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A small demonstration of how the Skull Merchant can be insufferable to play against
Yesterday I had a match against Skull Merchant where it took some time for me to get hooked for the first time. When I was, another survivor tried to rescue me, but she took a Claw Trap from a drone and got downed immediatly, so I went to second stage.
But why was she downed so easily? Because to get to me, she had to go through THIS:
I apologize for taking the screenshot AFTER it happened (the one that got downed was already being carried by the killer), but I wasn't planning to do that. Either way, the survivor had to come all the way from the other side of that corridor to where I was, avoiding the scan of this drone in the process, WHILE Skull Merchant was proxy camping AND she already had a speed boost from another survivor with a claw trap.
There were only three possible ways of going through this drone WITHOUT getting detected and taking a claw trap:
- Going completely around it and finding another path - hard to do in this map and it could take a lot of time, and she couldn't see the open door near me. Most people don't have this map's layout memorized.
- Crouching everytime the scan was about to touch her - it would take a lot of time while there was a killer with haste patroling around.
- Avoid the scan and disabling the drone halfway through - there was just not enough time to do that without being interrupted by the killer AND it was pretty hard to do in that position.
And all of that without the add-ons that change the rotation speed, which could make it even harder. Also notice that, on that position, it could also be very possible for a survivor to drop down to only then realize she was right beside the drone and take a lock-on by surprise.
Some of you might be thinking "but this only happened because of this map, right? It shouldn't be so easy to cause this in other maps".
Well… that would be wrong too. The screenshots below are from the next Skull Merchant match on the same night.
And yes, Jake DID get a claw trap before he rescued me. Thankfully, this SM wasn't proxy-camping like the other one. You know, it doesn't help that often the scan lines only appear right when they affect a survivor.
On the same match, at one point I had to make a rescue in the basement, but there was a drone near the shack entrance and another one at the basement stairs while I had two stacks of lock-on already. It would take so long to go through both without taking a claw trap that just taking it right away was the best choice. Later I lost a lot of time walking around drones in order to rescue someone else on the other side of Azarov's because their area was taking a huge portion of the map's width. It's always good to remember that everytime a lock-on triggers she gets a haste effect, making the life of whoever she is chasing harder.
Now tell me, realistically speaking, how can we expect for the average dbd survivor to counter all of that, specially the solo survivors? Considering SM has quite a low skill floor (not to be confused with skill ceiling), it shouldn't be a mistery why she has such a high kill rate.
Comments
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Look, survivors (especially solo survivors) are struggling against every killer on the roster. There’s nothing especially abnormal about Skull Merchant when you consider that. She has some counter play, to be fair, but the goal is again for survivors to die more often than they escape. The devs want this game killer-sided.
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She has a 70% kill rate, so there IS something abnormal about her. She managed to show a higher kill rate to the previous version of Sadako, which was broken as hell and would often mori people at five gens after teleporting aimlessly around the map.
Solo survivors struggle against every killer, but she is more troublesome to face than other killers and it shows. Many survivors already have trouble crouching over hag traps and dealing with proxy camping low-tier killers. SM's drone areas are more visible than traps, but they are dozens of times bigger and make entire areas hostile to the survivors and hard to traverse. She also gets haste to be a better m1 killer and is better at proxy-camping because of both things.
And unlike other killers who are hard to counter, like the Nurse, Blight, or even high B-tier killers like the Cenobite, she is far more simple and forgiving to play as. Setting up drones doesn't need the carefulness of setting traps as Trapper or even Hag, and it's much faster. Mastering her takes some skill and knowledge, yes, but at a basic level and against average survivors, all you need to do is press a button to place a drone and wait for survivors to hurt themselves on it, AND you get haste as a bonus. No other killer gets value so easily and is so hard to counter at the same time. Not even Cenobite.
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Now tell me, realistically speaking, how can we expect for the average dbd survivor to counter all of that, specially the solo survivors?
By not giving up, even if someone else does:
Skull Merchant isn't invincible in Solo Queue, far from it. As long as the whole team doesn't give up, there is a chance.
The problem is that many players give up as soon as they see her, like this Meg did, and they don't even try. That is the only reason why her kill rates are high.
