The projectiles spawn below the terrain I think. I was testing something in my mod that uses the rifthound model and I noticed this. I tested in vanilla to verify, and it’s the same. I fixed it by changing the skill template to the attackprojectilefan instead of burst.
i think you’re spot on there,
never even knew the dog had a regular spit
so i ran to the “stairs”, and voila, now spines shooting out the elevated ground https://imgur.com/a/eWLw3UO