A few small tips for playing against Skull Merchant.
People seem to genuinely hate Skull Merchant and I understood it before with the 3 gen problem but nowadays I really don't understand it at all. So as a P80 Skull Merchant main I want to share a few tips to maybe make it just a bit easier to play against her.
Try not to hack drones when Skull Merchant isn't in chase with anyone, she can see the Drone's Aura disappear and then reappear higher in the air when you do, effectively giving her tracking on you without you even being scanned.
On that note, if you see someone in chase, hack the closest Drone to you if you can in case your teammate runs to that area, this will force Skully to either Recall and then put up that Drone again, wasting her time, or simply allowing your teammate to loop that area without fear of being scanned.
You should never be getting scanned outside of chase, standing still or crouching will prevent you from being scanned, you can't really help it when in chase, but that's kind of the point, in a similar manner to how you can't prevent Clown from slowing you, or how you can't spend the time checking tall grass for Trapper traps. It's an obvious tip but I've been surprised how many people don't know you can crouch up to a Drone to hack it without being scanned.
If you hack a drone and then immediately hear a terror radius don't panic, this means she has the Iridescent Manuscript addon that gives hacked drones a 15 second Terror Radius and her Undetectable for those 15 seconds, so be on the lookout for her just like you would with any other stealth killer.
You can tell how close a disabled Drone is to reactivating by how close to the ground it is. When you initially hack it, the Drone will fly high up into the air, slowly descending until it reaches its original position which is roughly head height, at which point it will reactivate. You can use this to see if you can afford to stay at a loop for longer, or plan your movement to avoid it or be ready to instantly disable it again when it reactivates.
I hope that this helps at least someone, because I truly don't think new Skull Merchant deserves all the hate she gets. Even though I'm biased as I main her, I still play Survivor occasionally, and playing against her feels fine to me, the only annoying part is the hinder when Claw Trapped which, even as a Skull Merchant main I think is overkill and should be removed.
Thank you for coming to my "Please stop instantly giving up in my games please" talk and I hope these tips made you more knowledgeable about the killer and maybe made playing against her just a tiny bit easier.
Comments
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She really didn't need the hinder added to her toolkit with her haste, I agree with that. They should remove one or the other.
That said, I mostly agree with your take on her. People will still say she is the same 3-gen monster with the right perks, but so are most other killers. I've broken her 3 gens by doing them under her drones and being careful when I move about as she rotates around the gens.
Really we need to be more critical about the maps, tile generation and the gen placements more than anything. Pretty sure most M1 killers can 3 gen when all of them are within earshot of each other due to the wonky spawn system at the moment. Swamp and Garden of Joy both have some really bad ones.
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