tl;dr version
- Knight Shields are fine, just use Eldar Holofield for the proper wording and the crossfire exception.
- Bravery is not necessary but if kept, +1 to any engage is fine for simplicity
- 2DC is a big change and invalidates a lot of testing and a bit of pain on the actual table, but it is conceptually simpler and probably also closer to how new Knight rules for 40k would work.
- Work should procede, with the proviso that if new GW rules do come out, we may have to throw some of it away.
In no particular order.
2DC KnightsI sit the fence. By my personal reckoning, Knights are precisely the sort of units which should be 2DC. Much like the Tau Riptide and the new Eldar Wraithknight, they are big and bulky enough to warrant being more than just 1DC, and given GW's current rules for such large units, it's almost certain they will have substantially more Wounds/Hullpoints than something like a Leman Russ or Land Raider, but not so many as a Baneblade or Renevant Titan.
But I do agree with Markconz that book keeping for so many different war engines is kind of a pain, and would kind of prefer not to. It is conceptually simpler than ATSKNF/Might, but actually more complicated on the table between keeping wound markers vs blast markers and rolling criticals for every hit. I do like that it would give them a little extra resilience against non-BM damage, but I don't have a good feel for how much this would change their overall effectiveness. The potential tipping factor for me is simply that if they did go to 2DC, the list would definitely be back to Experimental and not simply Development, as that's a pretty big change to core list mechanics.
Bravery I'd be fine with just making it +1 to engage actions. The times when formation size would not matter are small enough that it's worth the simplicity. That said, I'd also be fine with just dropping the rule entirely. The 1.3 list does not have it, and while flavorful, it's clearly not inherently necessary.
Knight ShieldsI think the existing Knight Shield rule is the right idea, but needs some cleaning up. I'd probably steal wording from Eldar Holofields, which is the closest equivalent, and add the appropriate wording to prevent it from being used against Crossfire attacks. I would also approve of dropping the need to make a separate save for each point of damage, just for simplicity's sake.
New GW Knight RulesAs for GW's potential impending release of new Knights, this is a tough one for me.
On one hand, the rumors are at best rather vague, and GW's notorious for not finishing supposed projects or not releasing/delaying ones that that are done in order to better fit their business needs. Which means that it could be months to "never" for actual release of official Knights. I would hate to sit around just waiting because the internet phone-game says "in a month or two now" for years on end. Just like no one is proposing that all work on previous versions of Epic stop, just because there's a possibility that GW is doing a new game in a box set that might be called Epic.
The flip side is that I am the sort who
REALLY REALLY REALLY hates it when two sets of rules that supposedly represent the same thing get drastically out of sync. If new Knight models, fluff and rules did come out tomorrow, I'd want the Epic lists changed to match them as soon as possible given the available resources to make changes and test them. For better or worse, it is GW's universe, and if they change the fluff and general mechanics, then a game that purports to live in that universe should not be picking and choosing and selectively ignoring newer information just because it's inconvenient. Especially when the previous versions of those rules or stories are literally decades old and no longer quite fit in with current canon.
In the past you had to give at least some lip service to the available models, but between the rise of third party 6mm manufacturers, the growing quality and availability of 3d sculpting and printing, and the fact that GW has washed their hands of supporting epic miniatures in any way, you pretty much can't use that as an excuse to not keep Epic rules up to date with 40k fluff. If people want models for an army, they'll find (or make) appropriate proxies. And EA in particular has a fairly long history of using old models to "count as" for newer unit rules, so it goes both ways and the argument that it invalidates people's collections is likewise pretty weak.
