My personal thoughts on how to rework Skull Merchant.
First off I would like to simply add that I am one of many unhappy with the changes to Skull Merchant in this PTB. I will not go into detail on what I don't like but instead I will share roughly how I believe she should be reworked in order to bring some skill expression into her power.
I believe it is important to focus on the area where skill expression exists. Which I believe is "laser tagging", when you place a drone to instantly tag a survivor. The issue is there is no way to see this happening. Holding m2 will charge a laser scan that is instantly released when the bar is full. You'll pull out a drone which shows a visual laser of where you'd hit and scan, think Dracula's hellfire or Pyramid Head's shock-wave, this gives one stack of lock on. This drone is not placed down on the map, it is just used to scan once.
To place stealth drones as a trap you use the "ctrl" key and they will not rotate to act as a better trap with skill involved in the placement. Drones are activated the same as they are now and enter the scouting mode which will have 1 scan line that is faster than it currently is. This helps to promote using the switch direction feature to act as a skillful mechanic in chase. There will be a cool-down to changing rotation direction of course and there will be some sort of visual feedback to survivors so they can more easily see what is going on when the direction is about to change.
I also believe the hit-box of the laser beams should more accurately reflect the shape of the laser beams, the sort of triangle tapering from the drone to the floor further away. This way when you're closer to the drone (underneath it) you can just run underneath and not get scanned, and also if you're sort of in the middle crouching will get you underneath the scan line and you won't get scanned. But, if you're on the outer edge you cannot crouch the beam at all. Standing still and working on a generator will still avoid being scanned.
Furthermore, add some sort of counter-play to switching direction of drones. Perhaps hacking a drone disables its ability to be switched directions, or hacking a drone disables it for 30 seconds (is currently 45 seconds) and let's say anywhere from 15-30 seconds after the drone comes back online, the Skull Merchant will not be able to switch directions. It's in a half hacked state at this point. While hacked or half-hacked, the drone cannot be recalled.
To add to all of this, haste and stealth should both be removed from her power as to focus solely on tagging survivors to injure them eventually and tracking them with claw traps. The hindered penalty should return to 10% but reduced to 4 seconds in duration instead of 6. For some context, Clown hinders at 15% for 2.5 seconds and requires a lot less work to achieve that strong of a hinder. The hinder was fine as a consequence to getting a claw trap
I strongly recommend at least considering ways to rework her that will add more skill to her power and add skillful counter-play. I am not a gave developer, so these ideas may not be fully fleshed out, but I'm hoping these are good ideas to consider moving forward with this PTB and/or further reworks or tweaks to this killer.
Thank you so much for reading <3