My take on Knight changes

Feedback/Suggestions
#1

So I know a lot has been thrown around about Knight, and it is possible for knight to play well, but what is the “optimal” play at the moment is just not guarding at all and waiting. Not there is nothing wrong with being methodical about your guarding, but there is no tension with throwing your life away and potentially a second if you guard a possessor target, mostly because he has an infinite use guarding ability.

I think limiting guard, down to maybe 3 or 4, would be a positive change for Knight. This forces Knights to think a little more about who they guard rather than spam on King.

I think an additional change that could prove to make Knight feel more rewarding, is that sacrifice literally becomes a guarding ability, and Knight works like Merc, where he prevents visits, rather than killing himself. Knight should still be vulnerable to direct instances, but he prevents all visits to the target.

#2

No, Bodyguard is stronger than preventing visits, but making the guards have a secondary affect and giving them limited charges is a pretty good idea.

#3

I think limiting guard, down to maybe 3 or 4, would be a positive change for Knight. This forces Knights to think a little more about who they guard rather than spam on King.

I don’t like this suggestion because I’m afraid it would solve nothing. Many players feel the pressure to use an ability every night. If you limit their Sacrifice uses, all you’ll likely accomplish is that those players will use all their guards the first few nights and then, if they’re lucky enough to survive, they’ll continue with no guards left.
I do agree with you that spamming guards at random is not the optimal play, but that’s down to the player to understand and choose. I don’t think it’s such a bad play that it warrants a limitation.

I think an additional change that could prove to make Knight feel more rewarding, is that sacrifice literally becomes a guarding ability, and Knight works like Merc, where he prevents visits, rather than killing himself. Knight should still be vulnerable to direct instances, but he prevents all visits to the target.

If the Knight no longer kills themselves by guarding, there is no more reason not to spam the ability.
Also if you still kill the attacker I feel like the ability would be too strong. There are already a lot of abilities that protect from kills, I don’t think the game needs yet another that blocks kills with no drawbacks.

#4

Many players feel the pressure to use an ability every night. If you limit their Sacrifice uses, all you’ll likely accomplish is that those players will use all their guards the first few nights and then, if they’re lucky enough to survive, they’ll continue with no guards left

This could all be down to a player change needed, but I think this moves to the right direction for helping people understand that sacrifice is not something to just be wasted. Hunter is a character we also limit his protective ability, which to be fair if it was unlimited he’d be vastly overpowered, but I feel protective killing abilities should be limited in general due to their powerful effects.

If the Knight no longer kills themselves by guarding, there is no more reason not to spam the ability.
Also if you still kill the attacker I feel like the ability would be too strong. There are already a lot of abilities that protect from kills, I don’t think the game needs yet another that blocks kills with no drawbacks.

I can see the reasoning here, but we really don’t have any protecting abilities at the moment. Prince jail, but that also serves as an occupy, Ice Wall (which was just removed) and Hide from fool, and Merc/sellsword guard. None of which grant the ability to target anyone.
I definitely don’t think it should kill the attacker. I wasn’t clear there, so my apologies. All it would do is prevent them from visiting, and it prevents ALL checks on them. Meaning Knight is wasting BD’s time if they try to check that player.

All of this is rendered pointless though. They have Knight one night of immunity with Sacrifice.

#5

I don’t understand what this suggestion is trying to accomplish.

I think limiting guard, down to maybe 3 or 4, would be a positive change for Knight. This forces Knights to think a little more about who they guard rather than spam on King.

How does it accomplish that? Why is that desirable? You seem to want kings to have less reliable protection early on, but I’m not certain that that would really improve the game, and I definitely don’t think it would actually make knights deeper or more interesting to play (in practice, being able to only defend a few nights would leave knights with fewer decisions to make, not more, because on most nights they would do nothing.) If your goal is to make knights more fun to play, encouraging them to frequently do nothing is an… interesting way of doing it.

Mindlessly spamming defense on the king (outside of the first few nights, when it absolutely serves an important game design purpose by discouraging people from killing the king as soon as the game begins) is a terrible way to play a knight and isn’t encouraged by the current mechanics at all, since you don’t actually know if the king is on your side or not.

I think an additional change that could prove to make Knight feel more rewarding, is that sacrifice literally becomes a guarding ability, and Knight works like Merc, where he prevents visits, rather than killing himself. Knight should still be vulnerable to direct instances, but he prevents all visits to the target.

At this point it feels like you just dislike the entire concept of knights and want to replace them with a totally unrelated class.

Anyway, this feels like a bad suggestion that isn’t even trying to accomplish anything desirable. The basic protective abilities serve a vital purpose in the game by discouraging killers from going after “obvious” targets; it feels like this suggestion isn’t really considering the important roles that knights play in the meta.

If your goal is to make “predict when people will attack” part of the strategy required to play a knight, I just don’t see what it adds when they already have “predict who is going to be attacked” as a defining feature. In practice this would make it feel more random and would encourage killers to risk potshots at obvious targets more freely, which I don’t think would lead to interesting games.