Yes, it is nou.

I haven't noticed any difference with the Gun Puppies, personally. Sounds like you're just lagging rather heavily.

This has been commented in other threads too. And I've seen it, their bullets spawn about a knights length away from them making bombing them a real pain. You can't go in close without getting hit, so you have to shield no matter what.

Gun puppy projectiles now start much further away from the exit point causing a larger bullet spread. I found this out the hard way in the T3 gun puppy danger room. I thought that I was lagging the whole time until I saw a lone gun puppy with a missive projectile spread. The ninja update is quite annoying when dealing with two or more gun puppies that are next to each other.

Edit: I'm also convinced that the projectiles now have a slightly larger radius but I can not confirm this.

I sent a bug report too, and it's not just tier 2 but also tier 3. They just seem to spawn 2 feet in front of them, leaving no warning.

This might not be right, but here goes my experience with new bullets.

They appear to do the same as before, except be invisible for that knights length before them. I'm probably wrong.

The slower bullets seems to be caused by a knight being within the emptiness that was bullets pre patch.

I would stand close after hitting, taking a hit on my shield, and continue bashing. Thats my usually gunpuppy method. I've found that if you stand just withing a heavy swords range, but at the tip of a medium speed swords range, the middle bullet will appear as it was pre patch. The other bullets will spawn beside you. This has allowed me to duck behind the side bullets and avoid the last bullet.

More testing is required, but that's what i learned.

Slime puppies and rocket puppies are not affected at all, I've noticed; they run exactly as they always have.

Regular puppies, however, are completely changed. They are laggy or invisible, the bullets actually spawn much farther out than usual (which was the puppies mouth). As well as meaning that they can hit you a lot sooner than before, but that they also spread far, far wider than usual. Sometimes they do spawn nearer the mouth, when you're very close to them, and in this instance you tend to notice some of the bullets being shot at a farther distance than the others (usually the ones that would have missed you anyways).

It happened when the monster nerf patch happened, but there was no mention of this in the patch notes (and SK aren't known for stealth patches, in my experience) but the changes seem so odd, inconsistent and un-needed that I can't help but thinking it's an accidental bug. Puppies were the perfect difficulty as they were, and now they're infuriatingly hard to predict and deal with, especially in puppy rooms and are causing far more aggravation than ever needed.

Then again, they also buffed up the Brandish line completely unneccessarily, so what do I know...