Riddle me this
How is it that Skull Merchant, a killer with who it isn't uncommon to always have atleast one person on your radar and thus always having a 3% or more speedboost is considert a weak killer who's only option is to guard 3 gens cause her chase power is so abysmall while a 3% haste bonus for survivors turns them into uncatchable monsters?
That seems like a very odd contradiction. Is MfT overrated? Or is Skull Merchant underrated? What is the source of these mixed messages we are sending to the devs?
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I don't have the energy to explain it to them either.
You'd think all of these things would be obvious but they don't even play the killer enough to find out.
Post edited by Rizzo on16 -
I know.
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I play 75/25 killer/survivor
Including skull merchant so no matter how this goes, I'll win
The beauty of playing both sides
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I play both sides too.
Play more killer.
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Because she is sacrificing entire chase power other killers have to that one 3% movement speed.
If we had a perk that buffs killer speed for 3%, maybe while a survivor is hooked or something? would be broken af, even if it stops you from regression or anything like that.
Look at clown, his entire power is fully slowdown and haste, and the number is ridiculously big, even then he will be considered weak killer because survivor's basekit capability of utilizing pallet, windows, smaller hitboxes and existing at four place at once is that strong.
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Skull Merchant can be good at chasing if you run Readout and Strobes since the speed differences are quite large then combined with the basekit Haste boosts. Otherwise, she can force you away from loops with drones and get speedboosts here and there but at the end of the day she’s still an m1 killer. That 3% speedboost doesn’t make her OP because that’s basically all she has in terms of chase power, and overall I would say it’s more limited than MfT as it often only activates for a few seconds at a time if survivors aren’t regularly taking claw traps. If they are, it’s likely because the Skull Merchant is 3-genning, which the devs have acknowledged as an issue that they are looking to change both with a general anti-3-gen solution as well as a Skull Merchant update.
A survivor running 3% faster while injured affects any killer and the killer roster as a whole isn’t balanced around that kind of thing existing and especially not 110 killers (tbf, Spirit can get around it easily but the others can’t). It’s a perk that mainly punishes m1 killers and killers that aren’t high mobility, while the S tiers (especially Blight and Spirit) hardly notice it because they’re so fast that they catch you anyways. Whereas Skull Merchant getting Haste as part of her power is isolated only to her and she was deliberately given that as a buff intended to make her better at chasing - the devs said themselves that she wasn’t strong enough in chase prior to her buff. The speedboost also isn’t even the only effect that MfT has; you could remove either one of its two effects and it would still be a strong perk.
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SM has no real chase power beyond that, besides making herself undetectable inside her drones or addon buffs.
And for starters, youre dealing with 4 survivors, even one taking a bit longer to catch can greatly hinder your chances of winning the match, if not outright lose you the match.
And the most important fact, hitboxes, Survivors have a smaller hitbox than the killer, which makes them able to run around loop tighter than the killer, which means that a haste buff is quite significant for them.
Besides, MFT can be paired with other perks, most notably, Resilience which makes vaults fasters, making the chases way stronger for them, then we can also add other Haste effects, such has Hope or Blood Pact, and the survivors is essentially impossible to catch.
Made for This is just a horribly designed perk that punishes M1 killers greatly, and 110% even more, specially Trickster.
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I wouldnt consider Skully a weak killer. She is in a good spot.
Same to "Mad(e) For This". It is strong in the right hands against certain killers (e.g. M1 Killers or Bubba). I still wouldnt call it OP and I hope it stays the way it is.
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Isn't it kinda contradictory to say the 3% speedbuff doesn't matter as much for skullmerchant cause she doesn't have a chase power and then say the 3% makes a enormous difference for survivors against killers who don't have a chase power?
Not to mention that the 3% of skull merchant is bigger then survivors 3% cause of the higher base speed
Skullmerchant gets 0.138 extra meters per second while survivors 0.12
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0.6+0.138=0.738 and 0.6-0.12=0.48, it's 13.550 seconds(0.738), 16,6 seconds(0.6) and 20.833 seconds(0.48) for 10 meter straight line I think, the difference is 3.05 seconds and 4.233 seconds for each.
To me it seems survivors being faster having more impact if we just look at numbers, idk why.
