- Main article: Bestiary
Hounds are a type of demon dog. They range from low-level to high-level, and have relatively high speed. All hounds but the lowest level regular Hound have a breath attack. Usually, if hounds are gathered on a dungeon floor, they will all be of the same type, so don't expect it to get any easier due to enemy friendly fire since hounds always have superb resistance to the damage type of their breaths.
Hounds will generally stay at least one square away and either bite you, or breathe on you. As such, ranged weapons and spells tend to be better at killing them, with the exception of dark and chaos hounds, which can blind you.
Eating the corpse of a hound may grant you resistance to whatever damage type they are of. Also, all but the cerberus are capable mounts.
As of version 1.13, hounds are less likely to use their breath attacks.
Types of Hound[]
Regular Hound[]
Regular Hounds are like Dogs, but have a strong melee attack and lots of HP. They are a low-to-mid level encounter, and should be dealt with quickly. At higher levels, these become less of a priority target.
Fire Hound[]
Fire Hounds are a lower-level Hound. They have an AOE fire breath that may destroy items if they are not protected by a fireproof blanket. Having Superb fire resistance essentially negates all threat of having items destroyed by fire (and essentially any damage too, really)
Cerberus[]
A stronger version of a fire hound. Despite it having three heads, it cannot throw out three attacks in one turn, thankfully.
Ice Hound[]
Ice Hounds are Hounds with ice breath. As such, they can break items in your inventory if you do not have an coldproof blanket. As per fire, high Cold resistance reduces chances of items breaking due to cold.
Lightning Hound[]
Lightning Hounds uses lightning breath. Woohoo. Can chain-paralyze you if there are many of them; if you aren't resistant to Lightning you may want to force them to come to you via a choke-point. Of course, they become a non-case once you reach higher levels.
Dark Hound[]
Darkness damage breath, which may blind you.
Poison Hound[]
Like the others, but with poison breath.
Sound Hound[]
Level 18 monster with sound breath. More HP than the hounds above.
Illusion Hound[]
Level 18 monster, uses illusion damage breath. Confusion side effect can be extremely annoying for melee classes when combined with the hound's tendency to stay a square away.
Nerve Hound[]
Nerve damage breath. Nerve damage can cause paralysis, like lightning.
Nether Hound[]
Nether Hounds are exactly like Chaos Hounds, but have a Nether attack instead of Chaos. Whenever damage is dealt, the aggressor is healed for a percentage of the damage.
Chaos Hound[]
Chaos Hounds have an AOE breath attack that does Chaos damage. Chaos is regarded as the hardest-hitting damage type in the game (capable of blinding, poisoning and confusing) and as such these hounds are the toughest of the lot.