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I never said she is invincible. I said it's unrealistic to expect the average solo survivor to be able to counter her. You are a veteran player yourself and, If I had to guess, some of the other survivors in your match probably were too. Solo survivors struggle to crouch over hag traps, and a single drone has a much bigger area than that. She can make entire rooms and portions of a map hard to traverse just by placing a drone and gainst a lot of time and/or damage by doing that, AND she gets a haste as a bonus that the person in a chase with her can't really predict. One thing are veteran survivors dealing with a killer, the other is to think that same thing won't be problematic for the majority of the community. SM is, and it shows. She has a higher kill rate than FIRST REWORK SADAKO, the one that could condemn people by teleporting randomly around the map.
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She’s beatable. But it’s like a slow dreary. She’s so boring to face and it doesn’t help that skill merchant players play like as*holes most of the time. Last game I got a camping basement skull merchant on dead dawg. She’s miserable to face
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death* I hate auto correct
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As someone who actually plays a ton of skull merchant those kill rates should not be taken as a representation of her strength. They are very misleading. I would say I get survivors killing themselves on hook, just running up to me because they want out, or dc’ing once every 3 games, maybe even every other game sometimes. So those kill rates are extremely skewed.
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A tip. If you have no choice but to run through one of her drones, going to get hit with a claw trap and about to get hit with a M1. Just stop running to avoid the claw trap and have her hit you with a M1. She goes through the M1 cooldown and then you get the claw trap with descent distance to make a save or a strong loop. It's better for the survivor to get hit with a M1 before a claw trap gets you.
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It may not represent her strength but it does represent the community's willingness to play against her. If only 1 out of 35 killer has a 67% kill rate, then something is off. It's one thing for something like that to happen right after the rework or release of that killer but so many months later? Skull Merchant is miserable to play against. You don't get to apply her "counterplay" in most cases. Crouching allows the killer to catch up a lot quicker, so they'll easily get a hit. The same goes for standing still.
Every step of the way, Skull Merchant gains the upper hand in chase. She gets faster when someone is scanned, she breaks and injures survivors without hitting them, which allows her to quickly catch up even after the speed boost and also hinders you on top of it. All of that in combination with the extremely easy to use drones (seriously, it's not hard to place a drone and change the rotation so that the survivor will get scanned without counterplay) just make her a horrible killer to play against.
I'd go as far to say that SM is PvE simulator. The survivors have so little counterplay, they might as well be bots.
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Not arguing she needs changes or how unhealthy she is. Just pointing out flawed kill stats, that’s all.
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And here is another match, from earlier today:
All Solo as far as I am aware. I know I was.
Yes, I have been playing DBD since 2018, but that doesn't make me a master of the game. I make mistakes, sometimes my strategies fail. But as you can see, there were escapes on both trials I shared here.
Maybe the results will be different next time I see Skull Merchant, but I don't think we can dismiss it every time as me and other survivors just happening to have been playing DBD for a while. I think it shows Solo Queue can escape against Skull Merchant, as long as people do not give up.
For some players, SM might not be fun to go against, and that I can understand. But ever since her rework she no longer causes an actual problem for the game, as her original version did. It is no different than Legion.
In my opinion, there are worse killers in the game to go against. I don't mind this iteration of Skull Merchant that much.
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I believe everyone can agree that she isnt a high tier killer like how sadako's previous iteration(she was still a low tier killer even tho her killrate was very high). But all you are showing is proving that the community values a killer that is fun to go against. Regardless how strong or weak they are. If the community believes she is unfun to go against even though she isnt even a strong killer, then the devs need to do something about that once again.
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Dude, that doesn't make you a "master", but still makes you far more experienced than the majority of players one is likely to find while playing the game. This new match results you just showed had a p. 58 Dwight with strong perks and an Iri add-on. That's way above average. I also had a 4-man escape against a Skull Merchant recently, but guess what? Not only there were two P100 survivors in my team who were playing really well and even made a perfect FTP+Buckle Up play once, the killer was playing far more chill than this other two SM matches I showed: not camping, avoiding to tunnel altogether, not 3-genning and only focusing on chases against a different survivor everytime. That is clearly different, and according to unnoficial data (Nightlight), less than 14% of her games end in 4 escapes (That's less 0Ks than Bubba, who can just facecamp at the endgame to garantee at least one kill), while according to OFFICIAL data, she is the only killer in the game who has an average kill rate that is closer to 3K than to 2K.
But do you think the average survivors can counter these scenarios in my screenshots? The same average survivors who struggle against proxy-camping Ghostfaces vs a proxy camping Skull Merchant with a large drone area occupying the path to the hooked survivor AND who gains haste everytime someone gets scanned? The same who take long to find gens in indoor maps vs a killer who makes entire rooms and corridors hostile to traverse?