Is it even correct numbers?
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ppl forget Survivors have a smaller hitbox and can run loops a LOT tighter so 3% can make a difference. Not everygame or on every loop but its good. And SM is meh because all she has is guarding gens and getting kinda build in bloodlust, which is good to get hits but if players play safe it wont help you when your power only makes u faster. But there are way too many points to what makes a power "good".
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Yeah those numbers are correct i think.
Math is weird like that, in general reducing something has more impact then increasing.
Kinda like to combat the 20% debuff from mangled you need 25% bonus healing speed. I guess it's something simular to that
Yet if we put them together then you close the 10m in 16.2ish seconds. About half a second sooner then normal
It's pretty weird how in terms of impact the reduction of chasing speeds wins over the increase when looked at seperatly but the increase wins out when put together
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I still stand by the fact that on it's own, the 3% Haste is nothing. Combined with other Haste effects, yes, it can be too much and I do think there needs to be a cap to Haste effects, but on it's own 3% is pretty weak and I've had no issue with it as killer.
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The forums aren’t exactly crawling with null merchant defenders
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Is skull merchant weak? According to NightLight she has the higest killrate(tho its just community stats). Speed in any form is very impactful, a year ago during our little cheating epidemic it was basically universally agreed that a cheater giving themselves a tiny bit more speed(3%) was game changing and incredibly strong/dare I say unfair.
Idk why with made for this its all of a sudden okay to be a thing. More importantly this is yet another perk that just punishes the weaker killers in the roster far more so than the stronger ones, this was a problem with DH too(which for some unholy reason can be combo'd with made for this to great effect btw). I understand the desire to want "strong" perks for the side you play more but by creating perks like this the meta suffers by narrowing down killer choices. Playing very m1 centric killers against 4 decent players running something like made for this + dh is miserable.
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Skull merchant’s haste is undoubtedly useful but going by your logic clown, pinhead and Freddy are all absolute monsters.
Haste on survivors is more useful due to the hitbox being smaller making tight looping even stronger
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Oh no, not TRICKSTER!
I will continue to use Made for This with a smile on my face.
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Because 3% on a killer vs 3% for each survivor is a big difference
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Lets put i this way.
- Average killer's movement speed is 4.6 m/s
- Survivors movement speed is 4.0 m/s
- The difference between them is 0.6/ m/s
Now, if a survivor gets a 3% movement speed buff, they will then move at 4.12 m/s. This makes the difference between the killer and survivor 0.48 m/s
If a killer gets a 3% movement speed buff, they will then move at 4.72 m/s (percentage movement effects go off base movement speed of 4.0 m/s) This makes the difference between them 0.72 m/s.
Now, if we have a hypothetical killer chase an injured survivor starting at 32 meters, and pretend they run in an infinite straight line with these movement speed differences, how long will it take the killer to catch this survivor?
0.6 m/s - 43.3 seconds
0.48 m/s - 54.16 seconds
0.72 m/s - 36.1 seconds
The 3% movement speed on the killer saves 7 seconds, but on the survivor it saves 11 seconds. This is due to the nature of how the DIFFERENCES in movement speed work out. Which is far more important than the absolute movement speed between the two. Movement speed stacks in a diminishing way with itself, such that, every 1% extra movement speed gained, is weaker than the previous 1% movement speed gained. And since killers start out at 115%, 3% movement speed is weaker than a survivor that starts out at 100%.
Now, this is actually the WORST case scenario and still favors the survivor. The big thing to keep in mind is in the terms of looping. Because the hitbox of a survivor is actually much smaller than that of a killer, they can run loops tighter than them, so they actually REDUCE the difference in movement speed more when they loop tightly.
I don't actually know what this difference is, because the sizes of the exact hitboxes aren't known (as far as i know, but if someone has them, please let me know and we can do the math on them.)
But anyway, because of these hitbox sizes, the difference in movement speed while staying the same, the survivors have to travel less distance around a loop than a killer does. Thinking like a circular racetrack
I threw this together in paint so it isn't exact, but imagine these are perfect circles:
Blue is the survivor
Red is the killer
Black is a rock.
