darkguyver wrote:well if fact with heavy duty weapons add to back like pair heavy bio cannon on back refocus fist for better punching and if make them into mobile basilisk tank both for anti air or ground is one idea
you could add some fairly heavy-duty weapons to gorehounds, too, provided you have enough bio-e. i mean, nothing prevents you from adding, say, a heat projector, or a bunch of organic rockets, or other weapons, other than lack of bio-e.
furthermore, while they may not look that tough, their automatic dodge makes them surprisingly resilient.
as far as effective melee combat, gorehounds already have that covered, too. their jump attack knocks people down quite well, which means that if they get into melee combat with you you're probably going to spend most of your time knocked all over the place and unable to act, unless you have an automatic dodge or something like that.
i will say that there are some things i think would make for an appealing replacement for gorehounds. provided you kept a few key components (extreme loyalty to humanity being a major one, though their other advantages are not bad either), the main challenge i feel for gorehounds is their metabolism. meat is a major resource drain to produce compared to vegetable matter, and if you could go even further and make them photosynthetic or thermosynthetic or lithovores, that would be a definite compelling argument.
another possible argument would be some sort of useful sense. for example, if they were lithovores as above, and could sense metal more readily, that might be pretty compelling.
another major possibility would be something that lets them handle metal, by being so different from mammalian life that they don't trigger the nanobot plague. yet another possibility would be something that makes them blend in more. for example, if their new body doesn't give off heat and looks like a regular piece of terrain, that would be pretty interesting for the resistance.
these aren't the only possibilities, but unless you have similarly compelling reasons, i don't see gorehounds getting replaced any time soon. now, if stonebacks looked like a stone outcropping, ate metal and minerals (rendering them into an inert form that the machine cannot use), had a sufficiently different biology as to not trigger nanobot plague responses, and didn't generate body heat, then i'd say you've got a winner there.
but if it's just toughness, well, toughness is easy to add with splicers biotechnology.