The Dog Tier List

[This is part of a series of posts about animals. To find other posts in this series, see here.]

This month’s topic is by request. A few readers have asked me to do a tier list for the dog guild, or “canids”, as they’re more properly called, so here it is.

BASIC DOG BUILD ANALYSIS

Dog guild history

Canids first became part of Outside’s meta during the Eocene expansion. Around 40 million years ago, a group of early caniform carnivorans started speccing into longer legs to boost their stamina when chasing prey, and so the first dogs were born. The first of these canids was a small, fox-like North American animal called Hesperocyon, and the sub-faction of dogs it represented were called hesperocyonines. This faction quickly started splitting apart, and led to the creation of two more dog factions during the Oligocene expansion. One group, called the borophagines, specced into bone-crushing jaws akin to hyenas, and specced for a DPS-oriented role. The other dogs specced further into longer legs to better snatch small, fast-moving targets, and became the canines. For a while, borophagines were the most dominant of the three; by the time of the Miocene expansion, they, along with cats, had become so oppressive that they forced the hesperocyonines out of the meta entirely. However, the canines started to grow larger and more powerful during the Pliocene, when they started to radiate into many of the forms that are familiar today; by the time of the most recent Ice Age event, they had grown strong enough to do to borophagines what the borophagines had done to the hesperocyonines, leaving the canines as the only branch of canids to survive into the current day. Today, canines are among the most popular of the carnivorous mammals, having a sizable player-base on every major land server except Antarctica.

Not all canines took advantage of their new adaptations to become large predators. In fact, most of them still stick pretty close to the small generalist builds that the earliest dogs started out as. Generally, those that became large predators fall under a particular subclass known as the wolf-like canids, or true dogs, while those that stuck with the original playstyle are broadly grouped together as “foxes”. Strictly speaking, “foxes” aren’t a proper subclass, as some foxes are genetically closer to the wolf-like dogs than they are to other foxes. But given the similarity foxes have in appearance and playstyle, dividing dogs into foxes and wolf-like dogs is a lot more useful for understanding how the guild operates in practice than a more biologically accurate classification would be.

Dog build stats and abilities

In general, dogs’ highest stat tends to be mobility. Again, this is partly due to their long legs, but part of it also comes from the [Nuchal Ligament] they have at the back of their neck. This is a ligament that connects the sinuous processes of their first thoracic vertebrae to the back of the second cervical bone, and can support the weight of the head without requiring any active muscle exertion. This energy-saving adaptation is standard for hooved mammals, but among predators, it’s only found in dogs and humans. This is a big part of the reason behind dogs’ legendary ability to track scent trails over long distances.

After mobility, the main thing that distinguishes dogs from other predatory mammals is their cooperative ability. Dog groups have some of the tightest social bonds among mammals; they’re among the minority of mammals where both parents cooperate to take care of young, and where players are generally permitted to retain the same social group for their entire lives. Canid family groups have been noted for sharing food and caring for their sick members, behaviours not seen in very many other wild animals. Almost all of them also hunt in teams, and their high intelligence often allows them to adapt their cooperative tactics enough to incorporate even players of other species, a topic I’ll explore in more detail when we get into the tier list.

Other than mobility and intelligence, dogs generally have pretty middling stats. Their crushing bite can do significant damage, but their raw power isn’t especially high compared to a lot of competing carnivorans, and their defence isn’t anything to write home about, either. This means that their best matchups are usually against small prey; they have to be very careful when fighting mid-weight or heavy-weight targets, and are often dominated by more DPS-oriented carnivorans, like cats, bears, and hyenas.

Dog guild overall tier rating

I think few will dispute that dogs hold an above-average rank in the current meta, but honestly, it’s not by as much as you might think. While their sheer endurance makes them formidable opponents, their relative lack of physical power often puts them at a competitive disadvantage. I’d give dogs an average rating of high B tier.

But there are some dogs that take things to another level, and may even rank among the top tier of predatory mammals. To find out which ones, let’s now go into the dog tier list; as usual, I won’t be able to go into all of the 37 dog builds in the current game, but I’ll try to cover the most interesting ones.

