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Skull Merchant, from Completely Worthless to Speed Queen

DragonMasterDarren
DragonMasterDarren Member Posts: 2,845
edited April 2023 in General Discussions

My thoughts on Skull Merchant were, to put it nicely, not exactly very great, to stop myself from going on a multi page rant, I'll sum up my (many) problems with her

  1. Skull Merchant is visually unimpressive, she looks way too similar to a Apex character
  2. Her lore is a complete fustercluck that spends more time on her childhood then explaining why she has her power and where she got them from
  3. Her animations are hilariously bad, ranging from just the default animations, to recycled animations from other killers, to her absurd walk cycle (Which doesn't match with her movement speed even closely)
  4. SM's power was useless in basically every category that it covers, the tracking was worthless due to her being a 115% with no map mobility, her insta-down was worthless due to taking too long to set up, her stealth is worthless due to how long it takes to trigger and the fact that survivors can see the radius in which she's Undetectable, her drones were also completely useless against survivors that stayed Injured the whole match and just did gens, it was useful for only one thing, and that was stalling matches for literal hours unless survivors gave up

I say all of this as someone who played her on the PTB, and as someone who played her in live servers and got so viscerally upset I stopped playing the game for a month, but, most importantly, as someone who goddamn adores Sci-Fi as a genre, and wanted our first Sci-Fi killer to be something truly special, and what I got instead was a knock-off Crypto with the personality of a used napkin and the enjoyability of a 10 hour long video of watching paint dry on quarter speed.

I was fully ready to just say "######### this" and write her off as a complete failure, In fact, not only did I write her off as a complete failure, I was in such a petty and angry mood that I used her basic concept of "CEO/Hunter who wouldn't know what the word "Morales" means if it slapped her in the face" as the base concept for the villain of a story I'm writing, I took a well needed break from DBD and went and worked on other things

Then, 6.6.2 came out, I was still not playing the game, In fact I was busy with a lot of other things, I just get home from a weekend of visiting family abroad, and because I'm not-so-secretly a Masochist, I picked up Skull Merchant

And y'know what, She's pretty alright now

The Haste she gets from tracking survivors not only makes her power actually usable in chase, it lets her get some hits from a surprising distance, it cuts the amount of time she has to spend chasing down substantially, and it makes her addons, which were easily the best part of her kit before her buffs (much to my chagrin because a useless power should not be made up with amazing Addons), actually really really good (Geographical Readout and Randomised Strobes, my beloveds).

I've been playing SM in a mix of the old "Place drones on gens" strat and using my last drone to aggressively shut down loops and gain Haste, I love it, I can keep a eye on 3 gens while simultaneously using my last one to go super fast, manually removing it as soon as the survivor leaves, probably not the best way to play her, but I actually goddamn enjoy playing a killer i legit think was a mistake and should have been removed not a few months earlier.

That being said, she still has problems

  1. Her stealth is still crap on anything that isn't a Indoor map, remove survivor's ability to see the bright lights of drones that are in Scouting Mode and outside of the Active Mode radius and it immediately becomes a lot better
  2. I'd like having her Radar be passive and not have to be manually looked at, a small addon on the HUD, I can live without it, but it would be quite nice
  3. Fix her walk cycle for ######### sake, speed up her steps a bit, SM looks like she's skating on Ice, not walking on dirt
  4. Maybe give her a basekit Bloodhound against Injured survivors that are being tracked or have a Claw Trap? That'd be nice, the Haste does help make her power useful against injured survivors but I'd like a bit more, nothing crazy, just a bit of easier tracking would be greatly appreciated

That and I'm not a fan of this pattern of releasing killers with underwhelming powers and then fixing them by making them run faster a few patches later, Haste is nice, but the more you use it the less special it'll be and the more obvious the fact that it's a (admittedly very nice) band-aid fix. I'd rather killers release with fun powers that don't need a immediate buff thanks.

I'm not going to apologise for anything I said regarding Skull Merchant before today, but y'know what? I'm going to be a lot nicer to her in the future

G'Night



Skull Merchant Hooked on You DLC When?