ARCANE LOCK versus KNOCK

[tensen]

Knock is after all an extremely specialized spell.
It doesn't even dispel the arcane lock.. only suspend the operation.

A smart wizard word make ample use of this.
Door #1 with arcane lock... leads to inner door with arcane lock.. which leads to whatever they want. As long as they make sure things take sufficient time to deal with.. they can be assured that the knock happy wizard will be trapped by the now reset arcane locks... and has probably used up any memorized version of the spell.


But there are other instances of spells that don't really get better over time. So having arcane lock the way it is, isn't unexpected in the scheme of things.

 

[MerakSpielman]

I think it'd be fun to employ Heighten Spell here. A Knock can only break through an Arcane Lock cast at an equal or lower level than itself. So a 20th level wizard could spend a bit of time using Heighten Spell to prepare a few 20th level Arcane Locks, which would require a wizard who can cast 9th level spells to bypass, and said wizard would have to expend valuable 9th level spell slots to do so.