8.3.0: SM's New State is Catastrophically Bad
Everyone knew this was going to happen. Let's go through the changes to Skull Merchant with a nit comb and talk about what makes these changes such a comprehensive failure.
- Stealth Mode going means that the setup playstyle where you leave drones in the environment and hide them to catch people out is totally invalidated.
- Moving at 110% while holding radar out punishes you for using your tracking power to track Survivors. Yay, I love being encouraged not to use my power outside of chase or track Survivors who are Clawtrapped!
- The fast vault change combined with moving at 110% while holding radar out means that drones in tiles are more trouble to use than they're worth 90% of the time. If you can get Survivors in a position where the drone can scan them, you're almost always better off just not using your power and M1-ing instead. That takes a full health state, doesn't make you 110%, works with Bloodlust and can actually hit Survivors vaulting pallets and windows.
- Lasertagging doesn't work: your drone beam doesn't spawn consistently out of the front any more, but instead at a semi-random angle. This means that placing your drone intelligently in such a way to light up a Surv with your beam by aiming it at them does nothing, meaning you're 110%-ing yourself, burning your power cooldown and breaking Bloodlust for a power that has a 90% chance of doing absolutely nothing even if you aim correctly.
So you can't trap, you can't precisely aim, and rotating a drone already placed in a tile slows you down, takes several seconds to start up between placing and pulling the radar out and is countered by a Survivor using a pallet or window. The anti-chase power is hard countered by a Survivor's basic chase mechanics. This Killer's power literally has nothing you can do any more; every mechanic she had has been removed or made unusably restrictive.
In my first game against new Skull Merchant, she didn't even get a single Lock On stack until three generators were completed. Not a Clawtrap, A SINGLE LOCK ON STACK. Clueless Survivors will still lose to her but only because someone on their team gave up (or because they're so incompetent they would lose to a Killer without a power.)
One beam Merchant with no Haste was a great idea to rebalance the Killer away from randomly hurling drones at tiles and encouraging a more methodical and strategic play style around precisely manipulating drones. With these changes, the only rebalancing that was done was rebalancing her into the dumpster, and the only strategy you can use to win is the strategy of not playing her and playing any other Killer instead.
Players both in and out of the Skull Merchant playerbase left plenty of feedback both before and after the midchapter PTB to provide suggestions and signposts to make Merchant a healthier Killer without slaughtering her, but it fell on deaf ears. (For what it's worth, I will be leaving my own suggestions in another post in the appropriate section of the forum). I truly wish I was not so angry, I know BHVR has a lot to do, but it is not acceptable to leave a Killer in this state for a year: something has to be done, and quickly. If you could find the development time to hurl my favourite Killer into a mincing machine and call it a balance patch, you can find the time to fish her out again.
Comments
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BHVR needs to stop hunting harmless mid-low tier killers for sport. I genuinely do not understand how anyone could look at old skull merchant and think she needed this harsh of a nerf.
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Probably the most unfortunate part of all of this is that we’re inevitably going to be back in this position whenever SM 3.0 releases, because then she might a slim chance of being playable again and the player-base that somehow still believes that Chess Merchant exists will hookicide or instantly DC, go to Twitter, write a essay on why SM should be nerfed, and the mass whining will get her dumpstered again
We wouldn’t be here if BHVR didn’t fumble her launch harder then Blizzard fumbled Overwatch 2, but unfortunately that’s the cycle we’re in
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sm 100% needed changes but it feels as if bhvr somehow tried to gut the killer, which I kind of get, if you basically freeze sm by making them completely useless it means that sm will be less hated, which sure ig is an option. overwatch did it with brig and she's pretty liked now despite her release state.
but the issue is they tried to strike this inbetween and it just ended up messy and gross, they really shouldve just gave her speakers basekit and the one beam and she'd be significantly weaker but atleast the players who love her arent ######### over. Hell even changes such as increasing how long drones are off for or decreasing clawtrap time would make her alot weaker but atleast that character at it's core is the same. it's upsetting to know she's gonna be frozen for atleast a year now
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gonna add because i didnt explain it well at all, freeze as in they basically do nothing. it'd be fine if the character's core was kept she was just made weaker but they did significantly more than that
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I'm not gonna sugarcoat it: Your rework should have been considered or at least partially implemented from the start, Pixel.
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haven’t played SM.
