OhTofu says nothing but facts about SM for 40 seconds
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That's totally fine for me. I don't expect anyone to like SM. And yes, many still hate her because she was previously abused as a Chess Merchant. That's why I would like people to give her a chance. The fact that your randoms don't know how to play against her or just give up is definitely annoying. But that can happen to us with many killers in Solo Q :(
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I don't condone just giving up immediately against her, or any killer really. But I get why survs do it. It'll take some time for the ire to subside some.
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It does appear that way sadly. Hoping that General V is right and eventually people get bored of hating her, like Legion.
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My largest problem with SM is that for a Killer designed around stealth being basekit, she has no audio cues. Pig has the clear stand up delay and unsheathe noise, or the roar. Myers has the heavy breathing, as does Wraith. Ghostface has the cape flaps, and SM has.... nothing. She is silent for no reason. (Edit: Forget about Demo's loud portal traversal noise associated with his stealth too. All stealth Killers have a tell, except SM.)
My lesser issue is that disarming the drones does nothing. It feels like it only lasts 15s, and it doesn't even remove accumulated scan stacks. It should either permanently remove the drone (and from SM's inventory for 15s), last longer, or remove scan stacks.
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I agree with your anecdote. Just today I ran across one where the survivors bought a 6th year cake, a 7th year cake and party streamers. The SM decided to hard tunnel at 5 gens and tried to go for a 4 person slug. I've seen that with other Killers but with other Killers it's a mix between Killers that play like that and Killers who don't. For SM though I can't remember the last time I saw a SM that didn't play like that.
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Can someone explain how the drones injure you and when they can't injure you??? Because I'm still lost on that.
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If you keep looping or stay for too long inside the drones radius then you start losing healthstates (atleast that’s what I could process)
and they do nothing if you’re standing still
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20 - 40 upvotes. Majority of the community appears to agree against SM and still despise SM it seems.
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100%. Just because they're a streamer doesn't mean they represent the whole of the community as a whole. I actually even watch OhTofu but don't agree with his SM remarks.
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Just ignore the drone.
It doesn't do anything to you while you are sitting on a gen or crouch walking. She can only put 1 drone on a gen at a time, so if you really want to be safe just position the gen between yourself and the drone.
If you are worried that you will get marked when SM comes to check your gen you can crouch walk to when the drone is not facing you and then just run away. If you say that you can't tell when it is facing you, well that's just a skill issue because you can see which way a drone is rotating and where its cameras are facing.
I have legit made SM waste her drones because she is putting them on gens rather than setting them up in loops for chases. Seriously, most games where survivors don't just give up are usually free wins if the SM is just being dumb and putting them on gens.
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He says that after 4 outing a bad skullmerchant though. She's just very uninteresting to play against.
- A drone gives: Injure + Hindered + Broken + Deep wound (????) On top of that she can add: Mangled + Haemorrhage + Exhaustion + Blindness with add-ons. She can also increase the Hindered even more with add-ons. On top of all of this she is Undetectable after placing a drone and she gets Haste (with no tell to the survivor in chase how fast she's actually going) because you don't know what your team is doing. AND THIS HASTE CAN ALSO BE INCREASED WITH ADD-ONS. ######### she literally has every single status effect in the f-ing game.
- Her chase: Walk to loop, place a drone, walk to loop, place a drone, walk to loop, place a drone. There's no interaction, you don't have to think.
- Survivors can't get rid of stacks, once you have 2 stacks you will just get injured+hindered+broken+deepwounded (and maybe Mangled + Haemorrhaged + Exhausted + Blinded if she has add-ons).
- She's able to stack multiple drones in the same area, in indoor maps this is just GG. You don't have time to crouch all the way through the entire hallway to disable multiple drones.
- Elevation messes with the drones and gives random scans. Putting drones on staircases will still scan people on the ground.
Remember how people complained about Lights Out being to difficult for survivors? Because you're sitting ducks on a generator being injured all the time. Well she's the same, but on the live game!
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Why is Dredge boring and promotes poor gameplay? If this is only about forcing people into the remnant on small loops, then i dont know what to tell you.
You of course can have your opinion, but I think and experienced, that Dredge has a lot of deph. Both for a survivor and killer perspective.
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Well, it is based on the only other experience we had. The hatred for Legion didn't dissipate immediately after his rework, but eventually people stopped DCing against them.
I hope the same happens to Skull Merchant.
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I agree.
There are some absolutely wonderfully kind people in our community and I have had the pleasure and privilege to speak and play with them.
However, I can't help but agree that the bad elements far outweigh the good.
