http://dbd.game/killswitch
Skull Mechant VS Dracula issue (Community double standart)
Hello people of the fog, I would like to discuss something that has been on my mind for quite some time now.
When Skull Merchant last rework (year+ ago) happend, people complained that her kit is complicated and overbloated. Haste that stacks and has diferent values based on different things, hindred, info, injure + additional effect with some addons, stealth. Lot of different effects. People really disliked her and she got nuked few months ago to become the worst killer in the game.
Now, let's compare her to dracula. So dracula has 3 powers, he can swap between them with minimum cooldown, he has anti-loop, dash, teleport, movement ability, info ability (orbs from wolf). He has pretty much every single thing in his kit than any other killers. Vecna is like poor forgotten sibling compare to his kit. He has access to pretty much everything in every given situation. So in other words, he has many different abilities slap together and definitly more oppresive than Skull Merchant ever was even at her prime.
So how come that Skull Merchant got nuked from orbit and hated into Oblivion… and Dracula just chilling fine top 5 killers in game with X effects in his kit same as Skull Merchant and nobody talks about it? Sounds like double standart to me unless someone can explain this to me.
Comments
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Also you can say SM takes way less skill to play and that's true, however still his kit is stronger and has more tools or better tools than she ever had with X different things slap together and everyone is fine with this? He takes more skill to play but he also has more tools than her and both killers had like X things together chained. Also for Survivors its harder to face Dracula than SM anytime.
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Dracula might have 3 powers but they're all relatively intuitive to play against. It takes a couple of matches most of playing against Dracula to figure out what each of his forms do:
- Hellfire is a medium range attack that functions similarly to other killers (Nemesis, Pyramid Head, and Xeno). It's well telegraphed, the range is clearly visisble, and the SFX and animations make it clear what you got hit by.
- Wolf form is a dash attack that functons similarly to other killers (Wesker, Blight, Demogorgon, Houndmaster). Again, it's telegraphed, and clear what you got hit by.
- Bat form is the only power he has where it isn't super obvious what is going on and requires knowledge of how the killer operates to counter. But I'd say it's evened out by the fact he's pretty noisy as a bat, has a lullaby, and his teleport is well telegraphed.
Odds are if a survivor doesn't know Dracula, they've at least played against one of the other functionally similar killers and can quickly clock on to his similarity and engage in the counterplay. But Skull Merchant is a complete oddity in the roster. There is no killer like her so the counterplay is novel, and none of her kit was intuitive or well telegraphed.
Loading in as a new player against is her like:
- "Okay there are Drones that give me a little triangle on my HUD when I get scanned, but other than that I have no idea what they do." —> "Oh never mind I'm injured, broken, and hindered. —> "I best try to hide" —> *gets found straight away because the game doesn't make it clear she can see your location on a radar*
- Later in the game… *gets grabbed off a generator with no warning* because unlike the other stealth killers she has no tell that she's Undetectable (Myers' breathing, Onryo's lullaby, Wraith's grunting and partial invisibility, etc.)
- And to make matters more confusing, *constant second guessing distances in chase and confused about why she's catching up so quick* because a teammate is getting scanned across the map but the game doesn't clearly indicate what's going on so you're just left wondering "What am I doing wrong?"
Of course I'm exaggerating somewhat but the jist of it is that she was just overwhelmingly confusing for DbD's (primarily) casual and inexperienced audience. And it didn't help that her players garnered themselves a bad reputation by playing in some of the most disliked ways.
Her individual power(s) might not have been all that great, the problem was they weren't intuitive to play against.
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Also for Survivors its harder to face Dracula than SM anytime.
For players who know what they're doing, sure. But that's a very small proportion of the DbD playerbase lol.