When placing her drones, is it kinda like a nurse blink?
Holding the placement button causes it to fly to the point (or go up/drop down at the point), with the point going further and further away until the maximum?
(Probably being able to cancel it like a huntress hatchet)
Or is it just dropped at your feet?
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This game needs better information for players to access, and this nerf cements that idea in my head. The lack of knowledge on how to handle certain killers is kinda ruining some of them with these updates.
Heck, I went against an SM yesterday and 3 people still DC'd as soon as they saw her. I know there's the 'boring' argument, but that doesn't hold water when SM was called boring enough to nerf her to this state for a year+ until her rework. Can't really argue for boring when players asked for this.10 -
There's so many underlying things wrong with the way BHVR manages things and Skull Merchant is no exception. The ironic thing is if their goal was to gut the killer and prevent people from killing themselves on hook against her they failed at that too because they kept the thing that everyone hates about her in as you and Scott both said. I'd be willing to bet that people are STILL going to hook suicide against Skull Merchant and she's still going to have a kill rate that is not remotely proportion to her ability.
I really wish I could gather a bunch of people and create some competition and learns from the mistakes from those that tried. DBD has to be the worst balanced game that still gets actively updated and it's no wonder everybody gets excited (then let down) whenever something looks like it might be able to get BHVR to raise their game.
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It's deployed at your feet, and the initial beam where the drone turns on deploys in exactly the direction you were facing where you pressed the button. This was a technique called lasertagging, where you could line up the beam on top of a Survivor to give them an instant stack.
Well that's dead now lol
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Oh, so survivors had no chance to dodge the initial beam? And also probably favors high DPI to flick to a beneficial angle on button press if dealing with corners?
Was that indicated in the power description? Or just a commonly used tactic that arose from the technical implementation?
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They did. The beam takes 1.8 seconds to deploy: 1.5 as she puts the drone up, 0.3 while the drone turns on. This gives plenty of time for the Survivor to dodge the beam.
In addition, the range is extremely limited, and if a Survivor stands still or crouch walks instead of running the drone won't see them, they won't get a clawtrap and the Killer will be forced to basic attack instead.
EDIT: You can't flick a lasertag: the drone stays where it was when the Skull Merchant deploys it and it will always spawn EXACTLY where you pressed the button, before the animation to deploy it starts. It does not benefit high DPI. It's not in the power description, but BHVR intentionally added it when she got reworked this time last year. It's not a secret tech: it's how the killer is meant to work. I just named it.
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I'm not the biggest SM fan, but these are some ridiculous nerfs. What is she supposed to be good at? How is her power supposed to be used? The changes force SM players to lean into parts of her kit players hated the most (drop drone at loop, stand there and rotate beams). It's a bit worrisome that we're at this point and it still doesn't seem like they know what players didn't like about her.
Given how the Twins rework took 3 years and was DOA immediately when it hit the PTB, I don't think we should be giving the benefit of the doubt that a solution is forthcoming.
Players are always going to harbor a hatred towards the character because she's not what the community wanted. Not after Knight. I remember when her reveal hit and players thought it was a joke. She was yet another A tier killer with an autopilot zoning power on release. And she coincided with the Overbrine meta. Did you ever eat a food as a child that was so horrible you never gave it another chance? That's what is happening with SM. It doesn't matter what they do with her power. These nerfs aren't going to fix anything.
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hmm, okay, so at the very least it’s a zoning tool, though unfortunately with no indication of a beam prior to the beams activation without prior knowledge on the survivor side of how it works.
A potential zoning tool, and an area denial tool, potentially an information tool, that is also entirely reliant on the SM having traversed the point of placement of the drone.
So ultimately making her feel more like any other kind of zoner Killer, just that she leaves behind drones as she patrols.
… As far as drone concepts go, the placement is kinda dookie. Seems more like a camera. Would be more interesting if the drones could be placed forward, and survivors then needing to navigate/crouch the beams up ahead. Or placing it farther away at a generator to get a read on who’s there if it does an initial scanner pulse/ping of some kind.
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Just had a game with a 3 man out (basement with NOED) and she didnt get a single claw trap off the entire game. One other person got scanned once because they body blocked for me but they chased me the entire trial and even i only got scanned twice after two hook states.
She's literally worse than trapper lol
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Yeah, they went too far with Skull Merchant, this is excessive.