In order to go around the rock, the survivor has to travel less distance than the killer because their hitbox is smaller. So if you increase a survivors movement speed by 3% in this case, it is a big big difference, whereas if you are increasing the killer's movement speed by 3%, it doesn't make as big of a difference because they still have to loop around it in a "longer" path because of the size of their hitbox.
Really look at the difference between a 110% killer like huntress and a 115% killer like trapper. Average size of a map is around 10k meters squared. So if we take that as a perfect square the map is 100 x 100 meters. So traveling in a straight line from one end of the map to the other is 100 meters, how long does it take each killer to travel that distance?
Huntress = 22.7 seconds
Trapper = 21.7 seconds
Not much of a difference right? Because the difference in movement speeds between these 2 killers isn't actually that significant. But try looping a survivor around a tight rock as huntress, and then again as trapper (not using their powers) and see how much longer it takes you to hit the survivor as the huntress than the trapper.
Now for fun, lets look at these different movement speeds and how long it takes them to run in a straight line of 100 meters.
110% (huntress) = 22.7
115% (trapper) = 21.7 seconds
118% (SM with 1 stack) = 21.18 seconds
100% (survivor) = 25 seconds
103% (made for this) = 24.27 seconds
You can see there that the difference between the trapper and SM (where SM is 3% faster) is .52 seconds, around half a second. Whereas the difference between the base survivor and one with made for this is 0.73 seconds. We can conclude that the 3% from made for this for a survivor is actually around 40% more powerful than the 3% gained by skull merchant. Again, this is because the multiplicative nature of the movement speeds makes it so the 1% gained at 101% movement speed, is actually more impactful than 1% gained at say, 151% if the killer was moving at 150%. Each 1% is weaker than the last.
So, to conclude, to compare skull merchants movement gains to made for this, skull merchant actually needs 4.25% movement speed to be around as powerful as made for this. And again, this only factors in that straight line, not factoring in looping around a rock/hitboxes. Which i think would make it significantly more. Again, if someone has the numbers for the hitbox sizes we could calculate this out, and it would be an interesting exercise. But anecdotally. I'd say you would probably need around 7.5% more movement speed to make up that looping difference. Because PWYF doesn't feel like it does at 1 stack, but it does at 2 stacks. But again, that is just based on feelings and not actual math.
Post edited by Reinami on15 -
Nightlight is a 3rd party service, so there is no telling how that works out. But given the nature of the community, more people DC or intentionally hook suicide to get out of the match when playing against SM than say a trapper, so i wouldn't trust those numbers much.
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It's a combination of both, though I do think trying to strictly compare the same speed boost between survivor and killer - especially only one killer - is gonna be inherently a little misleading.
Skull Merchant is wildly underrated, and Made For This is being exaggerated pretty noticeably as it's the hot topic right now. That doesn't mean there's nothing wrong with either of them, but both things are currently being inflated in their severity by most posters on the forum.
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Agree with a lot of this, but one small correction: Haste is calculated based on the character's base movement speed at any given point, not a static 4.0 meters per second. A survivor's base speed when running is 4.0 m/s, but a 4.6 m/s killer with a multiplicative haste will receive a slightly higher movespeed boost than a survivor running at 4.0 m/s, because you're multiplying the haste buff by their base movespeed, which is higher than a survivor's. Similarly, Blight's 9.2 m/s rush speed receives double the extra speed than a 4.6 m/s killer.
Just wanted to let you know, because it does affect your math, if negligibly.
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Skull Merchant only gets that haste if a survivor has a clawtrap, not just because they are tracked. Survivors are rarely in the a situation outside of totem and gen defense playstyles where survivors actually are forced to interact with her drones in any meaningful way. That means she's actually quite gated on her buff it isn't by any means omnipresent and it's timed. It goes away when the clawtrap runs out of power and can be forcibly stopped if a survivor vaults a pallet. Made For This is a free 3% for the killer just attempting to play the game with you normally and stacks with other haste perks. Skull Merchant actually isn't really allowed to stack haste like that. She gets whatever effect is higher and that's about it. She'd need to have all four survivors with clawtraps and her movement speed addon to be really fast, but that's highly unlikely to ever happen. Made For This is guaranteed to happen because if it didn't happen then that means you were much better in chase than the killer or hiding in which case you didn't need it to begin with.
