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I'm not feeling optimistic about these planned Knight changes.
So unfortunately this post is going to fairly negative, I've seen a lot of people excited about the PTB knight changes but I think the changes just show a lack of understanding, or perhaps just an unwilling, or inability, to address the problem actually plaguing the Knight. It's no secret that BHVR has had layoffs recently, so it is entirely within reason they lack the work power to do something more substantial but I feel that the proposed changes are only meant to placate, make the knight weaker then he already was, and will just make him less exciting for all players.
Allow to me to go through the changes, one by one.
- [NEW] Added ability to manually swap between guards.
This is really not that useful, and if it weren't for other changes in this proposal as well, it would be completely redundant. Knight as he is now, really doesn't care about which guard he has selected, apart from the Carnifex, who can break pallets substantially faster, the other guards are, practically speaking, equivalent with their strengths being minor boons that can coincidentally benefit the killer, but without any of his high rarity addons, the distinction is unimportant. Again, except for the Carnifex's ability to break pallets quickly which can uniquely be used to break pallets as you walk through them, allowing the Knight much greater chase pressure in the situations were the Knight can pull this off.
Now with that said I'd also like to go into detail about that strategy I just described. It's terrible, it's not good, it's easily outplayed, and it's very risky. Now there are two major problems with going for it, that being the fact that you need to be precisely placed to even access your power, and the fact that survivors can easily counter play it by just… not dropping the pallet, at which point they gain considerable distance and disarm your ability to use the Carnifex. So the ability to manually choose your guards will help the Knight try to excite this strategy because the Carnifex will always be available. however this just makes it more predictable as the survivors will also know that pre-dropping pallets against the Knight will be a very bad idea.
- [NEW] Patrol paths must be at least 10 meters in length.
This is very bad for Knight, as one of his biggest weaknesses is how committal and time consuming using his killer power is, and during that time how vulnerable he is to misdirection during that time. One of the strongest counter plays to the Knight has always been to immediately leave the current tile as soon as you see the Knight kneel, and doing so will be even more effective with this change because he will be locked into drawing his path for quite a while, so the survivor will have quite a while to run away from the tile and string together another while his power is still on cooldown from the last use. Even if the guard were to detect the survivor, by running away from both the tile and knight the killer's power is nullified just by the basics of "kiting."
- [NEW] Added a multiplier to guard hunt time based on path length. Longer
paths increase hunt time up to a maximum 1.5x the normal duration.
This change is not horrible, as it would stack with both the shorter hunt start up and would apply reasonably more pressure to survivors then a current hunt. No further comment, I support this change.
- [NEW] When The Knight is within 8 meters of his guard, the guard’s hunt timer depletes 3x faster.
Now this also a huge blow to Knight's most major strength, his ability to pincer survivors, as 8 meters is quite large, for reference it's the same distance as the current standard guard detection range. This will reduce guards hunts from 12 seconds to 4 or 24 to 8. So for all intensive purposes only the Jailer will be helpful for Knight in chase, as the other two guards will simply disappear before the Knight can position himself around a survivor. Again this is why I find guard selection not impressive, as this patch itself is manufacturing the need to select guards manually, the current Knight design doesn't really need fine control of his guards at a base level, (addons obviously change things.) But the fact of the matter is that the Jailer is now both the best patrolling guard but also the best active chasing guard. As the assassin's speed will only be helpful for hunting survivors the Knight isn't chasing himself. And the Carnifex is only useful for breaking pallets. So in this context it makes sense to always use the Jailer unless you're using Guardia Compagnia for these specific situations, or certain addons are in play. However I have no idea what Knight's addons's will look like in this upcoming PTB.
- [CHANGE] Reduced The Carnifex’s hunt time to 12 seconds (was 24 seconds).
- [CHANGE] Increased The Jailer’s hunt time to 24 seconds (was 12 seconds).
- [CHANGE] Reduced The Carnifex’s banner spawn time to 5 seconds (was 10 seconds).
- [CHANGE] Increased The Jailer’s banner spawn time to 10 seconds (was 5 seconds).
I've lightly gone into how I feel about this change already, but to be clear all this is achieving is manufacturing the need to manually choose guards, makes the Jailer the ideal guard for most uses, and makes the Carnifex a guard with a very specific use. I do not believe this makes the Knight a more interesting killer to play, and feel that it makes the Knight more auto-pilot and reduces the space for creative decision making.
- [CHANGE] Decreased The Carnifex’s breaking time to 1.8 seconds (was 2 seconds).
