Fixing The Skull Merchant
...Or, at least, trying to. It's a difficult task, but I think I've come up with some decent first steps to massively lower her 3-gen potential while bolstering the other strategies she already has.
Though, as a disclaimer, this rework was thought up under the assumption that 3-genning itself is going to be looked at separately. That I don't know how to fix, but it's clearly a problem on more killers than just the Skull Merchant, even if she's the best at doing it. So, then, our goal here is to bring her more in line with the rest of the roster when it comes to defending 3-gens, while making her stronger in other areas so the average player can perhaps start to see what else she's capable of.
I typically prefer to avoid dramatic overhauls to killer powers a la Freddy's rework, but I did stray a little close to it this time. There's one change in particular that is pretty dramatic, but I believe that it's justifiable and I'll do my best to justify it. With that out of the way, I suggest the following:
- Remove Lock On. While I would recommend keeping the Exposed effect that comes from failing or otherwise interrupting the drone hacking minigame, I don't believe that survivors should become passively Exposed while standing in an Active Drone's area. I believe this because I find it to be inconsistent and annoying when doing anything other than 3-gen setups, and in those setups it's the passive pressure that pushes survivors to waste time on drones while progress is eaten away from their generators. This change is dramatic and undeniably a nerf, but I recommend some other changes to accompany it.
- Reshuffle her addons, and rework a few. I put this second because the Skull Merchant's biggest barrier to her more reasonable builds is that they rely relatively heavily on expensive purple addons, like the one for inflicting Hindered, the one for revealing auras, and the one for giving yourself Haste and action speed bonuses. Those addons, or at least addons with those general effects even if they have to be a little weaker, should be lower rarity and more numerous, while certain addons like the silent skillchecks addon and the Oblivious addon should be reworked entirely to do something else as they're bordering on useless if you aren't 3-genning. The Skull Merchant's biggest strength in terms of core design is how versatile and modular her power is, and her addon design should better reflect that by not locking the more active, chase-focused effects behind purple-tier price points.
- Increase the Claw Trap's battery timer. This may sound like a nerf, but I believe it'd overall be more of a buff to the Skull Merchant, while strengthening counterplay against her at the same time. That may be paradoxical, but I view it like this: Because the timer on the Claw Traps is relatively short, it's difficult for the Skull Merchant to actually use the benefits they apply (either basekit or from addons), and it's equally hard for survivors to keep drones away from specific areas if the Skull Merchant doesn't actually have to come chase them and force it off them. If it weren't for her Haste, I'd recommend making them permanent until the survivor is downed or vaults a pallet, but as it stands I think just increasing the timer by a noticeable amount would do. Another strong element of the Skull Merchant is that her counterplay should allow her to be flexible and adapt, bringing a shifting dynamic to the trial, but that's difficult to achieve with her live balance.
- Buff her stealth. The Skull Merchant has a stealth element to her power! You'd be forgiven for not realising that, considering how low the numbers are... without the threat of Exposed to make this too scary, I think her Undetectable could be buffed such that it kicks in quicker, and lingers for much longer after leaving the drone's radius. This would give the Skull Merchant even more versatility to weaponise, by making stealth builds genuinely viable on her.
So, then, what would these changes achieve? From my view, they'd bring her 3-gen capability down to basically what any killer can achieve with the right perks. If she's patrolling a 3-gen, she'll only get the Haste that tracking survivors achieves, and those survivors could choose to simply ignore the active drones in favour of working on the generators because she still has to walk over there and harass them off- and since they aren't Exposed, they can freely take a hit without going down.
On the flipside, though, a Skull Merchant who cares about unlocking the character's real potential would have much more freedom to experiment and tinker, because her power would have more versatility and would be empowered when her drones and claw traps are used in a more strategic, skilful manner. Drones would function better as traps to steer survivors towards, they'd function better as bait to lean into the Claw Traps more, they'd function as a web she can weave between while Undetectable, and they'd function less as simple generator defence, while still being able to defend things in general with a little work.
These changes would just be a start. Skull Merchant herself would surely still need looking at after this, and 3-gens in general absolutely would, but it would be a solid foundation to build from in my opinion.
Comments
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one question. why is the exposed a problem? Watching otz video on competitive skull merchant game. Just look UI for survivors.
everyone is injured. The expose is not doing anything in 45-50 minutes. everyone is already exposed. something else to notice is that nobody has claw trap at 45-50 minutes.
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Everyone is injured because Exposed prevents any value from them being healthy. Disarming drones is such a bad idea, they are better off staying in the drone zones. Since they have to stay in the drone zones (as the Killer can place drones on the same area), it doesn't matter if they are healthy or injured, so healing up is a waste of time.