THE DOG TIER LIST

D Tier: Bat-eared fox

I don’t think there are any dogs that rank in bottom-tier, but in D tier we have the bat-eared fox, the only dog to have attempted to adapt to an insectivorous playstyle. Playing mainly in arid grasslands, bat-eared foxes have much smaller teeth than any other dogs, and their digastric muscles have been modified to allow them to open and close their jaws more rapidly when chewing the small, soft bodies of termites.

While I’ve said in previous posts that specialising in hunting eusocial insects can be a viable strategy, doing it effectively requires adaptations that bat-eared foxes don’t really have. Much like the numbats of the marsupial guild, bat-eared foxes don’t have the arm strength to break into termite mounds, so they’re restricted to hunting for termites that are wandering above-ground in search of food. They’re mostly reliant on hunting the harvester termite, which, as I discussed in my termite tier list, is one of the few termites that’s easily tracked when doing this. In fact, bat-eared foxes don’t really function effectively as insectivores at all in practice, despite their biology being seemingly adapted to this playstyle; they have to make up for how little XP they get from insects by eating a diet of primarily fruit for most of the year.

D Tier: Maned wolf

The other low-tier dog in the current meta is the maned wolf. Despite the name, maned wolves don’t belong to the wolf-like canid subclass, but rather to a closely related group called the South American canids. While most South American canids have basically stuck with the fox-like default canid build, maned wolves have specced into increased size and exceptionally long legs for seeing over the tall grasses of the South American savannah, becoming the largest dogs in South America and the tallest dogs in the entire world. Ordinarily, a carnivoran that spent points on a size increase like this would use it as an opportunity to start hunting larger and more valuable targets, but maned wolves never really bothered to spec into traits that would let them do this. Unlike actual wolves, maned wolves have almost no social instincts and never hunt in packs, and their solo attacks aren’t powerful enough for them to easily kill animals close to their own size or larger. While there have been a few instances of maned wolves killing medium-sized deer, the vast majority of their hunts target the same kinds of small mammals and birds that regular foxes eat. Since they’re too big to survive just off of these low-value targets, they have to make up the difference through heavy consumption of fruit. This works fine during the rainy parts of the year, but during the dry season, it becomes a lot more difficult. The result of all this is that maned wolves are massively over-reliant on a particular plant called the wolf apple, one of the few fruits that grows in the South American savannah all-year-round. When you take one of the most versatile predators you can find and turn it into something that may have to rely on a single plant for the majority of its XP requirements, it’s fair to say you’ve probably screwed up somewhere.

C Tier: Raccoon dog

In C tier, we have the raccoon dog, a build you might have heard of due to its role in initiating the COVID-19 world event in 2020. Raccoon dogs are among the most unusual dog builds in the game, and not just because they look like a mixture of a dog and a raccoon. Raccoon dogs have four special abilities that distinguish them from all other dogs. Firstly, much like actual raccoons, raccoon dogs are highly skilled climbers and spend much of their time in trees. There are a few other dog builds that have retractable claws for climbing, but with the possible exception of the grey fox, no others do it nearly as well as raccoon dogs. Second, and also like actual raccoons, raccoon dogs can eat almost anything. They can even eat poisonous toads due to their third special ability, a series of genetic enhancements that allow their digestive system to break down toxins far more easily than other carnivorans. Finally – and unlike raccoons – raccoon dogs are the only dogs that get to hibernate through cold winters like bears, allowing them to basically just skip through the hardest parts of the game.

You might think unlocking all of these abilities would make raccoon dogs a strong candidate for a high-tier rank, but the problem is that they had to take a lot of points out of base stats in order to do so. While their mobility is still decent, their shrunken carnassials have left them with an extremely weak bite, and they lack any good fighting moves on either offence or defence. Their greatest vulnerability is to wolves, which kill and eat them so often that it’s a major suppressant of their population growth, but lynxes and other larger predators can also be major problems for them.

