New Knight doesn't feel much better than his old self
Obligatory "I've p100ed knight" sentence.
Being able to send out guards while another guard is active is very, very, nice, as it prevents hostage situations. Same with being able to cancel the patrol path. The longer banner spawn makes his pressure actually good, which is a big improvement over old Knights 5s banner spawn on Jailor and assassin.
Though thats where the advantages of new Knight end.
The 3x depletion rate feels very bad to use, and only exists to balance Jailors extreme chase time of upwards to 36s (40 with DHM) which can guarantee hits. Similarly being chased by an assassin for 18s while knight teeters on the edge of the 8m range, only coming in for a hit, doesn't feel great either.
I suggest:
- Remove the 3x depletion rate while within 8m of a hunting guard
- Nerf the extra chase bonus from 1.5x at max length to 1.25x (scaling accordingly)
- (If needed) Nerf Jailors base chase time to 20s instead of 24s
- (if needed) Nerf DHM to 2s or rework it completely
Another issue is his new dependancy on Call to arms. Since you want to get out of that 10m range while drawing a path, and to draw longer paths quicker, this add on may as well be base kit. It also increases his skill ceiling, which makes him harder to master.
- Make CTA base kit (+25% orb speed, +10m to path length)
- Rework CTA
Landing guards has been made much easier than knights previous version, especially with the option to choose Jailor at will. Map also feels semi-required still, since 10m doesn't feel like enough for a "patrol".
- Buff guard ranges by 2m (Carn, Assassin: 12m, Jailor: 18m)
- Nerf guard vision expansion time to 0.75s (currently 0.5s, old knight was 1s)
- Rework Map of the realm
His cooldowns are okay, however I don't like them purely because it feels like Vecna, and not Knight. Knight is about making guards work in your current situation, NOT picking a guard FOR your situation.
- Reduce guard cooldowns to 10s (Carn: 10s, Assassin: 10s, Jailor: 10s)
- Hitting a patrolling guard reduces that cooldown to 5s
Finally, guards in hunt feel like pure RNG depending on what structures have spawned, and if the survivor knows how to abuse the guards AI.
- Guards should not get slowed down when passing by a window/pallet
- Guards should not get "baited" when a survivor walks up to a window/pallet (this was a bug, but got turned into a feature for some reason)
- Guards should walk through newly dropped pallets, NOT walk around them
That's just what I want for Knight considering I mained him for a solid 3 months before Slay merchant was added. If any of the changes seem too extreme then the following could be done to mitigate them:
- Increase the slowdown guards receive when going through pallets (windows are ok)
- Buff carnifex in some way to make him more appealing to hunt with instead of spam breaking
Comments
new knight doesn't feel stronger because for every buff he received, he received an equally bad nerf.
→ Switching guards[Buff]
→Increased cooldown of guards from 3 second to 30 second, 25 second and 20 seconds.
→ Increased duration of guard chases based off distance for max of 2 and banner duration.
→ Added 3x depletion mechanic when near a guard within 8 meters.
→ Increased radius of guard patrols by 2 meters.
→ Added a 10 meter restriction to placing patrol guard paths.
than we have this global change:
-Added a distraction mechanic for AI.
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The way to fix knight is to make negatives they give him less severe and in some cases….. fix exploits and bugs. Don't make them features.
"→Increased cooldown of guards from 3 second to 30 second, 25 second and 20 seconds for Carnifex, Assassin, Jailer."
→ Reduced Carnifex cooldown to 5 seconds.
→ When a guard successfully enters chase, reduces the cooldown of the guard by 60%.
Now knight is rewarded for landing guard chases but is equally punished when he misses guard chases.
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→ 3x depletion rate decreased to 2.5x meters when within 8 meters of a guard.
Now the jailer has 12.8 second chase and 16.8 which is similar to old guard duration's removing some dependency of Dried horse meat.
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→ Reduced 10 meter restriction to placing patrol guard paths from 10 meter to 8 meters.
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→ Removed distraction mechanic that caused the guards to have irregular pathing when dropping a pallet or touching the side of a window.
New knight just feels same as old knight with a bunch of negatives that are too severe for the killer to be stronger. the cooldown is probably worst out of these negatives but other ones are not that much better. it is typical BVHR pondering towards survivor main players to attempt to neuter the killer power.
Wouldn't straight up removing the 3x penalty and nerfing the hunt duration bonus to 1.25x be easier? Makes assassin and carnifex easier to balance in chase, since assassins chase time will forever be too short if the penalty stays above 1.5x, which at that point it may as well not exist.
no, they invented that for jailer to premier pincer guard. it is just that penalty are too harsh even for jailer that you need to run dried horse meat to stay in proximity of jailer. it is too discourage using the assassin for pincers but assassin doesn't even work at getting hits because of distraction mechanic. so it is just hard useless vs good teams and has absurd cooldown. all the negatives for knight need to be dial down.