Skull Merchant - A Final Attempt
I do not have as much hatred for Skull Merchant as others do, and I do think the excessive hatred of this character and insta-quitting against her is unreasonable for sure... but there are objectively problems with her new design that one can't in good faith ignore.
I've argued many times I really like the new scan lines approach to her kit. It isn't binary like the old AoE scan system, and sneaking past the scan lines to head for unhooks, move to gens, etc, is something quite unique to SM. It also offers some skill expression where the SM herself can time direction shifts, which is cool.
I've read many discussions on Skull Merchant, it's usually quite hard to pick out useful feedback from the scores of "just completely rework her" or "just delete her", however there has also been a lot of constructive feedback. Taking the most frequently discussed points, these are the problems with Skull Merchant to my mind: -
- Her kit is overstacked, she pushes 1 button and gets so much for it with basically no thought. There is skill expression in this new set up, but there is no need for it, cause her drone does all the work anyway. Off 1 button she closes loops, goes undetectable, scans get perfect real time mind game info, gets speed boosts, builds up an injury with deep wound and broken, gets hindered after that. It's so stacked up on 1 ability.
- Just like Trapper, some people hit her drones even when not in chase. This would be fine, except this grants SM additional speed against whoever she is chasing, through no fault of their own, punishing a survivor for not making a mistake.
- No means of recovery from gaining a stack. Once it's there it's there for good until you get claw trapped or hooked.
- Taking time shutting down her power doesn't really do anything, because she can recall a drone immediately and just plant it new... in fact it's worse because you basically alert her to your presence.
A lot of people talk about bringing back her old kit now the 3 gen system is in place. I feel like this would be a mistake, but there were some cool things about her old kit that could make a return.
Proposed Rework
- Standardise her speed boosts to be 3% when chasing a scanned survivor, 5% when chasing a claw trapped survivor. Other survivors getting scanned has no effect on her current chase. This keeps a survivor responsible for what happens in their own chase.
- Each time a survivor is scanned, their lock on tracker on HUD turns red to indicate they are on SMs radar. It turns yellow when they are no longer on her radar (12 seconds). This feeds back to the survivor the state of Skull Merchant's power on them to assess the situation accordingly.
- Hacking a drone while on yellow lock on removes a stack. Red lock on will only disable the drone as normal without removing a lock on stack. This ensures a survivor still has to avoid the beams if they want to remove a stack, and can't just yolo up to a trap to eat a stack and instantly remove it. However it does reward them for doing so successfully.
- Remove the deep wound from being claw trapped, and just have the injured and broken state as the penalty for a claw trap. A free injury state is already plenty, and broken means a careless survivor cross map actually gets their penalty even if already injured.
- When scanned again with a claw trap, remove the hindered effect, instead now apply deep wound and the claw trap turns red for the same duration as a scan (12 seconds). Vaulting a pallet with a red claw trap will break the pallet. This will not disable the claw trap, it will instead return to yellow. Her claw traps breaking pallets was a unique part of her old kit. This gives counterplay to survivors via windows but with SM able to read all mind games and moving at 4.8m/s permanently after you, and with bloodlust, you're in trouble.
- IF Skull Merchant is too weak - Apply a 5% hindered effect for 3s to make vaulting windows a slow vault. I don't believe this is necessary, as you can take perks to deal with windows. E.g. Bamboozle, Hex: Crowd Control, etc.
- Recalling a unhacked drone is instantaneous. Recalling a hacked drone requires SM to spend 2 second re-establishing communication with the drone to recall it, her movement is slowed by 85% (1.2m/s) while doing this. This means she can't just keep throwing down drones haphazardly, and a survivor disabling a trap can actually hinder the Skull Merchant. If she runs out she either has to stop to get a broken drone back, or she has to pull a drone from elsewhere that she may want to keep.
Final Thoughts
This probably isn't going to change a lot of the deep rooted opinions of her, but it does at least remove some of the more frustrating and overstacked elements of her new kit, gives her some of the cooler parts of her old kit back, allows good survivors to use their skill against her, and gives a little more information to the survivors to understand what is going on.
Thoughts?