I've only played against her twice after the nerfs dropped. The second got lucky with a 3-gen and a DC, but the first was literally powerless against us, there was nothing she could do. Skull Merchant barely has a power, and it is awful to think she'll be stuck with this terrible state for a year, at best.
But then again, this isn't anything new. I know better than most how it feels to have your favorite character left to rot for years. The only difference is that, throughout the five years he has been left in a bad state, Freddy wasn't always weak. At first he was just boring, now he is weak AND still boring. And, funnily enough, also scheduled for a rework in 2025.
Freddy is a perfect example of what not to do with a character if we look at his history: nerfed a week after release, reworked into something that completely deleted his identity and playstyle, nerfed again and then left without changes for a long time. SM got part of that treatment, a treatment that clearly should be avoided at all costs because it only creates bad situations. There is a reason why no one likes Freddy's current iteration.
And considering the history of reworks we have, there is a chance the changes will fail and nothing will be fixed. I don't wanna be the bearer of bad news here, but the situation definitely isn't looking good.
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She never ever should have been released in the state she was. As has been pointed out previously, she arrived at the time when Eruption and COB were the meta and people were already extending matches by 3 genning with The Knight. Skull Merchant played into that meta even more, blowing the Knight out the water at it.
I started playing around when Artist was released, and 3 gen matches with SM were miserable. The worst experience imaginable since I've been playing. Most survivors haven't forgotten that. Then she was reworked and her powers changed a couple of times. She produced so many status effects that so many survivors didn't have a clue what was going on and again if you didn't know what was happening, again. it was miserable.
I didn't mind her previous state to this rework, but this is crazy. She never stood a chance of being accepted from the start and don't think that'll ever change; even now!
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What Behavior did to the Skull Merchant is nothing short of disgusting.
However, there is an upside to this.A decent chunk of the community is angry about this, and are rallying behind the Skull Merchant. By trying to kill the Skull Merchant, all behavior did was make her stronger, in a way
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Probably the most surprising twist I've seen from the community, after seeing her being hated for a long time.
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There's a lot of good things articulated well here. It's all been said in different ways before but it's well said here. The food analogy is absolutely spot on. They would have to completely redesign her in one of the many ways I've seen, even rename and redesign her base apperance before she has a chance of being accepted.
The worst part about it is that it's self perpetuating. People who want easy/easier wins and don't care about other people's enjoyment know people suicide on hook vs. Skull Merchant, so they play her and make sure to check as many 'you are not going to have any fun this game' boxes as possible. People then complain about Skull Merchant and BHVR's data supports this which we know they don't understand correctly only looking at raw numbers rather than how they got there. I wonder if this trend will continue seeing how weak she is now, but my money is on yes.
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I don’t really understand any of the changes they ever made to SM. All people ever asked for was to not let her put a drone up in the same place once it had been deactivated for a certain amount of time and to not let her overlap the radi of multiple drones. Everyone seemed to concur on this yet they’ve reworked her about 3 times and never really improved anything.
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I really hope she doesnt get any more changes/updates until her rework in 2025. Instead of wasting more time and resources for a temporary bandaid solution, they should focus on the big rework instead. Im sure there are also many other things way more important that they rather work on. Just accept your killer sucks for now, this is the nicest way to do it without kill switching the character. You have to understand that there are also 4 other players on the other side of the end that have to deal with this annoying killer, and we had enough of it. This is a big relief.
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I honestly could not comprehend why they would leave her in a worse spot for both sides
So why should we trust the devs in leaving skull merchant in a year for her coming rework
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Im so glad I got her adept before this.
But this also proves that her power is problematic at its core and unfixable. She needs to be as Pixel once said "get Freddied". Her power needs to be completely changed. And I'd do it to make her a hybrid of Singularity and Pinhead. Set up a drone, let us look thru the drone. And then like Pinhead control the drone like his chain. Lets just dive bomb the drone at survivors. Make her a pseudo surveilliance/cross map range killer. Survivors can hack the drones still to disable her power. Play with some numbers and cooldowns. Forget the whole laser tag, claw trap, haste and whatever mechanic. Just fundamentally change how the drones work, because no amount of whatever these "reworks" are is fixing it5 -
I'm glad the drone orientation was being pointed out because I thought I was going crazy or something. I was playing a bunch of matches with low power mode and drones would veer randomly 15 degrees to the left or right of where I was pointing at and it's so annoying. It kinda kills the playstyle that the addon offers altogether because what's the point of using it if the drones don't orient themselves to where you want them?