C Tier: Coyote and jackal

Also in C tier, we have two of the most generalist canids, the coyote and jackal. I already talked about why coyotes are mid-tier in my Looney Tunes tier list a while ago, and pretty much everything I said can be applied to jackals, which are basically just a slightly shrunken-down coyote equivalent for players in Africa and Asia. Both of these builds have been able to achieve wide-ranging success due to their intelligence and adaptability, but fall short when it comes to raw power and can’t compete very well with the higher-ranking predators of their regions. Both especially struggle against wolves, to the point that they tend to be rare or absent in any biome where wolves are found. Both can hunt socially to a degree, but not to the same extent as a lot of the higher-ranking dogs.

While neither of these builds are especially powerful on their own, another thing they have in common is that their intelligence allows them to take good advantage of other predators’ abilities. I talked about this in my earlier tier list regarding the partnership that coyotes have established with the badger player-base, and jackals sometimes use similar strategies to access prey they wouldn’t be able to kill on their own. In India, jackals often follow tigers and other larger predators around, and may get a significant portion of their XP from eating the leftovers of large kills that wolves and tigers make. Unlike badgers with coyotes, these wolves and tigers don’t seem to derive any benefit in return from the jackals, but they generally allow the jackals to do it – though it’s a pretty big risk to the jackals if they don’t. Both coyotes and jackals are also famously adept at taking advantage of humans, and thrive in cities due to the protection that humans offer by keeping out larger predators. This means there’s a good chance they’ll achieve much higher ratings in future expansions as urban biomes continue to expand.

One thing players interested in jackals should know is that if you go to the dog page on the character select screen, you won’t actually find “jackal” listed as an option anywhere. This is because there are three variants of jackal in the current meta – golden, black-backed, and side-striped – and despite their similarities in appearance and playstyle, the golden variant isn’t actually closely related to the other two. To find golden jackals, you have to look for the Canis page – the same page where you find wolves, coyotes and domestic dogs listed – while the other two jackals have their own page, marked Lupulella.

B Tier: Red fox

In high B tier, we have the red fox, the largest of the true foxes. Red foxes rank ahead of most other foxes, not because they have any abilities that other foxes don’t, but just because their larger size generally allows them to dominate over other foxes in competition. They’re among the most versatile predators in the whole carnivoran faction, being known to hunt hundreds of varieties of small animals, and also being able to supplement their hunting by eating a wide variety of plants. They’re exceptionally versatile in their habitat preferences too, having not only established thriving populations in nearly every biome in the Northern Hemisphere plus parts of Africa, but also successfully invaded Australia and dominated the environment there too. In fact, red foxes have adapted to Australia so well that their predation has pushed some native marsupials completely out of the game. With the possible exception of the coyote, they’re also the best dogs for adjusting to living alongside humans, surviving just as well in city and suburb biomes as they do in the wild.

In order to maintain their dominance within the lightweight meta, red foxes have to be vicious fighters. They regularly kill other small predators, including other foxes, and have even forced Arctic foxes out of several biomes entirely. What keeps them from going even higher on the tier list is that, like all foxes, they still suffer from a very poor defence rating. While their light frame and agile body make it possible for them to evade attacks a lot of the time, they get killed often enough by larger dogs like wolves and coyotes that I can’t quite see them making it into the top tiers.

B Tier: African wild dog

Also in high B tier, we have the African wild dog. This is perhaps the most representative build of the dog guild, in that it takes everything dogs are known for and pushes it to the limit. While almost all dogs subsist primarily off of meat, African wild dogs are probably the most specialised for a predatory lifestyle; their teeth are more specialised for meat-eating than other dogs, with massively enlarged, hyena-like premolars and a blade-like cusp on the heel of the lower carnassial that enhances their flesh-shearing capacity beyond that of most of their relatives. Almost all large dogs are adapted for endurance chases, but African wild dogs are the most so, due to the loss of the first claw on their forefeet allowing them to make longer strides when running. And almost all dogs are at least somewhat social, but African wild dogs have probably the strongest social bonds out of any of them; they’re among a small minority of mammals where bonds are strong enough that not only parents, but whole packs will assist with the rearing of pups.

