Skull Merchant improvement proposals
Skull Merchant continues to be a problematic design, with global average killrates going to show that she is too easy to play as compared to how difficult she is to play against, and being able to injure survivors without a hit sprint and afflict Deep Wound, Broken and Hindered as well as gain Undetectable, Haste and tracking at the press of a button just being a little much. I have a few suggestions for changes that are ultimately rather slight, but should make her decidedly more engaging to face.
Her primary two issues in my mind are her still much too potent capabilities of playing around a gen cluster (certainly when compared to the "ease of doing it vs. difficulty of countering it" ratio), and the lack of meaningful counterplay in chase.
Making hacked drones unrecallable would already go a decently long way to alleviate her problematic gen defense. The fact that she can recall and reset drones instantly as she patrols her gen cluster means that hacking them doesn't do much of anything, it in fact only provides her with frequent Undetectable and stealth mode drones survivors often have an even harder time avoiding the beams of.
For more meaningful chase counterplay, either slow down the drone beams if someone is in chase state within the drone area such that survivors can actually try to avoid them mid-chase with some semblance of reliability, or make it so hacking drones while in chase state can be done much more quickly (such as by only needing to input 3 instead of 5 keys; showing the actual keys bound to the direction inputs would also be beneficial (so WASD for most players), as it is much easier to read and input at a glance). Hacking drones mid-chase would still be risky since you have to stand still for 1-2 seconds at a spot that may also be inopportune (e. g. not right next to the loop), but it would be possible and provide meaningful and engaging counterplay.
Beyond this, I think Merchant should only gain Haste when a survivor actually gets clawtrapped, not intermittently on scans. Or at the very least have a visual and/or audio indicator that she does have Haste whenever she does. And it would also be worthwhile to think about ways for survivors to be able to lose lock on stacks. Maybe hacking a drone could remove 1 stack.