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As some one who plays a good bit of Trickster, Sprint Burst hurts him MUCH more than MFT
You don't really want to go for chases you know you cant win to begin with, MFT just makes Survivors at their strongest a bit stronger which is in the middle of a dense area. As Trickster you want to get a hit or even a down before their able to reach that area, and while MFT certainly helps a bit with that, but Sprint Burst is undoubtedly better at screwing him over since they can run behind cover before he even has a chance.
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I would say it is the same as windows vs zanshin tactics. The reason windows is miles better than zanshin is because survivors control the flow of the chase. 3% on SM can be frustrating for survivor but you can avoid that 3% from doing anything significant. If a survivor having 3% haste makes the loop +1 then the killer doesn't have agency in that situation. If the killer has +3% haste the survivor can pre-throw the pallet and there isn't anything punishing from doing that if the killer goes for chases. So SM removing pallets faster at times just enhances her 3-gen potential rather than letting her do chases well.
Now we can look at survivor and what 3% can do for them. You can pre-leave and make the killer take longer to remove that distance. You can hug small objects in dead zones to waste more time because of the hitbox difference. Certain tiles are going to be +1. Pallet stuns are more punishing to killer. Sometimes being able to go 2 tiles over instead of 1. Along with timings for killer being changed. Now add that on top of the problem with hope and the extra endurance the perk gets. Feels like power creep and adding more frustration to the game.
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There are SOOOOOO many points to adress... 😴
First: The whole game is designed around the survivor running 4.0m/s and killers running 4.4m/s (ranged) or 4.6m/s (m1). Survivors could run 5.0m/s and killers 5.4m/s and 5.6m/s and we would still have the same situation: killers are faster than survivors by a small margin (0.4 and 0.6), what makes then catch up to survivor when running through a straight line. That why survivors use windows and pallets to counter killers, because on pure mov speed, survivors are weakers than killers (and must be, on a 1vs4 game)
But something changes when survivors starts to be 4.12m/s : killers need to spend more time to get to survivors, because, their relative speed (when compared to survivors) is slower, which means LONGER CHASES, potentially, AGAINST EVERY SURVIVOR. The base difference of speed goes to 0.28 and 0.48, making chases 20% longer just because of Made for THIS.
Giving a survivor or a killer a speed boost is something strong and will be stronger the less conditions it needs to be active. If Play With Your Food gave killers a permanent 5% bonus for some easy to achiev condition, it would be the strongest chase perk in the game, as most loops wouldn't work against a 4.8m/s killer.
Probably, a killer with no power but with 5.0m/s speed would be the strongest killer in the game, as chases would be 40% shorter than any 4.6 killer in the game.
TLDR: Mov Speed and distance is the core component of this game, and anything that changes mov speed needs to be adressed carefully, as it will have a huge impact on the gameplay.
Second: The 3% speed on Skull Merchant is not weak, but its just not enough. If there were no pallets or windows in this game, she would be stronger than most of the 4.6 killers, but the problem is that Windows and pallets deny the killer mov speed advantage - and thats why being 3% faster is so strong, as you will probably reach a pallet or a window sooner than being on 100% speed.
I personally think her basekit is quite complex, and the problems are more on how it stacks with itself than just being basekit mov speed. You need to remember that her 3% mov speed is something that survivors control more than her.
But since we are talking about Skull Merchant, when you get into a chase with her using two purple addons (the combo that make the mov speed difference in 0.4m/s, or 10% speed). you will see how opressive she can be into a loop which you cannot give up.
i've wrote a whole chapter of the Bible, but just scratched the surface of this topic. Anyway, 3% for just being hurt and not exausted is too strong e needs to be adressed.
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This is false
The moment they are trackable you get the haste effect.
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I see all this information and wonder if everyone's forgotten MTF disables on exhaustion. Wouldn't running perks\addons that inflict it be the simpler solution? SM already has an add-on for it too! This isn't to discount the strength of 3% but it feels like there's already enough options to deal with it.
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Only reliable exhaustion perk is fearmonger, and then which isn't very good for MfT because it doesn't have cooldowns.