- [CHANGE] Decreased The Assassin’s breaking time to 5 seconds (was 6 seconds).
- [CHANGE] Decreased The Jailer’s breaking time to 5 seconds (was 6 seconds).
Okay now this is certainty an interesting one because I believe these changes accomplish absolutely NOTHING. So, firstly, the carnifex, he's getting a 0.2 second reduction to his pallet breaking. Let's compare what this looks like.
This is the current pallet break speeds, and as you can see, it is already fast enough that you can't touch the pallet before it's broken, because it only takes the pallet 1 second to break and lose all collision, the clip is roughly as close as I could get to the pallet and still summon a guard, maybe with a slightly different angle I could touch the pallet before it breaks but it doesn't matter because ultimately this is only a 0.1 second faster break speed since the pallet breaks before the animation is complete. So I think it's safe to say that the Carnifex breaking things faster really doesn't do anything for the Knight. And the same goes for the other guards, but for completely different reasons.
Now, 6 seconds is a quite a long time, I'd say it's a leisurely amount of time, it's the kind of action speed were you really aren't using it to get anything done quickly. And in fact, you can leverage the slow speed to your advantage. The linchpin here is that survivors can not in anyway interact with objects being broken by guards, this includes both pallets and generators. Now this is incredibly helpful for situations were multiple survivors are repairing a generator verging on completion. with the assassin or jailer, the Knight can order them to break the generator and not only will that gen regress for 5%, but it will be completely blocked for 6 seconds, allowing the knight himself to approach and chase the survivors away. Now this decision is still applicable whether the guard takes 5 seconds or 6 seconds, they're both really slow long times that aren't going to win any awards when 2 seconds is already as fast as you could ever want anything broken. But I feel like it shows how short sighted the changes are and how little familiarity they have with the Knight. The do LITERALLY nothing for one guard, and are a hindrance to reasonable strategy for the other two. While really granting the Knight nothing in return? If anyone could think of a practical situation were the guards breaking pallets or generators one second faster would be helpful, I'd love to hear it, because I can not think of any myself. As even around pallets, a pallet breaking faster gives survivors more paths to evade you, while an unbroken pallet the survivors can't vault is a wall that blocks them.
- [CHANGE] Increased The Carnifex’s detection range to 10 meters (was 8 meters).
- [CHANGE] Increased The Assassin’s detection range to 10 meters (was 8 meters).
- [CHANGE] Increased The Jailer’s detection range to 16 meters (was 14 meters).
Now these are certainly buffs, I wont say no to these, but again, I feel like it's a rather ineffective and shortsighted fix. So for clarification, Map of the Realm is a very popular Knight addon. It increases the direction range of all guards by 4 meters. However, I believe very few people running Map of the Realm are using it for these 4 meters. They use Map of the Realm because it causes the guard's detection range to expand faster, and thus allows for more reliable and aggressive survivor detection.
Let me explain the details,
so when a guard is summoned it's detection range starts at a flat 0, but after a 1.5 second spawning period (slower then the time it takes for the Carnifex to break a pallet) then the detection range will expand to it's full size over the course of a second. So survivors have over one and a half seconds to react and move outside of the range of the guard to completely avoid detection. However with the Jailer and with the Map of the Realm, that range expands in the same duration of time, and thus expands at a faster speed. And this is the major benefit of the Map of the Realm, for the Carnifex and the Assassin, the 4 meters of the Map of the Realm is a 50% increase to their range, and so they both become far more reliable in detecting survivors when first placed, while the Jailer only receives a 25% increase. However he's still the most reliable in this way.
So my problem with increasing the ranges, (specifically to address the over reliance on Map of the Realms as described in the developer update) as that assuming the Map of the Realm still increases detection range, it will STILL be his most popular addon, because as it is currently, more range results in more consistency. And with Jailer being always available, he will be more consistent in detecting far away survivors, even if the Assassin is more suitable. Just because the Assassin isn't as reliable as the Jailer.
I think back to the Unknown, the way his blast works is that a zone rapidly expands over the course of 0.38 of a second and lingers 0.2 second, and I often thought about how something like this could be helpful for the Knight, let's say, when the Knight summons a guard, sometime during that first 1.5 seconds of spawning, what if the guard's detection range were to expand to a predefined range, let's say 0.4 seconds after spawning, the range could expand to around 2.25 meters (the range of the Unknown's projectile) and stay there for a rest of the spawning sequence, before then expanding out to the rest of the intended distance over the current second it normally does, this would allow Knight players a skill, in trying to accurately place and tract invisible survivors, if you succeed you are granted a very reliable hunt, otherwise, the survivors could avoid the following expansion easier, as it would be technically traveling slow then it does now.
