Hot take: Skull Merchant Rework is OK
Many people have been complaining about SM's rework so far, saying "wow, she went from a boring, busted killer to being utter trash."
I played the PTB SM for more than five minutes, so I can say with a little confidence that her rework is absolutely fine, she needs some QOL changes and tuning regarding her power cooldown, but here's the deal.
New SM allows you to actually be a chase killer now, because that's precisely what she's meant to be. Claw Traps are objectively better now than what they used to be, and they allow you to close the gap in chases (with the hinder and the Deep Wound mechanic countering things like Dead Hard and OTR), meaning you can reliably snowball as opposed to putting four drones on gens and the Claw Trap being a mild annoyance to survivors.
Will she be strong? No, but that's OK. Although I did prefer if they kept the stealth in Active Drone areas idea, that was fun for mindgames. Otherwise? Great job, BHVR. You made a buffable Killer. 👍️
Edited for flow of paragraph.
Comments
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It's not fine at the moment. She's super underwhelming and needs a lot of tweaks to be remotely decent. Her power is super easy to ignore and that makes her not very good at being a chase killer.
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While I was playing the PTB as survivor I never understood why I should care about or interact with her power and I still don't.
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The reason why survivors have been ignoring your power is because of a bug in the PTB regarding the Stealth Drone showing its radius on the ground for survivors, or at least, I THINK that's what the bug is.
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That's only part of the issue (and I'm not even sure if that's a bug lmao).
You can just ignore the power by standing still for a second. There's no need to think about positioning when deactivating Drones anymore, you just play Red Light Green Light. The nerf makes no sense when it's now super easy to keep the Drones deactivated.
The immunity buffer is also way too generous, and the Drones also rotate too slowly.
She's just not good at doing what she's intended to do. Claw Traps take ages to apply and the fact that they have a 45 second battery AND don't destroy pallets anymore makes it a lot harder to get value out of the Hindered that they can provide.
That's not even mentioning the super annoying cooldowns that make her feel bad to play.
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And with this, I do agree on all of these points. I hope these get addressed as QOL changes (which I did say, but didn't outline in my OP so I do apologize).
My biggest issue and hopefully the change they agree on is being able to apply the Claw Trap if a Survivor is considered being in chase, but remains stationary while at a pallet. This and scan immunity is drastically cut down, or at least cut in half from its current version.
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Her new design, however weak, is much healthier for the game and has room to be improved. The goal of the rework was achieved, which was to make her presence in the game not actively harmful to people's desire to keep playing.
Any rework for Skull Merchant that makes it so that she doesn't need to be willingly choosing to handicap herself and play sub-optimally to not make the survivors want to DC rather than play against her is a successful one.
She might end up weak, but the new design is interesting, gives a unique experience for both the killer and survivors, and can safely be buffed in the future without hurting the game. And this game has plenty of weak killers who do fine because of the casual nature of this game's playerbase.
And let's be honest here, I don't think people suddenly became Skull Merchant fans. The instantaneous backlash she received upon her reveal was focused on her aesthetic design and backstory more than her power. I don't think those people who made the subreddit even more insufferable than it usually is with daily Skull Merchant hate threads changed their viewpoint on her. They're still not going to play her even if they made her good.
She's always going to be regarded as one of the biggest flops BHVR ever made, the important part is that she's no longer a flop who also makes the game less fun by being in it.
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She'll probably have a similar trajectory to Legion. They needed to push a functional rework out quickly because the original design was so flawed and unhealthy. That gives them time to further iterate on a healthy power foundation going further.
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honestly yeah, she just really needs some buffs and QoL changes in order to feel good to play. maybe like increasing the undetectable duration, make hindered apply on the third detection instead of fourth (so remove fourth entirely) so its more impactful in chases, make drones in stealth mode not show ANYTHING remotely close to a radius until they scan a survivor, and more
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She may need her drones to spin faster than they currently do. Other than in a chase, a player just needs to stand still whilst the scanner passes them and, even when scouting, it feels too slow.
If the drone was to move from its position within a few metres, that may also add some unpredictability.
She's certainly healthier for the game than the obnoxious power she had before, but the Skull Merchant may need some more tuning prior to the mid-chapter. Currently, the biggest issue will be whether there are enough players interested in playing her.
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AKA hot take: im survivor main and having another trash killer is good thing.
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Well I agree with this hot take, I think its a lukewarm take. I am personally looking forward to the release, with some luck bHVR might buff her and I hope my strategy would be even stronger.
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I've played more killer than survivor in my time of being on DBD, I can say with some confidence that if you're willing to put in the work to learn another killer and test their limits, you'll find that not all of the killers are bad (except for Pig, needs a nerf). I also don't take the game super competitively.
Current SM is a nightmare to deal with in uncoordinated lobbies and I don't feel like playing like I'm in Eternal 24/7 vsing a SM, when I do play survivor.
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No SM rework unless her whole kit is changed will be a successful rework imo. She’s unsalvageable, I’ve been saying it for months at this point.
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Current SM is a nightmare to deal with in uncoordinated lobbies and I don't feel like playing like I'm in Eternal 24/7 vsing a SM, when I do play survivor.
your post is just sentiment that she's dead killer with no redeeming qualities. your glad she is deleted from the game.
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A. The showing radius thing isnt a bug its intended
B. Even without it her power is beyond useless with how many limitations she has, the extremely small radius of her drones, the insane amount of punishment she gets for using her power correctly, and the beyond useless function of her power in general
C. Even if they were to buff her to oblivion shed still be unfun to play as. She has 0 agency in her power whats so ever and its entirely reliant on survivor mistakes. "Wow I get to M1 chase survivors and they get randomly injured by stuff entirely outside of my control SO FUN!!!"
There was so many non rework options they couldve done and they chose the worst one which isolates most her playerbase essentially just doing Freddy again but worse
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Honestly im really bored of this copium "if you put work and keep trying, you will make every killer good!"
Thats just straight up false. Onepunchwilly, BEST Onryo player in the world got destroyed by random SWF party(before rework). You cant make weak killers work, theyre weak, yes you can destroy solos survs or just bad SWFs, but thats it. Right now with ptb changes skull merchant goes into the freddy level garbage, even lower.
Yes, there are killers that have high skill floor and they will be geniunely good if you put work into them, like Singularity(who is still probably getting destroyed by high skill SWF) and Blight. But most of them arent like that. I dont want to have another garbage killer in the game just because survivors are crying. And what is funny its probably survivor mains themself who play skull merchant boring builds, because every killer main ive spoken with, either dont play SM, or plays something interesting like Hex build, and not "overcharge, oppression, eruption, sloppy butcher".
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Will she be strong? No, but that's OK.Than fix that? If shes weak allready before people found out how to deal with her she will just become weaker.
I mean the problem is her ability. Go into a loop -> press ability -> hit survivor.
Thats not very funny for eather side.
You made a buffable KillerIf the killer needs a buff before the release, maybe give her a buff and leave her a bit longer on the PTB?
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Those aren't QoL changes, those are buffs.
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Of course everyone is gonna say a killer rework that removes the ability to hold a 3 gen will be bad. People get too adjusted to a certain playstyle or meta and when that is taken away or shaken up you hear outcries
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