I will now attempt the analyze the Knight and his issues...

GrimReaperJr1232

The Guards and their roles

In order to understand the Knight and his problems, we must first go over each guard individually. We need to understand what's the intended purpose of these guards. I have to speculate a lot but I'm making my best inferences based on their existing traits.

Carnifex

He chases the longest, the banner takes the longest to spawn, and breaks things fast. He's your chase aid, the one meant to help you in a chase the most.

Assassin

The hardest one for me to make a guess on. He's 4.4m/s and inflicts Deep Wounds. 4.4 means he has a chance to actually catch up to a survivor, while Deep Wound is meant to be a stalling stool in modern DBD. From this, we can gather that he's the "independent" guard. He's who you throw at someone while you go do something else.

Jailer

Pretty easy. You send him out to patrol something you don't want survivors touching.

Issues

To describe their many, many, many problems, I'll have to go over their issues in general and what affects each guard specifically.

General

Starting a hunt

One of the most glaring issues you'll notice immediately. It is really, really hard to get a Hunt to start. The second you go into the "patrol mapping" mode, the survivor will run away.

This would be fine if this was only a major weakness if you immediately placed a guard, but survivors both see you as an orb and hear you when drawing a patrol path, with them also being able to see and hear the detection radius of the guard. So if you try quickly drawing a path, they'll just... avoid it.

The only way to somewhat help with this is to run Map of the Realm, upping the detection of Assassin and Carnifex to 12m (from 8m) which is far more reasonable. Not amazing, but it can be used.

Detection

After detecting a survivor, the guard will immediately go to where the survivor was detected. The stated purpose is to reduce the distance between a guard and survivor, as otherwise, Jailer in particular would be useless because of his large detection radius.

The problem lies in this assume the survivor runs away. They can just run into the guard who will just float past them. So if you try using them to defend a choke point, maybe cutting them off from an open exit gate, they will disappoint you.

Hunt Duration

With the exception of Carnifex, Hunts are extremely short at 12 seconds. This is terrible. Especially with survivors wanting to run away, forcing some of that to be spent catching up (for both the guard and you), there's simply not enough time. Horsemeat add-on ups this to 16 seconds, which is actually pretty decent. One of his best add-ons.

Orders

Ordering a guard is absolutely awful. You go into patrol mode and then place an order after approaching a pallet/gen. What's the issue? Sounds fine.

The problem is this entire interaction is very clunky and slow. So, ordering a guard to break a pallet/kick a gen while you continue to chase a survivor is out of the question. It's just too slow. The only exception is when a survivor is in a corner of the map, and that's only because they literally can't run anywhere.

For the most part, rather than feeling like a useful tool, it's just a small QoL thing. You order a guard to break a pallet while you hook someone. Kicking a gen too, but since it doesn't apply perks, you'll often just do it yourself since, again, doing it mid-chase is a no-no. (Just to be clear: I'm A-Okay with them not applying perks)

Carnifex

Out of all the guards, Carnifex is... actually the most functional. He fulfills his purpose just fine. He has a problem starting a hunt like Assassin, but if you do it, he works perfectly fine. Fix some of the general guard issues, and I think Carnifex will be fine.

Assassin

Hunt Duration

I'm mentioning Hunt's duration again because it really shows on the assassin. Now, he is 4.4 which makes him much more of a threat compared to the rest. This is true. But this is your independent guard, the one who seemingly is meant to pose a threat by himself. Considering how difficult it is to start a chase without your direct intervention, his chasing the survivor for 12 seconds (which, again, will largely consist of making up for lost distance) pretty much makes him useless in his role.

If you use him mid-chase, his help is limited since he chases briefly (even with the enhanced speed). If you do get him to work and land a hit... then what's the point of the Deep Wound? Deep Wound is to stall which is pointless if you're still chasing the survivor. It disables DH, but please tell me we haven't reached the point where we're actively balancing killers around the use of a single perk.

Jailer

Hunts

Hunts in general are terrible for Jailer. This might sound obvious, as his role is meant to be guarding and not chasing. This is true, except that he's so bad that it impedes his role as the "guard dog."

He has the worst of both worlds. Carnifex's 4.1m/s speed and Assassin's 12-sec chase duration. In theory, his role should be to chase survivors off objectives but rarely get a hit.

However, because he's so slow, it's ridiculously easy to grab the banner. Oh, chasing Meg after placing Jailer on a progressed gen? I'll just attract Jailer, loop him once, and then grab the banner. Easy. I have done this numerous times.

If the guard cannot be a threat by himself, then he can't really guard. Is he meant to help you patrol then? Well, his chases are so short that I can't get into a position to use him. And if I'm not using him to try to get a hit, then I'm just using him to stall the game which is unfun for both sides. Killer feels that he's getting nowhere, while survivors get to play with an AI.

And it can only stall the game since attempting an unhook ends a Hunt instantly, so you can only use it to defend gens. And if you can't get a hit, you only stall game progression for survivors without progressing your objective either.

Hex_Llama

I pretty much agree.

The interaction to break/kick objects is basically useless because it takes so long that you almost always could have just done it yourself, plus you lose vision on whatever else is happening around you. It would be much stronger if you could just tap to deploy it on the go.

I also think that part of the problem is that, even though the three guards theoretically have different strengths, in practice, you end up having to use them all the same way -- to chase the survivors off of something, or camp an area so you can get notified when someone shows up. Their strengths and weaknesses in how they do that are a little different, but the task is essentially the same.