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FINALLY SOMEONE WHO GETS IT. I struggle to put it into words but you put it together completely.
people try to compare her to clown or any other anti-looping killer but deem as nothing different from clown cause his bottles are technically stronger then her hinder and speed boost but fail to understand that skull merchant just gets free stats and upper hands in chase with VERY minimal effort. Clown has to think to throw his bottles and none of them injure you cause he has to go through the effort of m1’ing you and he has to reload themWhile SM only needs to press a button and now the survivor has to crouch or stand still during chase to avoid scans while giving more then enough time to just m1 you to death OR you just eat the scans and she just becomes faster and you eat a m1 anyway and depending on you’re scans that don’t go away by the way you just become injured and hindered while she moves faster and she just need m1 you once all of this from a press of a button and SM mains wonder why nobody likes her cause her counterplay doesn’t apply to chases and she’s just wins chase with minimal effort.
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That may be, but I don't think this fits the topic of discussion here. The thread is about SM being difficult to handle in Solo Queue, and I'm trying to prove that she can be beaten.
Whether or not she has to be changed due to fun, or lack of, seems to be a topic for another discussion.
Well, I can only share my own experience with ya, just as you can only share yours.
You have screenshots of two trials where survivors struggled against Skull Merchant's power, while I have screenshots of two trials where they didn't. I believe both are valid for our arguments.
From my understanding you don't consider our experiences as "average", but I don't think it invalidates them. The scenarios and situations we've seen with Skull Merchant are undeniably helpful to help us paint a proper picture of her current state in the game.
Otherwise, there is no way for us to progress this discussion any further.
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Feels like it's a lose lose situation when discussing SM with someone who dislikes them. If I talk about my SM games mostly consisting of 3-4 man escapes, people will chalk it up to me being bad at the game which is fine. If I talk about the few games where I got a 3k/4k, people will use that as basis that SM is strong against the average casual solo queue survivors.
I'm also getting similar vibes from this thread too.
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I personally believe her kill rate has been artificially inflated by players refusing to face her & immediately giving up in her trials. And this didn’t just begin with her rework. It started when she released & could stall matches with a 3-gen strategy. I’m sure if the devs didn’t consider these games her kill rate would still be high, but I also suspect it would be less anomalous. She’s oppressive yes but she can be overcome.
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Just calmly disable drones, her power is one of weakest of all the killer roster, definitely easier side even as a solo que
The only problem is people don't even try and immediately giving up
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I think people overestimate way too much the number of people that would DC just because of her released version. Maybe that could be said in the first month after her rework, but it's been seven months now, it's not like people haven't noticed how much she changed. The Legion used to be a DC magnet too before they got reworked, but people didn't keep DC'ing six months after that. People give up against her because of how she is NOW, because the lack of room for counterplay, because playing against her feels awful and she still wins most of the time even when nobody gives up. Having a very simple power that is just too hard to counter for most people is what makes her stand out in kills.
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Oh, now tell me how the survivor who got downed in the first screenshot should "calmly disable the drone" that was in the middle of the room that was the only short path to the hook while Skull Merchant was proxy camping with haste. Please, tell me.
She is NOT EVEN NEAR the weakest, and if she was "definitively easier side even as solo queue", she wouldn't have the highest kill rate in the game.
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Proxy camping is a different matter because survivors are never meant to rescue camped survivors alone
doesn't matter what killer they use, your team is already doomed, and using kill rates proves nothing because that only shows how flawed those kill rates are
And realistically she shouldn't even get haste when they are proxy camping, there is no way survivors are "forced" to take claw trap unless they just fail to disable drones
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Ok but this does fit the topic of discussion. You might be attempting to prove that she can be beaten thanks to a few lucky survivors on your squad that were willing to stay. However it still doesnt change the fact that the majority of the community do not like her because she isnt interactive or skillfull like the rest in the cast which leads to ppl giving up more likely in solo q. We wouldnt even be continuing to have this discussion many times on this forums, if she wasnt a problem for this community. Regardless, she will be dealt it in the future
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Or perhaps we have a problem in community, than in a killer, and maybe that has to be dealt with
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Well the community are the customers. And they are always right. Even when they are wrong, they are right. And the devs are receptive anyways
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But there is good customer and bad customer, like the one who actually plays the game and one who just ruins a match for other 4 players
Catering to that bad customer would be disastrous for the game really
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They dont penalize people who give up on hook because by the game's standard, using your unhook attempts is a luck mechanic, and the devs don't ban people for that. And letting go on 2nd hook, they dont ban because anyone can say they just left the room or had life issues to deal with outside of the game. So they dont ban ppl for it. Its too much to monitor for them so they dont do it. But if they want to leave the match, its there and its their decision and the only thing to penalize them.