Anything else is legit unreliable or killer dependent, if you have to change killer just to deal with a perk, might as well play nurse.
Also this isn't really a post about SM being weak against MfT I think.
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According to Nightlight.gg Skull Merchant has one of the highest killrates (if not the highest). So yes, she is underrated.
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Honestly, people didn't even say skull merchant is weak from the beginning, I think.
People said she is bad at chase, didn't said she is weak as a killer.
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Her killrate being high can be misleading considering she's still relatively new and since very few people liked her chapter she's probably not being played by a great deal of people.
That's actually something I have to admit I was wrong about. When I originally read the changes when they were first mentioned it seemed to me that the haste was tied directly to being tracked via clawtrap rather than via all sources of drone related tracking. So that is how I approached playing her in addition to generally using her drones for stealth rather than defense so I am very used to survivors pathing around the edges of my drones rather than spending any time in them and rarely bothering to disarm them.
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Ignore.
Post edited by MyelinXCVIII on0 -
Bit awkward but read the post above you.
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Eh, this logic doesn't work.
There are killers with worse pickrate on Nightlight.gg, and all of them have worse killrate. Twins are pretty close though, while being played 3 times less.
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Ignore, I've clearly never payed attention whilst playing this killer.
Post edited by MyelinXCVIII on0 -
you can track survivors with your radar if they are in the range of your drone
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Just tested in a custom game and #########. How the hell have I been playing this character for so long and not noticed this!?
I think I need to go back to the go-fast killers...
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sadly, Wesker is killswitched 😅
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How does that logic not work?
Twins are played much less, but they are also older than and harder to play than her. When you account for time it tracks just fine logically.
Twins is over 2 years old in terms of being in the game and Skull Merchant was added to the game in March of this year. Skull Merchant is played by three times more over a period of 3 months against a killer who's almost 3 years old.
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Skull Merchant is new. You would expect people to don't learn how to play yet, and also you'd expect more people playing her casually out of pure interest to a new thing in the game. Both factors would make her have lower killrate, not higher.
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Lol THIS right here!! This just shows the entitled attitude that people have thinking the other side can't get anything new without screaming for a nerf until we're left with the same perk meta as always
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So 4% movement speed boost for killers with noed is overpowerd too?
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She's new, but also extremely unliked which is key. People were not excited for her chapter due to wanting a predator crossover chapter or an emotionless cyborg killer. Like the expectations that had been built up absolutely crumbled for a lot of people when Skull Merchant was officially revealed. Then her ptb was extremely lackluster as reports came that she was another killer who was overly geared towards gen defense and at the time basically extremely weak in every other area. This hasn't changed great deal either so people generally just have not been playing her outside the people who really really like her.
Usually when a new killer is released the killer queue is overly full and you'd see a rather large survivor bonus to entice people play survivor more to speed up matchmaking, but for Merchant's chapter it was the exact opposite as killer queue had a full 100% bonus basically the entire time during first couple of weeks because no one really want to play her and killers weren't playing very much in general. Like she got a lot of play during her tome, but that was because it was necessary for to play her. This is fact that folks complained about heavily here.
Also keep in mind that people have grown an extremely bad habit of giving up the moment they see the killer is Skull Merchant. Survivors don't want to play against her even if you're not doing gen defense because her reputation is so bad. I've literally had players just go stand under hooks and afk so they can go next. So you have situation where her dominant playstyle wears people down into timing out games or giving up, on top of people proactively giving up in a bid to spike killrate(that's not conspiracy theory, people actually made threads on telling folks to do that), on top of the usual "I'll eat the dc penalty" players invalidating games.
DBD's also very content creator driven space where people will very dogmatically follow what their CCs of choice are doing to the point of taking their word as heaven's gospel. The consensus of most content creators was there isn't a lot there to enjoy with Skull Merchant and generally much more to dislike. From her lore to her gameplay to her visual design, those of us who like her are in a distinctly small minority. It's not fun playing her because in my experience I get one or two normal games and then its dc here, give up there, or a team was already dead set to just speed run the game meaning any semblance of a normal length game was never in the cards.
There aren't enough people playing her to drive the number down and there aren't enough survivors interest in playing actual games against to really drive the number down like you normally expect.
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