I feel that this is a much more comprehensive solution to the problem of players being over reliant on an addon because it gives players what they actually want. And with this range players can use increased detection range as increased detection range, and not as a tool to get more reliable hunts.
And Finally,
- [CHANGE] Updated various Add-Ons.
This could mean literally anything, presumably it means the Map of the Realm and Pillaged Mead will be nerfed, and addons all addons relating to unique guards will have to be reassessed.
And that's all of the proposed Knight changes, I hope I have made it clear why I am very disapointed in these changes and why I think they only serve to make Knight both a weaker killer, but also one who is less interesting, and more frustrating. I don't like to be so negative, and I do have my own proposal for how to improve the Knight more substantially. However I am still finalizing my work, I hope to make a post on it soon but I thought it was critical to make my voice heard as soon as possible.
I would like to thank anyone who read this glorified rant, and I appreciate the hard working developers who make the game Dead by Daylight that means so much to me. I want to do anything I can to help, and all I know to do right now is make this post.
Comments
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I'll miss him 😔
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It feels like they just gave content creators what they wanted on this one. They hate knight.
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To the point about the new 10m restriction on patrol paths - the thing you're describing where Knight spawns a guard in a tile and survivors leave to hold W to another one is the entire thing they're trying to fix.
It's not something that harms Knight in his capacity to use his power as intended, it's a nerf to an extremely obnoxious cheese strategy. I have my issues with a few of these changes, especially the change regarding hunt time shortening if the Knight is close by, but that particular change is a good one specifically because it's aiming to address the loop-zoning issue that a few characters share and Knight is the uncontested king of.
That's not to say I'm of the opinion these changes adequately buff him in compensation, or to say that I don't think that - I'm agnostic until I can test it. Just that Knight has historically had a big problem: Flattening gameplay down to "he's knelt down, hold W, rinse and repeat". This update is pretty clearly attempting to both address that problem and encourage Knight to use his guards in alternate ways, it's not a bad update because it successfully addresses the problem.
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Yeah I agree with your points.
Also, those "supposed" longer chase times by distance will in reality never happen. This is because if you're doing those longer chases away from the Knight they will simply loop around and pick up the banner to remove it wayyy before it actually finishes the hunt since the Knight isn't there to defend it. The banner essentially can't exist or "longer" range guard snipes with increased duration without the Knight there literally won't exist.
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Hey, trapper has knelt down, hold w. Hey, hag knelt down, hold W. Hey skull woman lifted a drone into the air, hold w.
Like that's not an inherently bad thing. I find every killer I just mentioned fun to play vs. The salient question is whether gutting his antiloop in exchange for maybe longer chases and swapping guards is enough of a compensatory buff. You know, the guards that don't actually do anything without help from the knight. That vanish when you try to do stuff with them now. As a fun thought experiment do you actually see that as a buff?
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Thought I agree with you but none of the changes imo will make him better. The way you are supposed to use his guards tends to be the weakest way to use his power bc his guards are just really weak I think. Knight is a killer who power greatly depends on bad AI. We all know the AI in dbd is #########, look at nemmy zombies. ######### could you picture nemmy if his power was just zombies, he would probably be the worst killer in the game imo. Lucky nemmy has a chase power but knight I dont think the Gurads will even be a good chase power and if left alone they are barely a threat to survivors bc of bugs, and the banners.
I think alot of yall who looking forward to testing changes have this idea that they also fixing the bugs with the AI but Im sorry I really dont think these bugs are going to be fixed. Look at twins, they are still buggy even after they were supposed to be "reworked". DBD has a history of taking forever to fix bugs in the game and even when they do the bugs usually come back after two or three patches.
Personally I think Knight needs a new power that doesn't relay on ######### AI but that never going to happen. I think he will always be bad bc he going to be held back by something you cant control yourself. But hell that just my opinion but I really dont have faith that these changes is going to make knight any more fun for the person who playing him.
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The problem existing on other killers doesn't stop it from being a problem on Knight, and it's also worse on Knight because he's not limited like those killers are + the guards are a bigger threat than those powers.
However, I agree. The salient question is whether he's being compensated properly, not trying to argue that the main problem being fixed is itself inherently bad. You'll notice that was my point too.
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