Post edited by Rizzo on0 -
They don't penalize it only because they can't distinguish legit and non legit one, that's it, twisting it like they are allowing literal throwing isn't great really
Post edited by Rizzo on1 -
So you're basically saying that proxy camping is already really bad for the survivors, a killer makes it WORSE and you think it's fine? There wasn't just one person there because of coincidence, there are less survivors rescuing when the survivors have less time to do anything. We were in an indoor map where she was making whole paths hard to cross with her power, one survivor was injured AND WITH DEEP WOUND because of her power, which would make her to easy to down in an atempt to unhook too, the other was the only one doing gens and we were solo. The one that was coming at me should have been able to at least hook trade, but because of SM's power we BOTH took a hook stage and she got a snowball. It DOES matter what killer they use.
One thing is saying kill rates are flawed or that they don't tell the whole story, the other is invalidating and ignoring them completely, which shouldn't ever be done. If a killer has high kill rates, it has because of a reason. The Dredge has high kill rates because of map travelling and Nightfall mode, the Cenobite has even higher kill rates because he has an extremely strong passive effect that messes up survivors, specially uncoordinated teams, first rework Sadako had it because it was way too easy to get a lot of value from her power and kill people early, and could be quite hard to counter it, average survivors died all the time, and I believe the Skull Merchant has way too high kill rates because of that too.
If you're saying that "realistically" something shouldn't happen but yet, in reality, it keeps happening all the time, than there is something wrong. Good thing the devs don't say "the problem is on the community, not the killer", because if they thought like that this game wouldn't have survived for so long. This dismissive talk doesn't help at all.
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This new match results you just showed had a p. 58 Dwight with strong perks and an Iri add-on. That's way above average.
I disagree. That is nothing too special anymore. I'm a pretty bad survivor. I can play around some killer powers but put me against someone, who knows their craft and I am hopelessly outmatched. But I still see survivors like this as my team mates. Prestige is not an indicator of skill and iri addons aren't all that rare anymore.
SM is a killer that cannot be beaten by a series of good 1v1s but only in the 1v4. Meaning, when you're not in chase, you need to spread out, disable drones in crucial spots and most important do gens. That doesn't make her overpowered. It just makes her terrible to play against. Especially in solo queue, where you sometimes have survivors that lost their last 2 brain cells in the lottery.
I have tried SM a bit over the last 2 days because I had 2 dailies for her. It really wasn't hard for me to put drones in places where survivors had no counterplay in chase. In the few instances I actually messed that up I just kept changing the rotation so that the beam was basically frozen in place and survivors had to run through. It's cheap, it's easy and it's uncounterable. But it's also kind of her only strength.
Because outside of chase SM is really not good. Her map pressure is pretty bad because drones don't affect survivors that aren't moving. So you can sit on a gen in a drone's range and nothing will happen to you. The same can be done when approaching a drone. Stand still when the beam would actually scan you and then come closer when it passed through. Plus, there seems to be some kind of bug with her radar, that also makes her tracking power pretty much useless.
So the way to beat SM is as uninteractive as her chase because, if you engage in a chase then you already lose. Meaning, rather than playing against the killer, you play around them. The difference is that in playing around them, your goal is to minimise interaction. This is what in my opinion sets her apart from other difficult killers to play against. Hag for example is more engaging because interacting with her power will lead to her chasing you eventually. The same goes for Pinhead (and he also has more counterplay in chase). I reckon that this is at least partially the reason, she is so disliked.
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Then it is their fault for leaving the game just because they do not like the killer. And we shouldn't change killers due to bad behaviour.
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Kinda funny how Doctor has an abnormally low kill rate because killers don't play him, he is used to farm… and Skull Merchant has an abnormally high kill rate because survivors don't play against her, they just instant kill themselves.
It's almost like not playing the game skews the results. Crazy.
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Matches with DCs don’t count toward a kill rate. Matches where survivors run up to the killer to die, go idle and die, or give up on hooks do affect kill rates. And people absolutely did those things against SM before her rework. They’re still doing it now, of course, but I want to emphasize that it happened before her rework too.
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