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This is not intended as far as I'm aware so this will be going to the team for review.
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Genuinely they should just hire Pixel Bush here to do the next Skull Merchant rework because it’s very clear that BHVR doesn’t know at all what to do with her at the moment or at all, so they should just bring in someone who very clearly knows how the killer works and knows what good for her.
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Very glad to hear that at least for sure.
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Oh no they didn't try they straight did with the first set of proposed changes. A trap power that doesn't work well as a trap power and blood lusting literally being better than to try and hinder the person mid chase.
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The nerfs don't change the fact that her power is still extremely badly designed. She required far more effort to counter than she did to play, did not have adequate counterplay, and got way too many things for free just for existing. She can't be salvaged with nerfs, she needs a rework and her power needs to be changed, but she deserved to be nerfed in the meantime. It's a bandaid, and admittedly not a very good one, but she was far too problematic to be allowed to remain the way she was for the next year.
They should fix her bugs including with the drone beams facing the wrong way initially but other than that they shouldn't spend any more resources on her until she's reworked. There's no fixing her current iteration, her current power will either always be obnoxious or terrible.
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Dang I didn't expect a response but thank you very much. That's reassuring to know.
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Remember BHVR, the forums do not represent the majority of the playerbase. Almost everyone I know is happy with these changes and thinks you should have even went further with them.
Post edited by Rizzo on4 -
Hey good sir! Good to see, that you have found your way here as well. Enjoy your stay!
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I feel like survivors know they can just give up in matches and get whatever changes they want to killers they dont like now. Congratulations BHVR for creating this type of metagaming.
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Waiter waiter more obnoxious killers to go against like basement camping bubba please!
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For a moment I really thought they went back on the single scan line and gave us two back. When I loaded into a Custom match to see how her new haste feature worked, I was shocked when I discovered you have to get a survivor scan within 5 seconds of a drone placement to get it. This makes her weaker than the knight. You can literally just hold W and you won't ever be caught.
Having 1 scan line makes her drones that easy to avoid that you're basically just an M1 killer now.
I have nearly 6k hours in dbd. 50/50 Killer/Survivor and all the time I spent on killer was Skull Merchant. Now I have to wait probably longer than a year before her actual changes come through.
As a lover of Dead By Daylight, I'm filled with sorrow and my motivation to even touch this game have dwindled.
From the OCE's inclusion to SEA servers, making every game feel like a sweat laggy toxic filled session, to the only killer I actively enjoyed playing being gutted beyond recognition. I don't know if I want to dedicate any more of my time to this game, because you never know when your favourite aspects of the game will be gutted and changed.
This was not a good job Devs…
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Old Skull Merchant was weak and whatever, but they can't keep a killer with a 80% killrate in the game. They didn't have time for a full rework and decided to put the killer "on hold" for now so that there are no outliers in their stats. I think this was the best way of doing it. Either that or a Killswitch.
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That's the problem. The killer wasn't good but had high stats. Thats not the killers issue, thats the survivors refusing to play against a killer they don't like. Nerfing the killer to put her "on hold" is honestly pathetic.
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She definitely needed changes: I don't think anyone is arguing that she didn't. But the changes they chose to go for were way too heavy handed and, in my opinion, came from a position where they didn't understand the Killer well enough to know what to do. It's like the Hillbilly changes from years ago when they realised his addons were a bit too good so they added Overheat and smashed the Killer with a welding mallet where he was underwhelming for years, except worse because Billy's power at least FUNCTIONED on a fundamental level.
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bvhr doesn't care. they only look at survivor's fun and not killer fun. too many survivor were d/cing so BVHR decided to do something about d/cs. now we're stuck with weak version of the killer for some months till rework.
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All of these changes feel awful, but the biggest biggest problems I have so far are the removal of stealth mode, the removal of one beam, and the slowdown when using a drone.
The removal of stealth mode is the most mind boggling choice, as it removes her as one of the very few trap killers we have in the game and makes skull merchant an exclusively anti-loop killer, which is what survivors complained about the most about her in my experience. She isn't even decent at being an anti-loop killer either, due to the bug with laser tagging and the ability to ignore drones entirely if you fast vault. In this regard she feels like a significantly nerfed version of Clown.