Post edited by EQWashu on1 -
It really comes down to Remnant mindgames, which do have SOME counterplay. You can fake and bait a TP, which you can't really do with SM. However, it still promotes holding W.
Nightfall is really the thing I have the most issue with.
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Her chase oriented changes are pretty uninteresting. Killers getting random % increases based on your team's actions mid chase isn't very interactive.
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Remnant can be countered by teammates running into it, shift w or mindgames. Thats counterplay.
"Promoting shift w" is sadly just a joke to me at this point. Its done against every killer if possible. It does not depend on the power "leaving no other choice" or not. I play Pig = shift w. I play Sadako = shift w. I play Legion = shift w. I play Xeno = shift w.
Its done mainly because its simple and incredibly effective.
Nightfall as survivor is annoying to deal with for sure. As killer though, its super nice to play around with. When looking at characters and perks, both sides have to be taken into consideration.
DH was super fun to use back then. Playing against it was one of the most infuriating things this game has ever created.
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"every SM I've played against since her rework has been an absolutely toxic human being"
Not "every" SM for me, but at least 8/10 of them have been like this for me too. I feel like 99% of the time I get humped on the ground and left to bleed out, it's by a SM. Not all SMs are trolls, but I feel like those who enjoy trolling gravitate to her most because she has the most success for the least amount of work.
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AHHHH yes all hail tofu the master of dbd because he knows everything.
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All of those Killers have chase powers that put Survivors into a losing scenario in a loop, except Sadako.
Nightfall is an accessibility nightmare on Survivor.
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Pig: heavily depends on loop and addons.
Legion: literally m1 killer if survivor is injured.
With Xeno, i absolutely agree.
My other points you just ignored. Wasnt it you, who once told me to answer all your arguments?
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Should they change her name too, lol? Completely changing both her power and appearance is just a different way of saying "Delete this character and we both pretend the next character released is SM".
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Prefer more like "Delete this character and both pretend she never existed."
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Many killers can do this actually and even in faster way.
So the reason you hate SM is that she disturbs your repairing?😂
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Obviously Pig isn't going to be great around Shack, but around a lot of standard loops (think rock loops) she's extremely good right now
Legion, obviously yes when you're injured, but holding W away from a Frenzy Legion is the right move.
I'm usually fine with people only answering one of my points, but sometimes people don't answer any of them and that's when I ask them to stick to the point; so no, doesn't sound a lot like me.
Counterplay that relies on teammates isn't much counterplay at all for the majority of players.
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That will never happen.
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They also need to go to where the trap was placed, spend time placing it. SM can recall and replace her drones at will which then give her undetectable.
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Well considering how universally hated she is, it would be for the best.
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If we start deleting content based on people not liking it, eventually there would be no content.
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We can dream.
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Well the reason I hate her she gets stealth with no tells (like breathing or cloak flapping or even wraith growls), haste, hinder, free injures, anti-loop, and area control - all for just dropping drones, no real other action on her part.
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I will take what oh tofu say and flip it around and say I will take ANY killer over skull merchant anytime anyday. I will even rather mend simulator legion or broken nurse anything than skull merchant.
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It is not even necessary to deactivate the drones, just crouch walk and repair.
I find it extremely annoying when I am unnoticed repairing a gen and a teammate comes to deactivate the drone attracting the attention of the Skull Merchant. A drone placed on a generator is a poorly placed drone, it is only effective thanks to people who don't understand how the killers works. A good Skull Merchant will place them in strong loops and forced transit areas.
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Sounds like trapper should get a buff where he can recall his disarm traps from a range.
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Deactivating the drones is indeed a waste of time and alerts the SM + she can simply recall them immediately anyway.
Of course if she comes calling then you get a scan almost guaranteed.
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The rework definitely made her weaker at holding gens. The issue was that survivors wanted it to be impossible for her to use her drones to keep an eye on gens. And for a killer that uses drones, what they are asking for is simply never gonna happen in any realm of the multiverse. Never. In a million years. I think its time for people to finally make peace with that.
The one nerf I'd be okay with is that when a gen is deactivated, it can't be recalled for 45 seconds, but as a downside, the player that deactivated the drone automatically gets a lock on stack. Risk, reward
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I don't hate Skull Merchant, but I wish that her drones would go back to her after you disable them a certain number of times. It's not so much that it's impossible to play against -- just that it's very annoying for her to set them in the most inconvenient places and leave them there for the entire match, regardless of what you do. IIRC, everyone else with a trap has to reset it from time to time.
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why would people deactivate a SM drone, didn't they change it so you don't get detected while not moving/doing gens?
