is she creates a lot of incredibly difficult interactions to navigate, often with little to no reliable or consistent counterplay, and she does so without having to exert much mental or mechanical effort herself. She isn't the deadliest killer in the game, but she is too deadly for how easy she is to play.

I think she needs some fine-tuning and toning-down of some of her numbers, or alternatively mechanical changes that make her more difficult/less forgiving to play, such as a shorter redirect timing, movement speed reduction on using the dog, ways for survivors to free themselves earlier, getting rid of the automatic target seeking after vaults such that redirecting is more often necessary to get pounces after vaults, …

I also hold that some aspects of her are blatantly problematic and something the devs simply did not consider, such as the situations the doubled vault speed creates, the gate blocking vs. reduced cooldown duration, the tactic of waiting for the survivor to free themselves and only then hit them such that the Hindered effect cuts their hit sprint distance in half, the ability to prevent survivors from being able to unhook for prolonged periods.

But overall I don't think Houndmaster is an incredibly problematic killer and that addressing her holds huge urgency. BHVR will likely retune a couple of egregious things about her in the coming months but I don't expect they will actually tangibly nerf her or make her tangibly more difficult to play. I just don't like her current gameplay design that allows lesser players to punch way above their weight.

Oh, and as a by the way: Anyone here please feel very free to do what I did and provide actual evidence and examples supporting your arguments. I would like to see clips of survivors successfully and consistently counterplaying Houndmaster with the methods described. Keep in mind that the Houndmaster walking into a pallet to let themselves get stunned when the survivor is being held by the dog is not counterplay, it's the Houndmaster player outplaying themselves.

EXACTLY. Thank you. There was never anything wrong with chucky, and now hes been gutted. He needs to be reverted to his initial live release state where u can scamper freely but his cooldowns and actions were a little longer. That was actually really fair and should've never been touched, he was released from the ptb with almost 0 changes for a reason, its cus he was perfect.

The tp through vaults thing is a bug, and its equally confusing for both sides. It happens when u drop a pallet the singular frame that it can't stun the dog, and them the game assumes the dogs already on the other side of the pallet

Again, im not reading all of that.

My reply to you consists of 222 words. This reply of yours is 182 words. What gives?

the survivor easily can just waut out the dig grab, WHICH does not pull u towards the killer when u resist, its just a slowing effect. So whipe u stay on the pallet completely in control, u wait for your slowness to go away or you stun the killer and begin to loop the filler

I'm not sure what you are not understanding about me pointing out the fact that survivors cannot simply camp pallets until the killer swings and reactively stun them. Nobody has that reaction time, pallets take some time to apply the stun, the killer has the latency advantage, and they can also fake the swing to bait the pallet drop. Feel free to show me clips of someone consistently camping pallets for 6-11 seconds and getting successful reactive stuns on the killer. V1rtual is a competitive DbD player with good reaction times and a ping of 12-18ms, as low as it gets for 99.999% of the player population, and even he cannot consistently just camp pallets and react to a swing or not get baited.

The dog does pull survivors in different and at times random directions, it can absolutely pull you out of the pallet or at least so far to one side that you can only drop it from that side anymore.

When i said the power is essential dracula's hellfire, i was referring to how easy ut is to grab a survivor who drops a pallet while the killer holds chase command. That is essentially like half of anti loop powers, u pre drop, you get hit over. Either way its completely the survivor's fault.

? That is not what we were talking about. We were talking about camping pallets, taking the dog, and then stunning it. Because that's an insanely good counterplay tactic according to you. You then said "just run away", instead of camping the pallet, contradicting yourself.

If you try to run away or loop the pallet, the dog can absolutely and easily get you. Part of the reason for that being that he as opposed to Hellfire can path around tiles and pounce from range, locking on targets automatically. And the whole redirection thing. Also Houndmaster doesn't lose movement speed when using her ability like Dracula does. But again, none of this is pertinent to the actual argument we were having.

For the last time, pls, know ur facts and have the decency to at least try the killer or play against her enough to formulate excuses. And stop replying in massive walls of text that u should know well no one who cares abt actually playing the game is gonna read

I have played as and against the killer. Watched some of the best and most experienced players do so. Hens, KnightLight and Xeno (some of the most experienced players period, the latter two also being two of the very best) are all of the opinion she's a notably strong killer, with Hens even saying she is "massively overtuned". I had the "decency" to go through multiple hours-long videos of actual Houndmaster gameplay to try and provide evidence and examples for my points. You can't even show me the decency of not getting offensive making me out to not have any experience or knowledge, apparently even taking your gripe with me to other threads where @Pulsar jumped in to defend me.

I'll do whatever I want, and if I want to discuss this game at length or in detail on the discussion forums, I'll do so. The people that don't want to read or engage with my lengthy posts or discuss with me can feel free to refrain from doing so. I often point out that I know almost none of what it is I and the people I discuss with talk about will affect the devs' decisions. I just like talking about the game, and always have at least a vague hope that some of it reaches someone on the team and steers them into some direction somewhat. Which I know for a fact some of my discussions have in the past 7 years.

dropping the pallet after she sends him out makes him just stand there, which counters her.

Is that so? If so, it must be a really specific timing, since I've seen plenty of instances of survivors pulling pallets while the dog was already chasing after them, and him then vaulting it. I have seen instances of the dog just standing still at pallets, but I had assumed it was just due to reaching maximum chase path range (or that vaulting would exceed this range). Or maybe it's because the dog had already entered "pounce" mode and the pallet somehow interrupted the action, although that really would have to be very specific timing, susceptible to latency, and far from reliable.

