expert killer is bad because there are roles that can accomplish the same thing that don't make me auto-die as soon as i claimed my role name or nomark sheeted yeti. the way in which it interacts with other roles in a non-standard way makes the game unclear and is unfair to villagers. how is shubaka supposed to explain why his role doesn't work? how am i supposed to prepare for a role that i don't expect to be in the game and have no reason to expect it to be in the game? i don't focus on expanding leadership because there is no reason to expect a kill to bypass 3 types of protection.
the role also only works based on an element of surprise. if i know it's in the game then i never claim my role name or no one else ever talks about their role name. the role is now useless and a waste of space for the most part.
theoretically the trade-off to a village leader should always be that more important roles are not protected. obviously things don't work out that way because as you would have it, smarter players tend to be more valuable than good roles come late game due to situations where you have people who don't know what they're doing or don't make correct choices that a different player would make correctly. i liked mithril's bg role because it added an element of doubt to things. that's good.
i think it's totally fine if you want to go the route of nerfing the village leader so they don't live forever but expert killer is not the way to go. don't put any protection roles in the game. don't put in a BG or limit it from protecting the same person one night. but when i can't counterplay it or have no expectation of it being in the game, then it just removes my agency and makes planning useless.
also there weren't lots of surefire ways to clean people and expand leadership efficiently. this is kind of like sam saying in metagame "yeti add more kids to the sheet" but there were no roles to clean anyone with so we were left to guessing. DLE had a mole role, and there was one alliance checker. role name checker doesn't really mean much because flavor is fairly arbitrary although i admit that it's close. it's totally reasonable that people won't get sheeted quickly or at all due to a lack of real ways to clean people and there definitely weren't. maybe i am a bit of an outlier because i am more paranoid than a lot of ppl on this site, but if you look at my sheet day 2, who on there reasonably deserves the sheet? rssp1? could be wolf.. flyhn? role isn't really proven etc. The person I considered adding the most was kirsche and as we all know that would've been a mistake LOL!
The mafia roles in this game were so brazenly mafia that the Rolecop was basically an alliance check. The tracker is also really strong in a game with no role safeclaims. Empoof dying night 1 was a matter of circumstance, but you were a backup and you could have picked Alliance check if you didn't want to step up. Testing people with the SG and the decoy worked wonders, and HAS cleaned people in this game.
I hate mole roles so I specifically made it so that DLE getting sheet wouldn't inherently damage town because while he won alone his quests were town aligned in the early game. As long as he had protection, he wouldn't in the endgame when suddenly prisoner's dilemma games and redirection crop up at the same time someone discovers Mithril or whatever is town. He would have to fight his way out of that and sheet access was nowhere near guaranteed for him even in the beginning. Outside of that single exception all inspections were reliable.
Putting the protective roles in the game and having an expert killer as opposed to no protection, no Ekiller means that the village gets rewarded for finding the Ekiller. which is an upside I wanted in addition to allowing more protection for other reasons (DLE, every night vig, etc)
You did have agency, and you planned well. While you were alive you scumhunted and negotiated, you lynched and you progressed the general information level of the village.
Ekiller was unclear, but so were a lot of other mafia aligned roles. I firmly believe in having the mafia work in ways town may not expect. People don't expect to have results stolen, or get their kill reversed, or suffer a dictatorship in which you have to take the inspector's word that everyone needs to vote, or having a Safeguard effect have hook flavor, or having a truck pass by them notifying targets that they were the locations of transportation instead of notifying the people that were redirected. But all these things gave you a hint after the first time it happened to you as to what was going on, and the village had the numbers to absorb mistakes. You weren't supposed to be able to guess beforehand whether or not it was in the game, you were supposed to be surprised and afraid when you saw someone important die, and be wary that it might be you next if you talk to the wrong person. You talk about traditional balance being WIFOM protection but in practice other people really just don't get involved or learn about the game at all.
Plus I made the design parallel RWBY mafia as closely as possible. My faction there had a Decoy-BG combo and Ozpin had an Expert killer to get around it. There was precedent, even in the result shubaka got that others could relate to.
I don't really get what making it hookable does either. If a hooker got Nico they would have seen she was too skilled and then Nico gets quicklynched lmao.shub was supposed to be a regular martyr as I've said and that would have done the same thing.
I don't think in context it's "inherently unbalanced", however it is unfun for the person that gets killed and I am sorry about that.
