Suggestion - Knight Changes

I picked up The Knight recently, and his power is very well suited to my playstyle: However, the guards can feel very underwhelming in certain situations and very boring in others. In this post I have proposed my suggested changes to The Knight with the goal of making him feel better to play as and to play against.

Generally, I believe The Knight should be heavily discouraged from insta-dropping a guard at a loop and brute-forcing chases. While I acknowledge this playstyle is far from his strongest, I also think it is un-interactive and boring for both sides. To solve this issue, I think the knight should have a minimum patrol path of somewhere between 5-10m. This would effectively kill insta-drops by giving the survivor a much larger window to leave the loop. Due to this change, Knight players would be forced into creating longer paths and predicting survivor pathing, giving survivors a chance to mind-game the green orb (similar to the spirit). To balance his new power, the move speed of each guard should be slightly increased to make being hunted more punishing in the case of the Knight predicting correctly.

Another struggle with The Knight is his addon dependency. The Knight feels infinitely better to play with Call to Arms and Map of The Realm. Call to Arms provides two things for The Knight: a stronger power in chase (green orb speed), and longer possible patrol paths. The movement speed when in drawing mode feels so good when using his power to cut people off in chases, which is something we want to incentivize. Therefor, the effect should be partially or fully base kit. The longer patrol paths aren’t as necessary, but it does feel great to snipe people with a guard from a far distance. This can be really fun; however, if the survivors aren’t given an adequate tell for this, it can feel unfair. To address this, along with making his default patrol path longer by x meters, his terror radius should also be increased by the same amount. Not only would this give The Knight more counterplay, but it would also encourage players to build around this larger terror radius with perks and add-ons.

One issue that was abundantly clear to me when playing in this way was The Knight’s inability to recall guards at will. Similar to the twins, another survivor could take a guard hostage (unintentionally or on purpose) and essentially delete the killer’s power for up to 24 seconds. In order to curb situations like this, The Knight should be able to press the Secondary Power Button to recall a guard at any time. To balance this out, the cooldown between a guard ending a patrol/hunt and the next guard being brought out will be increased to prevent The Knight from spamming his power.

Lastly, to make The Knight’s guards feel more distinct, I feel that their attributes should be altered slightly. The Carnifex is supposed to specialize in orders; however, in most cases The Jailer or The Assassin outclass him when it comes to damaging generators. To fix this, the speed at which The Carnifex and the other guards break generators should be reversed. This would secure The Carnifex’s spot as the order specialist. With the other changes mentioned above, I feel that The Assassin and The Jailer would fit their own niches as being the best in the hunt, and the best at patrolling respectively. Although, both could benefit from a slightly increased hunt duration.

Overall, The Knight is one of my favorite killers in the game, but he struggles from a few issues that stunt his potential as a catalyst for interactive and fun gameplay for both sides.