Hi all, I wanted to write this up after buying the Corinthian dog that was in the bazaar, and doing so reminded me about how many bizarre inconsistencies there are with a lot of the wolf / dog skins that have come out (though really this applies to a lot of the pet skins in general, but I’m going to focus on wolves so this isn’t the length of a book 
). For better or for worse, I own every combat capable dog / wolf skin, so I compared and tested all of them to the default greater wolf. I only tested the greater variants for everything since the greater variants are the only ones that really matter for later in the game.
Using the Greater Wolf as a baseline, I compared the following for every skin:
- Base Stats
- Base Armor
- Base Health
- Base Damage
- Crafting Cost
- Can it be Staggered
- Diets
- Sizes
And as for the list of skins, they go as follows:
- Gurnakhi Wolf
- Gurnakhi Albino Wolf
- Aesir Armored Wolf
- Vanir Dire Wolf
- Pictish Wolf
- Abyssal Hound
- Abyssal Horror Hound
- Corinthian Herding Dog
- Zingaran Guard Dog
- Nemedian Guard Dog
- Undead Dog
- Grey Fox
- Siptah Feral Dogs (more on this later)
-So to start, lets check the base stats of the Greater Wolf:
- STR: 8
- AGI: 0
- VIT: 2
- GRI: 2
Thankfully, every single one of the listed skins have the same stat lineup, so they’re all good in that regard. However, things change with their other base stats.
-Next up is base armor and health:
- Armor: 91
- Health: 1178
All dogs have the same armor except the following: Corinthian, Zingaran, Nemedian, Undead, and Siptah dogs, all of which having 116 Armor.
All dogs have the same health except the following: Corinthian, Zingaran, Nemedian, Undead, and Siptah dogs, all of which having 1707 Health.
-Next we’ll look at base damage. I tested this by having each of them attack the same NPC with the default bite attack as a baseline, the lunges do around the same damage though.
The base damage is:
- Damage: 64
All dogs have the same damage except the following: Albino Gurnakhi, Siptah dogs, both of which dealing 12 Damage.
This is so comically low that it’s just not worth bringing them to fight anything.
-Crafting Costs are all fine except for the Abyssal Hound and Abyssal Horror Hound, which for whatever reason use hyenas to craft, despite obviously using the wolf rig, stats, etc.
-Next, one of the most important things in my opinion, is can it be staggered? One of the greatest strengths of using a pet over a thrall is the fact that they can shrug off hits and keep getting cosistent damage even when surrounded. The moment this is taken away, that pet is almost worthless in a fight. While the majority of the skins retain their stagger immunity like the default, there are some that don’t:
The Corinthian, Zingaran, and Siptah Dogs CAN BE STAGGERED. This is one of the biggest reasons to just not use any of these. The second they engage in combat with a thrall they’ll be lucky to get any hits in before dying with how often a human can attack.
-Diets are next, which is one of the least important aspects, but I wanted to add this in for consistency. I won’t be listing their full diets but the important thing is the skins following the default Greater Wolf, of which most do thankfully.
The following, however, DO NOT have the same diets: Corinthian, Zingaran, Nemedian, Undead, Siptah Dogs.
I get why the undead dog was given a unique diet (rotten meat, brimstone, etc.), but if these are meant to be cosmetic I believe they should just follow what they’re originally based on. The others have a similar meat diet but for some reason just switched around from the regular Greater Wolf?
-Last is size, which really only matters in extreme cases -cough grey fox cough- but there’s still some significant model differences.
The only one that really causes any issues is the Grey Fox. It’s animations aren’t meant for a model that small so it’ll end up lunging when it couldn’t even reach a target, and sometimes enemies can have a hard time hitting it in general. I honestly don’t know why this was even made to be a combat pet, with how small it is it should’ve just been similar to a cat where it just wanders passively. Aside from that, it should be scaled up to at least the size of the siptah feral dogs. Really the only other criticism is that the Gurnakhi and Aesir wolves both look really narrow for some reason, poor fellas need an X axis stretch or something.
Now, the reason I bring up the Siptah Dogs is because it seems like the Corinthian, Zingaran, and Nemedian dogs were based off of them in some aspects, which is why two of them can be staggered, why their health / armor stats are different, and why they all share a different diet. Strangely, they don’t have the damage problem like the Siptah dogs. With the merging of Siptah and Exiled Lands, the major inadequicies of the Siptah pets are really going to show, the feral dogs especially. I cannot stress enough how much the loss of stagger immunity harms a pet’s performance, and the awful damage is just stacking on the problems. This also applies to Siptah’s special named dogs, not just the regular ferals.
I threw together a quick spreadsheet to see which skins had it the worst:
To be honest there was more green than I was expecting, but some of these are really suffering. All I can really ask for is for the DLC / Bazaar skins to be brought in line with the default wolf, and the tameable Siptah dogs to be brought up to par to the default wolf. (and maybe scale up the fox)
One of my favorite things in this game is the critters, and I’m always excited when a new skin releases, I just want them to not feel like a waste when I realize there’s some random issue or inconsistency with them. Thanks for reading 
Foxes are part of Vulpini which is within Canidae so they make sense at least. 