I’m not going to spend too much time explaining how African wild dogs play, because I already covered them pretty thoroughly in my tier list of Africa’s apex predators. To quickly recap, African wild dogs are mainly adapted for hunting midweight antelope on the African savannah, and they do it better than any other build – it’s not unheard of for a wild dog pack to succeed on as many as 90% of their hunts. However, they have nowhere near the physical power of the server’s other two major pack-hunting builds, the lion and spotted hyena, and tend to get bodied by these two in competition. Lions regularly outright kill them with ease, and while hyenas aren’t quite powerful enough to get away with doing that, they do frequently steal the wild dogs’ kills and kill their pups without much fear of pushback. These problem matchups have severely restricted the wild dogs’ ability to grow their player-base, and keep them from going above B tier on the tier list.

A Tier: Fennec fox

In low A tier, we have the fennec fox. Players might be surprised to see the smallest dog in the game ranked above so many of its larger and more powerful relatives, but there aren’t very many builds as well-adapted to such a difficult niche as the fennec fox is. Found throughout the Sahara Desert, fennecs have two key adaptations that make them among the best builds for surviving in this legendarily brutal environment. First, their huge ears, which act as a surface to dissipate heat during the hottest times of day. This is actually kind of an add-on bonus to the ears’ main purpose, which is to listen out for the movements of small animals hidden under the desert soil. The other major adaptation fennecs have is that their kidneys retain water extremely well. In fact, they retain so much moisture from the prey they eat that they can survive for an unlimited time without drinking water at all.

Like all foxes, Fennecs do still have the downside of being vulnerable to getting killed by larger predators. However, fennecs are among the most agile dogs, and are known for being incredibly difficult to capture; even specialist game-hunting dogs bred by humans almost never manage to catch them successfully. The fennec is easily one of the best builds for the Sahara Desert meta, and is only kept out of S tier by the fact that it’s unlikely to spread to other biomes outside of it.

A Tier: Wolf

And on the opposite end of the spectrum, the middle of A tier is where I’d place the largest dog in the current meta, the wolf. With their huge teeth, wolves easily outclass all other canids when it comes to raw attack power, and with legs that are long even by dog standards, only the toughest of herbivore mains can outlast them in a chase. Even a lone wolf can deal enough damage to kill nearly any herbivore in the Northern Hemisphere, but it’s when wolves hunt in packs that they become a true terror. Aside from perhaps African wild dogs, wolves are probably the most adapted to pack hunting out of all dogs. This is true both in the sense that their social instincts are the strongest, and that they’re most adapted to hunting the kind of large prey that dogs would normally need a pack for.

Wolf packs have two main approaches to hunting, depending on how many players they have. Smaller packs tend to rely mostly on midweight ungulates, with a particular focus on deer. These packs typically kill ungulates by tiring them out in an extended chase, and then one-shotting them with a bite to the throat. Larger packs are more likely to have to take on riskier targets like moose or bison, and these require a different approach, as getting too close to the horns or antlers would be more danger to the wolves than it’s worth. So instead, these wolf packs first wound their prey with a series of bites to the hindquarters, then wait until the blood loss has critically weakened them before going for the kill. This is generally easiest for wolves living in cold climates, as wolves’ paws are much better adapted at running through snow than the hooves of their prey. All that said, wolves aren’t very picky and will also eat smaller prey like rodents and rabbits if available, in which case they use essentially the same tactics as smaller dogs – leaping onto them and stunning them with their forepaws before killing them.

Although they’ve lost a fair amount of territory to competition from humans, wolves still control territory spanning a good portion of the Northern Hemisphere and a wide array of biomes. The width of their range means that they have to compete at least periodically with nearly every other apex predator in the North American and Eurasian metas, which makes it unusually easy to see how they compare in viability against similar builds. Wolves easily dominate over all other canids. Against higher-tier carnivorans like the cougar, hyena, and black bear, things are more even; these characters can usually defeat a lone wolf, but will typically lose if confronted by a pack working together. Their biggest problem matchups are against the S-tier carnivorans of their servers, the grizzly bear and tiger, both of which have basically free wins against even entire wolf packs. All of this balances out to place the wolf pretty definitively in A tier.

