Board Thread:Debate of The Week/@comment-28112409-20171002223259/@comment-28859532-20171007213432

Team Mafia

Mafia is the better group since the Coven is just too inconsistent. You can't really kill the first two nights unless you get lucky enough to actually get Potion Master. I didn't mention Poisoner there, because if the town has a Doctor the death can be prevented way more easily than a mafia attack, since the poisoned player gets alerted.

The Coven may have a consistent way of finding out player's role (since CL is always included) but of course that does not go unnoticed, since the player will be notified that they were controlled. In comparison a Consigliere will be relatively unknown since his targets won't get any notification whatsoever. They can also just claim Investigator and mix up the nights they checked the players, since the consig's Investigator results obviously include Investigator in the list, unlike CL who can be easily outed.

The Hex Master, Medusa and Necromancer all just too inconsistent, as i mentioned earlier. The Hex Master can of course be compared to the Arsonist, but unlike the Arso the Hex Master cannot choose when to kill their targets. So if a Hex Master actually manages to hex all the remaining players, the Coven often times have majority already anways, so the only purpose of the Hex Master was to speed up things. Furthermore the Hex Master is just a dead role for most of the game until the very end. This role is just based too much on luck, since the target you just hexed might just get killed by someone else, resulting in a wasted night.

The fact that Medusa can only "alert" 3 times makes her role pretty bad. Sure her target's will might get cleaned but when you actually stone someone in a later stage of the game, the remaining players often know who the stoned person was visiting, since they might be some known TI who said he would check you this night. If you don't wait for situations like that and just stone randomly, you will probably just waste your ability since the odds of someone visiting you by chance are not that high. After the 3 "alerts" this role just becomes useless. Besides that, a Medium can easily out the Medusa by talking to the stoned player.

The Necromancer is also a role that relies a lot on luck. Someone with a useable ability actually has to die, meaning they are 100% useless the first night. Furthermore, most of the time those abilities won't really help the Coven a lot. How does controlling a dead Sheriff really help you for example? There are only a few roles that actually help the Coven, like a Vigilante. But even then those corpses can only be used once, which often times results in the Necromancer just being useless.

The Potion Master might be one of the more useful Coven roles, but he can still only use his potions every 3 days, which is a long cooldown time. Besides that, he will instantly be known if he chooses to kill N1. Mafia in comparison always has the ability to kill N1, so no roles would be revealed there.

The Necromonicon might sounds great at first, but the Coven is just useless until they actually get that. They have no way of killing  (besides the Potion Master) until Night 3 in which timespan the mafia might already have killed 2 players.

The townies have a lot of new strong roles that help them defeat the coven pretty easily. The Psychic will get 1/2 evil player every second night, which might just be enough to kill a coven before they even had a chance to attack. There are 2 new TP roles which makes the job even harder for the Coven.

Overall the Coven doesn't have a real way of deceiving the town or spreading wrong info. The mafia in conparison has roles like the Forger/Framer or Hypnotist who can easily get the town to lynch a from person.

If you take the Coven Expansion Mafia into account, they even have anotehr way to kill. Besides the Mafioso and Godfather they also get the Ambusher, which could potentioally lead to 4 mafia kills before the Coven could even kill 1 person.