Knight problem, PLEASE READ

This is just a repost from reddit that im sure many of us agree.: I'm sure just about everyone on this subreddit has seen the massive influx of "Knight rework bad" posts, and for people who don't play or don't like Knight (and believe me I know there's a LOT of you) it may be hard to understand why. "Knight mains are just upset that their can't brainlessly anti-loop anymore." No no the Knight changes are really awful, and this is coming from someone who praised the PTB changes and played devil's advocate for a lot of the bad features that were introduced in the PTB. Let me summarize what has happened:

Along with the removal of "guard farting" ("farting" out a guard on any loop with low walls and playing Knight like Skull Merchant - a playstyle which needed to be removed as it was unskillful and uninteractive for both sides) and the 3x guard decay the Knight has been plastered with a 14 second cooldown if you attempt to use any guard for any purpose. Oh and I should explain: this 14 seconds happens after a guard despawns. So it's not like old Knight where you'd summon a guard, it would goof around for 12 seconds, and then you'd have about a 4 second cooldown afterwards before you could summon a new guard (effectively a 16 second total cooldown.) No the guard exists for 12 seconds and then you get a 14 second cooldown. That means you're waiting for TWENTY SIX SECONDS to use your power again if you summon a guard and it doesn't spot anything, or up to THIRTY EIGHT SECONDS if you summoned a Jailer. As other threads have pointed out this is more than double the time it takes for Nurse to recharge both her blinks. So on paper Knight's power to send a stupid AI to check an area and maybe kick a pallet sometimes is considered stronger than Nurse's ability to move through walls, at least in Behaviour's eyes. I genuinely can not begin to summarize how awful this feels. Honestly I shouldn't have to, but the best summary I can give is "imagine if Huntress had to wait 14 seconds after throwing a hatchet before she could throw another." Regardless of if she hit or missed.

This cooldown change is on top of the changes from PTB that did make it to live (oh and we'll get to what didn't make it to live) including the longer hunt time if you make a long path and more notably: significant buffs to The Jailer. With Knight's previous iteration The Jailer was often considered "the worst guard" since his strengths were entirely rooted in scouting and defense. He had the widest search area but also lasted the longest, meaning that while he was useful out-of-chase he was rather detrimental in-chase because his chase time was bad and if you missed with The Jailer you'd have a 24 second duration of not being able to summon another guard.

Now you can choose what guard to summon, meaning that you will never have the wrong guard for the job but (much more importantly) you can have an essentially infinite number of Jailers at your disposal, something which was previously only possible with Cold Steel Manacles (one of your two addon slots wasted) and a lot of time wasted smacking the other guards out of existence. The Jailer was already the best defensive guard with a wide detection range and long duration but now he is also arguably the best chase guard in the game with a longer Hunt time and the change to make the Banner take longer to spawn if you make a long patrol path (along with an already long banner spawn time base.) This on paper was a good thing when Knight was on the PTB as The Jailer was much more capable of acting as a scout (search for longer, chase for longer when he found someone) but now that you have an essentially limitless amount of Jailers we have too much of a good thing.

The Jailer now guards areas for the longest, has the easiest time detecting survivors, and will waste the most amount of a survivor's time when chasing them. So in short by Jailer spamming you can defend an area very well and will chase for a very long time with a very long banner spawn time if the Knight set up a large patrol path. All while the killer never interacts with the survivors. But as previously stated due to the 14 second cooldown for using any other guard there's little reason to try to use any other guard in chase. Using The Assassin to anti-loop has become way harder due to the removal of guard farting the minimum patrol path along with the 3x guard decay (meaning there's a good chance that you despawn your own Assassin before he even gets a hit), and even if you use The Carnifex to break a pallet you become a default M1 killer for 14 seconds because you had the shear gaul and audacity to do what Nemesis, Demogorgon, and Blight do essentially for free.

So to reiterate: we have a power that defends a wide area and wastes a lot of the survivors' time while also tracking their exact location, but the killer is essentially incapable of using their power in chase... Wait, isn't this just release day Skull Merchant? And what did release day Skull Merchant do again? Oh god...