The removal of one beam also hurts her significantly in my experience and seems to make her too easy to play around, but that could just be a skill issue, and I could just need to get used to it.
The slowdown is also a baffling choice, as you get a measly 5% haste for tagging a survivor. That is the exact same amount that you slowed down for simply using your power in the first place, meaning you functionally get nothing.
I genuinely think SM might be one of, if not the worst killers in the game now. There is almost never an instance where using your power would be better than M1ing. Even Freddy, who people consider to be a terrible killer at least has some form of map mobility and can slow survivors significantly easier than SM can.
I really hope the upcoming rework actually happens and isn't thrown on the back-burner like Freddy, or abandoned like the Twins were. And if it does happen I hope it at very least brings back her trapping playstyle, because it was so much fun.1 -
All of this while Nurse still ignores the very fundamentals of the game. There are so many perks and mechanics that simply can’t be in the game because Nurse exists. But no, these mid/low tier killers are way too problematic for the game.
the fact that someone at bhvr came up with these SM suggestions and someone else okay’d it is very worrisome for the games future. And let’s not forget all the other reworks we’ve had like Twins, pig, freddy, sadako, billy etc. Is anyone actually trusting that when the SM rework finally arrives it will be well implemented?
Get your ######### together bhvr and if you can’t figure it out on your own, LISTEN TO THE COMMUNITY AND PLAYERS who have thousands of hours of experience on certain killers and the game.
I genuinely feel so bad for anyone who enjoyed playing Skull Merchant, as someone who played Sadako since release, I know how frustrating this is.2 -
If people giving up and refusing to play against a killer is enough to get them to be completely gutted, doesn't that set a horrible precedent? People seem to really hate Clown and Trickster, so if people give up and decide not to play against them should they also be nerfed into the ground until they can get a full rework?
I really don't think killers should be ruined like that simply because people don't like them, because it will allow people to weaponize it.4 -
Yeah, I think SM's the worst Killer in the game right now. With lasertagging fixed then maybe she's better than Freddy and Trapper and Myers, but in her current state… yeah she's in the toilet.
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She is easily the weakest killer in the game now. Well done cry baby survivors, you won
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Genuinely should of just kill switched her and refunded people for points invested. Cause sadly that's a better decision that whatever lazy balancing this is.
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I mean, if people are giving up SO MUCH then the design of the killer is very bad and needs a rework anyway (?). Hopefully without gutting completely that kille, but I think doing it one time is fine as long as they don't get too comfortable with it.
I've been saying this since Skull Merchant 1.0, they told me that the killswitch was a drastic measures for fubdamentally broken things, wich skull merchant 100% was. Now with skull merchant 2.0 I was kinda fine, was painful in soloq but with my other friends it wasn't really a big deal. I didn't like the place a drone at the pallet and just get tons of value, but knight was kind of the same "just leave to loop" play style so I just held W while people worked on gens. But one thing is I'm not the whole dbd player base, I like to maximize everything so I knew how SM 2.0 worked, maybe more casual gamers didn't and couldn't really understand (there's no way of knowing she has haste unless you read it), I agree with what @PixelBush has answered to me earlier, but maybe they just didn't have that much time? I think doing it once is forgivable, for the first time there was a really big outlier, what's unforgivable is how they messed up a killer power twice after 8 years of game development (especially SM 1.0)
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My opinion on her is still the same no matter how they try:
They should remove her from the game (and compensate her mains, ofc), rework her from the ground up, maybe even with a brand new power, change her lore so it's not a mess, change her base cosmetics, so they don't look so inconsistent, and after all that, re-release her back into the game.
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Thanks at least us survivors managed to get the game about .0001% less killer sided.
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I actually love her music as well as singularity's. They both sound like they would fit in a terminator movie or something.
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If we're exterminating characters that people who don't like them don't like just because they don't like them, then I have a small list of characters I'd like that done to. I physically can't play as or against Spirit because my hearing is bad, for example, so should she get pulled apart to accommodate me? Singularity's lore and visual design is a complete joke that makes Skull Merchant's look flawless and his power is a snooze fest, especially after the huge buffs he got, let's drag that robot to the scrap heap!
Why are we so insistent on carving up a Killer just because people don't like them? Every Killer has people who don't like them. There is no compensation that BHVR could reasonably give for straight up deleting my favourite character, especially if the lore and visual design and everything got changed too.
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