# Warrior Knight Strain

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## Abstract

Create a T2 caste/strain that can actually fight in the frontlines, without becoming overwhelmingly strong like a T3.

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## Goals

1. Allow a non-T3 caste frontline fighting.
- Currently, the frontline of xenos vs marines features such a massive amount of suppressing fire and explosive support that it is basically impossible for anything but a T3 or maybe a Defender (supportively) to fight in the open without risking inmediate death. Speaking of..
2. Fill the Defender Caste with frontliners.
- Right now, the tree goes frontliner t1 - sideliner t2- frontliner t3.
- Warriors are NOT capable of frontline combat, they have no mobility, no stun defences, no ranged attacks. This is perfectly fine in a vacuum, as they have many other strengths, but it leaves the caste tree with a sorely needed lack of front fighters in the T2 slot.
3. Add a strain focused on defence.
- Out of all the combat capable castes, the vast majority are just as good pushing out as they are defending. There's some exceptions, but it mostly holds true. By creating a strain that's most powerful on defense, it helps limit its aggressive and thus steamroll potential without weakening it on its intended role, and adds an interesting and unique limiter.

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## Non-goals

1. Create another sideliner.
- The whole point of this strain is to be a fighter on the frontlines. If it ends up being a caste that's significantly stronger and more usable in the sideline like base Warrior, it will have fundamentally failed in its goal to create a front fighter. All strong frontliners are, to a degree, powerful in the sideline, but even so. This doesn't mean it won't be worth introducing, if only as an unique playstyle, but it would be a failure in this goal.
2. Overpower all other possible castes on the front.
- Stacking Knights should not be so overwhelmingly strong that it completely or partially nullifies the existence of T3s and any other castes on the front. This would reduce variety, not increase it.

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## Content

Abilities

## Passive: Sweeper
1. Tail Stab is replaced with Tail Trip. After a shorter windup, you may trip a marine, stunning them for half a second.
- The Knight's first ability is already a stronger version of Tail Stab. I didn't want to just remove Tail Stab outright as it'd feel like a weird outlier, so instead Knight has a small microstun for maneuvering.
Actives:
## Pike
- Deal slash damage to the 3 tiles in front of you with a cyan telegraph. Deal bonus damage the more targets you hit at once.
- When enhanced, the last telegraph will be silver colored, and targets there count for double bonus damage. Additionally, successfully attacking someone with this silver tile will halve the cooldown on the ability.
- The main ability. It's intended to harass the front from a range that's not far enough it can't be punished, but not so close it's a detriment to utilize.
- The bonus damage is just a small bonus I coded on a whim, the ability is not centered around it and I doubt stacking marines like kebab will see too much use.
- The enhanced Pike is intended to strongly buff the Knight's defending capability in a way that's very satisfactory to pull off, and is reasonably well telegraphed for marines so they can position themselves accordingly: Either far back or in front and it can't do much against you.
## Bulwark
- Reduce bullet damage by 20% unless it's directly aimed at your sprite. (Like the XM88) Other damagetypes (currently) unaffected.
- Reduction increased to 40% when enhanced.
- Grants 1 protection from knockdown stuns, 2 if enhanced.
- This ability is primarily meant to allow the Knight to fight in the front without losing all of its health to Suppressive Fire. Additionally, if marines do learn and focus on it, it will be able to draw attention from other T3s, almost like a tank.
- This doesn't make the Knight invincible, far from it. Sprite clicks will deal the same amount of damage, and they aren't that hard to aim when you're focusing on it directly.
- The clarity knockdown resistance, similarly, is meant to let them fight without instantly collapsing to one person with heavy m44. Due to the rest of their abilities not having much crowd control, it shouldn't be overpowering. Additionally, it is telegraphed by having the shield icon up, rather than invisible like Boxer's iteration had it.
## Leap
- Leap up to 4 tiles away, passing through friendlies but stopping and slashing enemies, without stun.
- When leaping into an enemy in an L-shape (like chess), they will be stomped on, shortly stunned and slashed, effects doubled if enhanced.
- This ability will help the Knight fight on the frontlines without dealing with or causing too much bodyblocking and interference of T3 lanes.
- Additionally, it serves as a useful stun and engaging tool, of which the Knight comparatively lacks otherwise that allows it some degree of strength against lone or duo marines without being as strong as any base Warrior stunning ability.
- I'm still undecided on how strong the chess jump should be, and how much it should be buffed when enhanced.
## Create Holdfast
- Cough up a Holdfast Node, a recovery node that can weakly heal, but primarily serves as a node that will enhance the Knight's abilities when it's near (8* tiles of range)
- The intention with this ability is to strengthen the Knight's defensive strength (And sieging, I suppose) significantly while ensuring it isn't overpowering in offense, by only allowing its strongest abilities near a node.