But even if there would be a consistent timing to do this, the first issue is the instant redirect which makes him vault and grab the survivor anyway, and the other is that you obviously cannot drop the pallet after the dog got sent out if she is standing right in front of the pallet.

The dog's vault speed is a bit overtuned, sure. Making it 0.6 seconds would be fair.

Remains to be seen in action. I think even the original 0.9s could be appropriate on the first chase path, and then 0.6s (or even less) on the redirect chase. Because I think what's really neat about these interactions would be that Houndmaster has to use the redirect much more often and proactively on pallet and window play, since she will have to either use it to pounce over the pallet quickly enough to instantly grab the survivor, or to get the pounce after the dog has vaulted less quickly and the survivor therefore managed to avoid the instant grab.

Her cooldown is also very short, but keep in mind she has a bug/problem which doesn't start the cooldown even though Snug is behind her. So unless that gets fixed (which it should), the cooldown should stay as is. The Exit Gate situation is also tied to this, so I won't mention it further. Her ability to deny unhooks is there for sure. I won't argue with that.

I've seen and experienced this bug, but it's very rare. Certainly too rare for the effectively instant recharge to be an adequate band-aid. I think the original 5-second cooldown was appropriate. Around 3 seconds already pass during hit cooldown, so this gives survivors 2 seconds of breathing room before the dog is after them again, comparable to a lot of other killers that either have longer recharge times or at least charge times that give survivors a few seconds before having to play around their ability again.

But there could also be more intricate adjustments to the recharge. They could distinguish between successful pounces and misses, with misses having a shorter cooldown. Using redirect could incur longer cooldowns too, again differentiating between successful and missed redirects as well. A survivor freeing themselves (by pallet, teammate or struggling) could incur an increased cooldown as well.

Snug's curving capabilities are pathetic to say the least, and the Redirect Window being 3-4 seconds does nothing as long as there is a solid bush between Snug and the survivor. The 8 second holding time is fair, imo. I mean, if you messed up and got caught, you should get punished + you are being held by a Cane Corso, not a Chihuahua. Her speed while on the Search Path is that much of a problem imo, as it was really bad on the PTB.

I mean, he won't run circles around tiles, but his curving is far from pathetic if you consider that he moves at the same speed as hatchets/slinger shots, for which the idea of them curving around corners would be pretty insane. She also has a faster "wind-up" speed than Huntress. And the dog has a fairly large hitbox and pounce detection range that additionally help with getting grabs around tiles and corners. Plus the redirect means you can make use of his curving capabilities two times, so even if he only rounds half a tile in one go, you can go around the entire thing between the two attempts. And she herself being there still to threaten the survivor at full movement speed of course adds to the complication of these chase interactions at loops.

I don't think the redirect window is necessarily too long mechanically speaking, but it just makes her much easier to play and harder to play around. If she only had, say, 1.5 seconds like Nurse does for her blink window, it would take more skill from the killer to quickly aim the redirection and would make it more transparent for survivors to play around, since they can relatively quickly be sure whether they have to still be afraid of the redirect or whether the window has passed. Or simply that they have more of a chance to dodge the redirect since the killer cannot watch and wait out their movement for as long.

The 8-second hold is a guaranteed hit pretty much every time. Slinger is 4.4m/s, cannot curve or redirect his shot, and it has a much smaller hitbox and no "pounce" range. He also gets slowed down upon shooting and has to reload. And he does not have two points of possible attack that the survivor has to play around, he can only attack from the direction he's chasing in. And yet it happens frequently that successful shots do not result in a hit, as survivors break free. And Slinger is a good killer, usually regarded as sitting between B and A tier. (Granted, I personally do think he deserves buffs, such as being 4.6m/s, but a lot of people would disagree.) Houndmaster's dog grabs are much easier to get and you can get them in ways Slinger never could. And yet they will pretty much always result in a hit. You can literally grab someone over shack pallet and walk all the way around it to hit them. I have almost never seen a survivor break out from the dog manually if the killer actually wanted to hit them.

The search path speed is perfectly adequate for map mobility, but you can use it in chase in ways that I find to be a bit silly. Simple solutions could be the increased basic hit cooldown if the hit happened while (or within 1 second) of having been Slipstreamed that I mentioned, or yet Slipstream speed being slowed down to 5m/s if a survivor is in chase state.

I don't think you should be able to vault while getting bitten, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

In what way does it not make sense? It would obviously free you of the dog, you wouldn't drag it across the vault with you, ha.

It would still only rarely open up real counterplay, just like slow vaults while chained against Pinhead still regularly result in a hit. But it would be a little more one could do.

Like I said, not all of these things need to be towned down or changed, and some such mechanical changes would or could be applied instead of toning down some of these aspects, I'm not suggesting they need to nerf her across the board and revert all the buffs that came after the PTB. I enjoy this killer's basic idea with the redirectable projectile and I want most of all killers to be what we consider A-tier. Just some tuning and targeted changes that make her more reasonable, not even primarily in terms of some of her overtuned mechanics or overall "strength", more so in terms of how challenging or demanding she is to play.

They weren't even responding to you there.

It's sad that this is SO true…

Mm hm. Its funny isn't it? 💀. According to Pulsar this guy is the most knowledgeable dbd player. What a joke