Reducing Skull Merchant's Ability to Stalemate Games

NotJared

The most common feedback about Skull Merchant at the moment is that her ability to keep pressure on 3 generators is not only unparalleled, but also extremely uninteractive for Survivors. With the sheer amount of precise information she has, Skull Merchant can focus entirely on throwing all 3 of her drones on generators, protecting and chipping away at them with her life rather than taking (and finishing) chases. If there is not a full team of survivors alive by the last generator to harass her drones, the pressure she can keep on the generators (rather than on survivors in chase) is nearly unbeatable. I don't think this playstyle should be encouraged.

With the reduced cooldowns, increased and resettable exposed timer, doubled battery life, and decoupled Activation and Placement cooldowns, I feel Skull Merchant feels a lot more of a threat to play against. That said, these exact changes have given her too much pressure on keeping survivors off of the last 3 gens.

I think the most impactful change (for worsening her stalemating ability) was decoupling the Placement cooldown from the Reactivation cooldown. With these cooldowns, the Skull Merchant had to be tactical and critically think about which 3 of her 4 drones she wants to keep active at once, while also tactically zoning survivors she's chasing and survivors with Claw Traps into scanning drones to circumvent the activation cooldowns.

(On a side note, I see no point in having drones go into a scan mode at all anymore, since her cooldown is so short and she can recall and replace any drone instantly to circumvent the Activation cooldown, keeping all drones active at all times)

Now that the cooldowns are decoupled, it makes it was too easy and effective to ignore chases completely and only focus on making sure drones are covered on generators at all times. As soon as one is taken down, she can throw another one down and reactivate another one. I think not only is this encouraging a stalemate playstyle, but it is encouraging an unfun playstyle. I think players would find the Skull Merchant much more interactive if she had to focus on taking chases rather than exclusively patrolling gens to make sure her drones are up with no cooldown.

I feel that 60 seconds of exposed is sufficient time enough to create threat and pressure on survivors. The threat of being able to reset 60 seconds of exposed with the press of a button is too oppressive pressure in my opinion, and scaring unconfident Survivors away from interacting with Drones in endgame. I feel that the Lock On progress should not reset to a full 60 seconds when in a drone radius; maybe stop regressing at best.

I feel these changes would make Skull Merchant much more interactive and make her play in ways that give her a kind of pressure that survivor players will find more engaging (using them more in chase rather than waiting at generators).

ProveKa

welcome to drone hack simulator

Nos37

Gen-kick perks are doing most of the... leg work 😉

Remove her ability to use both drones and gen-kick perks to defend gens and she'll be more manageable (for SWF at least)