A Tier: Domestic dog

At the top of A tier, we have the domestic dog. I should note that I’ve done something I don’t normally do when rating this build. Ordinarily, I tend to rate builds on how well they can survive in the wild, without taking into account direct interference from humans. If I did this for domestic dogs, they’d probably rank around low C tier. The reason I do this is because for most animals, the degree to which humans help or harm them is essentially a matter of blind luck based on how humans in the area feel about them, and has little to do with their actual build design. However, domestic dogs are an exception to this rule – maintaining cooperative relationships with them has been a consistent feature of nearly every human guild throughout history. And unlike most livestock animals, who basically just function as passive recipients of aid from humans, dogs have adapted to playing a variety of active roles in human societies. This makes dogs closer to conventional symbionts than other domesticated animals, and that sort of symbiosis does factor into account when giving builds a rating.

Dogs were the very first support build that humans ever unlocked, and by a wide margin. Hunting in partnership with wolves has been a major element of human gameplay going back around 45,000 years, and the earliest wolves who became so adapted to this that they became an outright separate species probably appeared at least 23,000 years ago, if not earlier. As humans started to develop agriculture, dogs further modified themselves to make it easier for humans to feed them, speccing into a starch-digesting ability which isn’t found in any wild-living dog build. The other big change that occurred in the process of turning dogs into supports was in their brain structure. Like most domesticated animals, dogs have shrunken brains compared to their wild relatives, and are generally a lot worse at problem-solving and less wary of threats compared to wolves. However, they’ve compensated with a massive increase in their social cognition; the degree to which dogs are attuned to the behaviours and emotions of the humans surrounding them is utterly unlike anything seen in other domesticated animals, and also well exceeds the emotional intelligence of many other animals that are otherwise smarter.

Today, dogs’ partnerships with humans have made them the most popular carnivoran in the game, with over 700 million active players currently. I came very close to giving them S tier for how far they’ve spread, but the one thing that holds them back is that their breeding has left their code particularly prone to glitching out. This is mainly a problem with what humans call “purebred” dogs, due to the inbreeding involved in their creation, with all the problems that entails. The exact glitches that result vary depending on the breed, but they’re enough to keep domestic dogs just barely out of the top tier.

S Tier: Dingo

The true top-tier of the dog guild is the dingo. Including this on the list might be a bit controversial, as it’s still disputed whether dingoes are actually a distinct build. The official character select screen still lists them as a variant of the wolf, and there are other game guides that treat them as a variant of the domestic dog, but I think they’re different enough from the more common variants of both to deserve their own section. Found in Australia, dingoes are the descendants of a group of wolves that came over with early human settlers. These wolves had already been taught to hunt alongside humans, but had not yet begun to undergo selective breeding to become truly domesticated. Today, dingoes remain generally well-disposed towards humans and often live in close association with them, but are also still fully capable of surviving on their own.

In terms of playstyle, dingoes play pretty similarly to wolves, but have traded away some bulk in exchange for more flexible shoulder joints, which enable them to easily climb cliffs and rocks so as to keep better lookout for prey. Given how few large herbivores there are in Australia, a pack of dingoes the size of regular wolves probably wouldn’t be able to find enough prey to survive anyway, so this wasn’t much of a sacrifice. Kangaroos and wallabies are dingoes’ most preferred source of XP, but their smaller size compared to regular wolves means that they can also sustain themselves on rabbits, rodents and other lightweight prey in biomes where these can’t be found. Unlike domestic dogs, dingoes have also retained the enlarged brains of wolves, and their remarkable intelligence can help them with hunting difficult prey. For example, lone dingoes have been known to kill large wallabies by using ocean waves to drown them, and they’ve also been known to use the same tactic to kill echidnas without getting near their spines.

Dingoes are the largest and most powerful predators in Australia’s meta today, and among the few true apex predators left on the continent. For achieving nearly uncontested dominance across nearly an entire major server, I rate them as the S-tiers of the dog meta.
So that’s the dog tier list. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you’re interested in playing a dog, I hope you find this helpful. If you’re interested in other carnivorans, consider checking out my tier lists for the raccoons, mustelids, bears, or cats. Thanks for reading.