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# Alternatives

## Tail trip
- Tail trip is not exactly a necessary ability, but i feel it would be too redundant to have the base stab, and strange to remove it entirely.
- Additionally I believe the microstun would be interesting to play around with, but I am open to any changes possible.
### Alternatives:
#### Rework the tail ability into Pike.
As an alternative, this would basically transplant Pike and its special enhanced feature to Tail Stab. It would lose the funny bonus feature and the cool cyan and silver telegraph, and be more versatile in range, but would most likely be harder to aim as it'd require a sprite click, which is HARD to do in the frontlines where Pike is intended to be exhaustively used. Plus, it might be unintuitive since tail stab is an 'extra' ability in most castes that would be made front and center in this one.
#### Remove it outright.
Against this, simply because of how it means Knight won't have a tail stab, making it an awkward outlier.
#### Revert to normal stab.
This would make it very redundant with Pike, as they have very very similar attributes, and there would be no reason to utilize it, ever.
## Pike
- Pike would be difficult to replace. Its function as a frontline harasser and damage dealer is pretty straightforward and the rest of the kit is effectively built around it. Since I do not think it can easily be replaced, I will skip over its alternatives.
## Bulwark
- Bulwark's design is meant to let the Knight soak suppressive fire, and cause marines to focus fire on it, drawing attention from other more dangerous castes. Effectively, it's what allows the Knight to participate in the front.
### Alternatives:
#### Bulwark grants a powerful but temporary shield that stuns the Knight if prematurely broken.
The original design, this was redesigned into the current Bulwark after feedback. Said feedback talked about how shield is overused, lame to fight, the filler ability, and how the dev team isn't going to be looking into merging any shield abilities any time soon. I actually agreed with these points, so I don't think it would be a good idea to revert this.
#### Remove entirely, significantly strengthen Knight's stats.
I don't like this at all! It would effectively mean making Knight a lite-t3, and that would just be weird. I much prefer Knight being a T2 'pretending' at being as mighty as a T3 with its temporary shield than it being significantly stronger than its brethren by default. Additionally, it would simply be strange to fight, as a Warrior with a slightly different sprite would be inordinately tanky.
## Leap
- Leap is meant to be utilized primarily as a quick and easy repositioning tool, allowing the Knight to leap over friendlies to not block them or infringe on their space.
- As a secondary use, it can weakly stun marines or enemy xenos and damage them by leaping onto them in an L-shape. While this may sound stupid and memey, I genuinely do think it adds a very interesting and refreshing depth to the skill, allowing good Knights to really show off their power level. If Boxer's concept was able to get in, I don't see the issue here.
- Any alternatives would need to take the following into consideration: Knight needs to: Not bodyblock other T3s, have some way to reposition away from stuns quickly, and preferably some form of secondary stun. I think Leap is perfect as-is, so I cannot really think of any alternatives.
## Holdfast node
- The most complicated and perhaps unnecessary ability, it serves these functions: Allow the Knight to be a very powerful defendant but not a massive power multiplier when aggressing. Creates a VERY weak recovery node for other xenomorphs to huddle around (Flavor!). Adds a very unique and interesting mechanic, giving a combat caste the ability to build something.
- Take this into consideration if you think it shouldn't heal: It heals three health every 6 seconds. It is comedically weak. Effectively, it's just flavor!
#### Replace with: An ability that lets it jump to a crit xenomorph, shielding it and soaking damage for it.
- This was recommended to me, and while I think it's a very interesting idea, it doesn't fit my intention of what Knight should be. It shouldn't be such a passive supportive role, in my eyes, but rather an aggressive one. It might be better fit as a sentinel strain or new T2.

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## Potential Changes

### What could go wrong:
- Too powerful.
- - That's fine, we can tune it during testmerging.
- Too weak.
- - As above.
- Better as a sideliner.
- - As stated, this would be a failure in its goals, though even so it would be an interesting addition just to change things up.
- Cannot, at all, be made powerful in the frontline without becoming overwhelmingly overpowered.
- - This is a very possible outcome, and a very sad and sobering one. It would mean that it is NOT possible, whatsoever, to let a T2 fight in the main... fight of the game. This would point to a huge flaw that needs revision within frontline combat, but there is not much that can be done about that in a strain PR.
- Not fun to play.
- - I sincerely doubt this! The abilities are very neat to mess around with even in localhost. I trust people will enjoy this strain as they have Globber, Vampire, Impaler.
- Not fun to fight.
- - A tricky question, as it forces one to ask. What *is* fun to fight? And the answer is, there is no way in hell this is somehow worse to fight than normal Warrior, which stalls pushes, idles around corners with its two stuns and a slow with very short cd. It cannot secure kills as it has no fling, cannot juggle a marine even CLOSE to the level a base Warrior can as its stuns are a 0.5s sprite-click-click-delay tail trip and a 0.5-1s move that needs careful positioning. Thus, I don't see this being an issue.
- Too powerful in numbers.
- - This is going to be a very hard issue to diagnose, because testmerges are ONLY done in bursts which means everyone is desperately trying to test out the new strain. This means everyone goes Knight, everyone is effectively doing a low form of coordination in going Xeno, not going marine, piling on as a single caste and ramming its strengths into the marines.
- - To fix the above, either make the testmerge long-lasting, or just let the wave ride by and ignore complaints until it's fully merged, then look into it if it continues to be an issue.
- Fundamentally does not fit CM.
- - Why? Boxer did. Dancer does. *Impaler* does. How would this fit worse than a starcraft enemy?
- Chess move is too goofy.
- - Again. Boxer! In real gameplay, it wouldn't be goofy, but instead a careful and enjoyable footsies-like interplay between the Knight trying to link up a pounce and the marine moving around to ensure that does not happen.
- Knight is too fast/too slow/too durable/not tanky enough/weak slashes
- - These are simple stat tunes. Preferably the stats would make Knight a slower, tankier Warrior, but any changes are open for discussion.

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