In another thread, while discussing The Hunter, people brought up how easily the Hunter can prove using his wolf. That isn’t really the purpose of the wolf, so I think it’d be useful to have other ways of bleeding people at night.
However, another idea would be to have ways of faking bleeding / poisoning people at night. And the logical class for that is the Herbalist. Therefore, I suggest that the Herbalist’s Drug ability get improved to let them fake bleeding attacks on others. It’d work as follows:
When you click it and select a target, you get two options - one for making someone think they were bled, and one for making them think they were healed. (If we ever get a way to poison people at night, that could also be an option.)
Fake bleeding is tracked as an actual status ailment and is identical to actual bleeding in every respect except that it doesn’t actually kill you when the time runs out. If you’re healed or fake-healed afterwards, you will get a message saying you were cured as if you were suffering from the real status ailment (fake-healing someone who has been fake-bled changes to only say that it cured you of the ailment, not that you were attacked.) If you reach the point where you would expire, and are not killed that night by something else, you’re informed it was fake instead.
Additionally, fake-healing someone after they’re actually poisoned or bled can produce a cure message for real poison or bleeding. The person thinks they’re safe… but they’re still actually dying.
These things would make it much easier for a Herbalist to fake still being a Physician. They’d also allow the Herbalist to fake being a Hunter, if they wanted (or to help someone else fake being a Hunter, although doing so is more risky.) In theory, a Herbalist could even help someone else fake being a Hunter, then fake being a Physician themselves by healing it the next night.
Possibly, Herbalists could also get a day ability that performs a fake poison / bleeding attack during the day; although that’s not really necessary, faking bleeding attacks during the day could be used to trick the court into thinking they’re facing Cult (at the cost of exposing the existence of a Herbalist once the truth comes out.)
If this makes Herbalist too strong, Defile could be moved to another class (it’s not terribly connected to their previous role mechanically, though it’s an important ability and obviously needs to be present somewhere.)
I don’t think that this would fix the Hunter issue on its own (Herbalists show up too rarely and often become Assassins quite fast, like all converted Unseen), but it would at least help a little bit by preventing a bleed message from being 100% proof of a Hunter. In theory you could let a confirmed evil bleed out to confirm, but that takes several nights.