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Theres def worse to play against. I dont DC vs her anymore and will play the game out now, but the survivor player base will never get behind a killer that gets guarenteed hits imo. Thats the reason that trickster is hated so much, theres virtually no skill expression from the survivor side you just run zig zags/try to break line of sight until eventually you die. Theres never like a feeling like oh all these hours I put into dbd are paying off because this killer couldnt catch me and I am better than him. The problem isnt because hes too strong, its because there isnt an enjoyable thing to do in chase vs him as hes just going to spam you with knives till you die. Unless you are caught out with main event, its not going to be fast, but he will always eventually kill you. No matter how much better you are than him in chase. This is less egregious with skull merchant as there is perhaps more counter play, but the gameplay loop is quite lack luster. Go to pallet, predrop because shes immediately going to put up a turret run to next pallet because theres a turret up and you can't stay or you will get hindered.
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Saying these things haven't been fixed kind of implies that they're all problems, which I'm sure you'll agree not everything you listed is.
Like, you not seeing the drone rotate can't be considered a problem with her kit, that's just a player missing a cue and making a mistake. You could have seen the drone rotate, which is part of her design and counterplay, so what exactly is there to fix here?
Similarly, when you talk about her stealth not having any audio cues, it's kind of misleading to not talk about what her stealth is actually balanced with, right? It's not that she's just lacking a downside to her stealth, it's that the downside isn't an audio cue, it's a timer. We could even have a conversation about whether or not the end result is properly balanced, but without acknowledging the fact that they're using a different method to get there, we're never gonna reach any constructive conversation.
For the record, I do agree drone overlap is a problem, for more scenarios than just basement stairs, I'd like to see that adjusted. Similarly, I think her Haste should have more of a visual tell for when a teammate trips a drone mid-chase so you have more information to work with when gauging whether you'll make a resource or not. I agree with those two things being problems, though obviously they're hardly huge ones making her a miserable killer to face, they're just annoyances that should be adjusted.
As an aside, if we're going to conclude that community hate is justified based on her being able to just press M2 at every loop, we must also conclude that Knight and Artist should be hated to at least the same degree, if not moreso because they're better at it than she is.
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knight and artist are hated
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I'm not sure why this thread got revived but SM is still just as boring to play against. And this is because her kit is fundamentally unfun.
1 - she is an area control/zoning killer. Sorry, most agree this is the least fun type of killer to play against. At a loop, she places a drone, you shift W to the next one, if you stay you are getting injured and slowed for free. Like knight but less effective.
2 - random haste. Skull merchant is constantly getting haste effects from random drone tags, addons, etc. It is very difficult to track her speed internally, so the best play is to treat her like she has bloodlust and predrop pallets. Boring to play and to play against. If you try and loop thinking she is 115%, you will inevitably get hit because of random haste out of your control.
3 - drone disabling. There is still almost zero reason to ever disable drones. They do not stay disabled long, and she can pick them up instantly and just replace them. Disabling a drone for someone else mid-chase is not fast enough to have viable counterplay to the zoning playstyle like Knight (where you can take aggro from the guard while Knight is chasing a teammate).
4 - drone stacking. You can stack tons of drones in an area and there is basically no reason to ever go there. Disabling them is futile, see 3, and you can spam them in places like basement stairs (see another commenter) or in the middle of the map to force survivors to basically take a free hit if they want to access half of the map in chase. She has so many and can replace them so fast that she can make any area one that you go in and you die.
5 - drone beam swap. In case you thought there was any counterplay to placing a drone in a tile mid chase, she can just swap the beams while chasing you to remove all counterplay. You can't skillfully loop in the same direction to avoid them, you can't time crouches or stop moving, nothing. You're getting triple scanned or leaving.
Overall the playstyle against SM is very boring. In chase, you shift+W to a place without drones, where she either chases as a normal M1 killer or places a drone and you have to shift+W again. There is little to no reason to interact with drones, doing anything other than predrop is unreliable, and because she can remove and replace drones so fast she can constantly be undetectable which means on indoor maps you hold checkspots until someone is in chase and you have a good idea of where she is.
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I specified "at least as much, if not moreso".
No killer is hated as much as Skull Merchant, and the killers who have her flaws but worse are included in that.
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Oh, gotcha. I mean, I'd argue that bugs shouldn't be lumped in with design criticisms, but I getcha. I can't say I've noticed that bug or the "scan outside the actual range" bug you mentioned, but if they're there, 100%, they should be fixed.
And as I said above, I specified hated as much or moreso, which they are not. For the record, Skull Merchant can also obviously go for cool stuff if the player chooses to.
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