If drones, once disabled, left a phantom zone that prevented the drone of being plopped down over the same area (until the shoulder tracker is removed from the Survivor who hacked it), then Survivors would actually have a reason to disarm drones. Arguably the tracker should function similar to Victor at that point, where the Killer can recall it after a certain time (the current 45s? autodisable timer), or the Survivor can keep the power to deny the Killer the ability to use it on others, at the cost of giving her haste, and making pallets unsafe for them to vault.
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you do not need to teach me or explain anything. I already understand how the gameplay loop works. i am just trying to understand @jesterkind point of view. For example he says to buff stealth. everyone in the 53 minute skull merchant match was permanently oblivious due to brown noise generator add-on and skull merchant undetectable for big portion of the match while kicking generators. The stealth did not help skull merchant win that 53 minute war of attrition. buffing stealth achieves nothing.
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I explained why- it stands to reason that 3-genning typically involves leveraging the threat of Exposed, and in addition, I have personally found the Exposed to be a finnicky and unreliable mechanic that doesn't really mesh with the better ways of playing Skull Merchant. Removing it should, ideally, cut down on your average 3-gen match, and it'll allow things like stealth and other builds to be more viable because that threat isn't there to make it overpowered.
I wouldn't put too much stock in that Otz video, by the way. Even setting aside the usual caveat of it only being top tier players, your other comment here makes it seem like you think my proposed changes should help in that scenario and, uh, no, I want to prevent that scenario. I want Skull Merchant to be better at doing other things, and worse at doing specifically that.
Though, for the record, mizark is right in saying that those players were probably staying injured because of the Exposed. They're oneshot either way, so why waste time with healing up?
(Also she, not he.)
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they were staying exposed because healing is too time consuming vs that type of gen-lock. the map layout was to unfavourable for survivors to heal efficiently and progress generator. as a result, the team committed to not heal and ignore drones. Exposed and undetectable/oblivious had a low impact on the match outcome. The bulk of that match was kicking gens, missing skill-checks and team eternal working out how to break the gen-lock on that map. torment creek is like farm map. farm maps loops are unfun to play on as killer so 3 gen is recommended.
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...Yes. Undetectable/Oblivious has a low effect on 3-gens in general. That is why I want to buff it, and the other things that Skull Merchant can do that isn't 3-genning.
I am not aiming to improve Skull Merchant in areas that are relevant to that video. I want her to be worse at the things that video showed.
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oblivious and undetectable was at its max-power level on that match. there is no point in buffing it because it is already at its peak power-level. The survivors countered nearly perfectly with speculator gen-rotations. it was impressive play. the legit only aspect that they did wrong in that match was missing skill-checks which extended the match. nothing else. everything else was near perfect.
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I'm not sure I'm following your point, I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to ask for some clarification.
So, you say that there's no point buffing her stealth because it didn't help the SM three-gen, but I don't want her to use the stealth to three-gen. I want her to use it like a regular stealth killer, across the entire match, to sneak around and get the drop on survivors. I don't want her to use it in a tight area where everyone obviously knows where she is because she's alternating between three close-together generators.
Why is it relevant, then, that it wasn't any help in the three-gen video?
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so you want skull merchant to have 8 drones base-kit? With 8 drones base-kit, you can put a drone on all 7 generator and inflict oblivious on every generator. that buff her stealth but now you can 7 gen the entire map. I think your better off playing wraith or a killer that has undetectable status. at this point, I am confused.
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...What?
No, I want her to be able to set up the drones she has and actually use Undetectable because it doesn't fade out as quickly. I also only want that to be an option; as I said, Skull Merchant's power is modular and versatile. I want her to be able to do that if the player wants her to, and I want her to be better at chase, better at utilising claw traps, and just a little weaker at protecting generators and hexes.
You're aware she doesn't have to place her drones directly on top of generators, right? If you're playing her for chase even on the live servers, you're usually looking to place them between generators, and in important structures.
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I do not think she is designed to be stealth killer. it would be weird for her to be better stealth killer then wraith. weird case of power-creep.
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She wouldn't be. She'd just be capable of performing as a stealth killer. She would lack the lethality of Myers and Ghostface, and she'd lack the speed and invisibility of Wraith.
A better comparison would be Pig. People want Pig's stealth buffed, and that wouldn't make her a better stealth killer than Wraith. It would just make her capable of using stealth.
That was also only one of the things I wanted to encourage on the Skull Merchant's part. At this point I'm seriously not sure what your overall point is, I apologise if it's me missing something.
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