Why was the intention to reduce merchants strength?
Many killers in the game are stronger than pre nerf Merchant.
Even excluding the obvious, killers such as Wraith, Knight, Doctor, Demo, are deemed stronger than her because of to what they have against good players.
Is strength only based on killrate? That seems like a very bad way to interpret them. I thought that changes were not done from stats only. I thought other factors were considered.
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I thought that changes were not done from stats only. I thought other factors were considered.Other factors were considered. People overwhelmingly hate playing against her.
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Basekit included: stealth, anti-loop, global map information on survivor locations, haste, speed reduction on survivors, and the broken debuff.
None of the killers you listed come close to how frustrating of an experience Skull Merchant is to play against.
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Their intention should be to raise her skill floor.
Some of the most employed SM tactics are boring, and require essentially zero skill. Deploy a drone in chase, inflict hindered and gain haste, almost guaranteed hit. She's just annoying to face, and a trained monkey could meet her skill floor.
The fact that of all the nerfs they threw at her the ones they are choosing to revert are the ones that most needed to be nerfed to make her less annoying is classic BHVR, and doesn't inspire confidence that they can salvage her.
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Yeah IDK. Kinda just shot themselves in the foot with the initial proposed changes then proceeded to make the boring way to play here the most prominent with the new proposed changes given that its only 1 scan line and only getting haste on rotation switch/drone placement.
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Okay but that doesnt indicate strength. A killer can be frustrating but bad at the same time. Strength and fun levels don't correlate. Plus fun is subjective, SM matches are some of my favorite matches.
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That doesn't matter when they said their intent was to nerf her. Fun doesn't equal strength.
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well they proposed to rework skull merchant and make her stronger later on. so at least she is not doomed like some other killers like ghostface cough cough.
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Don't forget deep wound, and lack of audio (like footsteps / breathing)
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Fun is subjective, but the fact that SM still has such a bad rep in the community to the point where she has consistently had one of the highest skill rates shows that a vast majority of the community heavily dislikes her. Like it or not, you are a part of the small minority that enjoys going against her, and while nothing is wrong with that the devs need to listen to the majority in this situation.
And strength doesn't matter in a game like DBD despite what people will say. This isn't a game that is balanced on strength because if it was the game would look and play completely differently. Looking at the history of DBD you can see that 99% of changes that happen to the game are directly caused by not strength levels, but fun levels, and considering SM is one of the most hated Killers in the game it's no surprise as to why she's getting the nerf hammer.
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How would you make a Drone killer have a high skill floor.
Only way I could see it is if we took manual control of drones flew around and shot claw traps at people
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Well here's the thing. Skull Merchant was never particularly strong. She was never a strong killer since her release. She was just considered annoying, boring and unfun to go against all because of one particular play style but that was changed since her release so she couldn't do that particular play style very well anymore but because she's so well known and established by doing this and making players miserable for only a couple months, its kind of become impossible for people to not hate her every time she's played. Once they see a Skull Merchant that little chemical in their brains immediately activate triggering their trauma. It's still quite funny thinking about it because players never understood that the Devs deviated away from that particular play style a long time ago but because the damage was already done the players just couldn't recover.
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So if I deploy a drone while in chase just to get the haste and hinder on a survivor to get this so called guaranteed hit isn't considered skillful then what is? I'm not trying to be an A-hole or anything I'm just asking. Because in that situation if I don't deploy a drone to help me... Aren't I just a basic M1 killer? I get no benefit in this chase at all. I either do the loop and get ran for God knows how long or deploy my drone to help me. So what I'm asking is what do you think would be skillful in that situation as a Skull Merchant to do?
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I think it is a case of "Legion syndrome" here.
Original release Legion was really bad, they would take forever to down you but they would eventually get the down and there was no counterplay to avoiding the down. People kept giving up or DCing against Legion since they were unfun to play against, and the level of counterplay was so low it felt awful to play against.
Skull Merchant does have some level of counterplay, but a lot of players feel like the counterplay she does have is pointless since it leaves you in a "lose/lose" situation. You crouch or sit still, you lose distance, you get hit; you run through her drones, you get tagged, you get hit from with a Claw Trap. OR You crouch or sit still, you lose distance, you go down; you run through her drones, you get tagged, get Hindered, you go down.
In terms of strength, she is on the lower end of things. Legion was incredibly bad on release despite the lack of counterplay, since it took forever to get a down, the Generators would get done faster than they could reasonably down a Survivor; Skull Merchant fits into a similar area, they take forever to get those downs, but they eventually will (against a majority of the playerbase).
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I agree.
Though there is a difference between the two, which is the community's opinion regarding those killers after they got changed.
With Legion, the hatred dissipated eventually. It took a little while, people didn't instantly love Legion after their original version was no longer around, but eventually people got used to them no longer being a problematic killer.
With Skull Merchant, the hatred is still around. Perhaps not as intense as it used to be, seems the PTB raised some sympathy for her, but people still don't think of SM as another killer who was once a problem, but no longer is.
It is interesting.
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