Yeah so the new Knight is only effective at three-genning and is too clunky to do anything else. Let's go baby we're in December 2022 again WOO!

"But you keep mentioning the PTB. What was different then?" "Why didn't Knight mains protest this change on the PTB." Because this is not what we had on the PTB. The Public Test Build version of Knight was substantially different to what we currently have. In fact there are three changes between the PTB version of Knight and the Live version of Knight that can be seen:

1. Knight didn't have a 14 second cooldown for daring to use his power (obviously)
2. Every guard had an internalized 40 second cooldown (reduced to 32 if you had the addon that made their recharge faster) (currently all guards share the same 14 second cooldown)
3. (Most notably) There was a "bug" on the PTB that allowed The Knight to summon a new Guard when one was already active. This would cause the old Guard to despawn regardless of what it was doing (so no fear of having two Guards active at once) and set that Guard on its 40 second cooldown.

So to reiterate: between the PTB and Live Knight lost the ability to quickly resummon guards and got slapped with a 14 second cooldown whenever he does literally anything, while also having to deal with the intended changes of no more guard farting the minimum patrol path length and the 3x guard decay when close to them.

In exchange he got the ability to spam whatever Guard he wants at any time. But again since you have a 14 second cooldown you won't use The Carnifex to break a single pallet and you won't use the Assassin when the 3x guard decay and minimum summon length means using your power to anti-loop is significantly harder. So you got the ability to spam The Jailer and nothing but The Jailer, something that PTB Knight was not able to do because Jailer spam specifically had a 40 second cooldown to prevent Knight from repeatedly spamming The Jailer to play in a hyper-defensive playstyle.

So why was Knight changed? Well it's because of point 3 on my list of changes between PTB and Live. As I explained there was a "bug" on the PTB that allowed The Knight to resummon guards when one was already active. This feature was beloved by Knight mains as it alleviated one of his biggest pain points (having a guard stick around doing nothing for a long time if you ever "missed" with your power) and still remained relatively balanced due to the 40 second cooldown per guard. This meant that if you missed with The Jailer (best chase guard) you'd have to use The Assassin who required more precision and could be more easily evaded without The Knight applying pressure to the survivor (shorter chase time + banner spawns sooner.) If you missed with The Assassin you'd have to send The Carnifex to chase who now chased for the default chase time (same as Assassin) without having the added duration of Jailer. This meant that the ability to alleviate mistakes was balanced out by still being locked out of your stronger guards if you made a mistake.

But Behaviour didn't like that feature so they removed it, even though Knight mains universally praised it. And seemingly as a bandaid fix to the mechanic they implemented the 14 second cooldown shared amongst all guards, because "Knight won't be able to summon a new guard when one's already out if every Guard gets put on cooldown after using your power." And I know this was a bandaid fix because the three addons that reduce summoning cooldown after using a specific guard literally don't work currently. Yeah so on top of Knight being a shell of his former self he has three (of his five) yellow addons that don't do anything. Groovy.

So here's my question: what even is the point of Public Test Builds if feedback from players is going to be ignored in favor of completely untested changes? Why should we bother giving feedback if features players like are removed and features players dislike (3x guard decay, dumbass AI being considered a "feature" rather than a bug) are considered core gameplay mechanics? And should we be concerned about the inevitable Freddy 3.0 / Skull Merchant 3.0 and the potential Myers 2.0 if Behaviour's grand design for The Knight was to make him better at three-genning and nothing but three-genning?

PLEASE BEHAVIOR BRING BACK PTB KNIGHT, I BEG OF YOU🙏🙏🙏😭btw im a knight main and i was very saddened and disappointed when i found out what state the knight is after ptb. U could also just make each guard have an individual cooldown, without the bug that lets u summon another guard while one is already out. Lets say u miss a survivor as a punishment u need to actually chase and hit the guard and then u can spawn another guard immediately.