Most of the audience is very casual and does not know how all of the killers work. Which isn't too much of a problem because a lot of the roster is relatively simple and intuitive:
- Oh this guy goes invisible (Wraith)
- Oh this guy runs fast with a chainsaw (Hilbilly)
- Oh this guy puts down bear traps (Trapper)
- Oh this guy does a few things I've seen before (Dracula)
Skull Merchant's design was very confusing. Her lore, her power, her visuals. None of it was cohesive. So a lot of players saw her and were just left scratching their heads about what was happening.
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So we just aren't allowed to have interesting or complex killers because a bunch of people don't want to try or don't want to bother reading?
I'm sorry, but making 50 variations of Blight or Billy or whatever dash killer people might not despise at the moment is not a good or healthy design decision. At this point you might as well delete the entire roster and give one killer a million skins that change it into the other characters because that seems to be what people want.
No variety, no thinking, no effort.
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Pretty much. It's similar to the reaction when killers complain about gen speed. The go to isn't to nerf gen speeds it's "give the survivor's another objective because sitting on gens is BORING!!" then when they do that with Onryo, Pinhead, Skull Merchant, Thrill of the Hunt, etc. people go NO the survivor base is too casual/stupid for that!!!
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because a bunch of people don't want to try or don't want to bother reading?
Y'all on these forums need to realise the overwhelming majority of the playerbase are casual. As in they pick the the game maybe a couple of times a week/month and play only a handful of matches. Heck, a lot of the playerbase exclusively come back to DbD for events. The "bunch of people" you're accusing of not trying are the masses that keep the game alive lol. The number of people who have enough time and money spare to extensively learn the ins and outs of a game is relatively small. The number of those interested in asymmetrical online horror is even smaller. It's not feasible to sustain a game like DbD with only dedicated players in mind. If BHVR wants to keep the lights on, they HAVE to appeal to casual players too.
Most people don't want to spend their time reading up on the intricacies of 40 different killer powers, their perks, their addons, etc. Nor should we expect them to. That's a ridiculously high barrier to entry given how many killers there are nowadays.
Because of that, killers NEED to be intuitive enough that people can understand who they are and what they do after 1 or 2 matches playing against them. That doesn't mean we can't have complex killers, just that their power needs to be represented through sounds, icons, animations etc. in a way that makes it very clear what's going on.
Plague is a good example of this done right. She's relatively complex, and unless you'd read her power you wouldn't know exactly what Corrupt Purge (her red sick) does. However, when she gets Corrupt Purge there's a loud global audio cue, she glows red, and her sick changes to red. Loud noises and red are universal signs of danger. They immediately communicate, even to someone who doesn't know her power, that the killer has beefed up in some way and they should run or hide.
Skull Merchant just didn't have the same degree of thought put into her power. For example, it isn't immediately obvious that getting scanned by a drone is a bad thing that you want to avoid. Both the scanning noise and HUD indicator are relatively neutral.
The HUD indicator is also terribly designed. Instead of splitting the circle into thirds and having the bars fill in when you gain a lock on stack (akin to how Trickster's laceration builds), you instead get a tiny triangle in one of 3 easy-to-miss black gaps in a larger gold circle. To someone playing against her for the first time, it's not intuitive that you're building up stacks.
Them being yellow is another odd design choice, because yellow in this game is the colour used to indicate positive status effects and increased action speeds. She's just a messy killer.
We can certainly have complex killers, they just need to be better design than Skull Merchant was.
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I agree, however: -
- Skull Merchant was the poster child of the 3 gen/gen kick meta, which was a bit of a pain point on all killers, but Skully especially thrived on it.
- Her release was rushed and the false Predator hype, her lore, her appearance and her power didn't ingratiate her to players.
- The Chess Merchant game vs. Team Eternal made her a griefer magnet.
- After her rework, her power was heavy on loop cut off, while literally taking barely any effort on SMs part compared to Survivors (She never even had to switch drone directions at all, but Survivor had to track SMs position, current haste stacks, Bloodlust, drone position and current rotation, loop size and timings, current stacks of a claw trap,locations of other known drones, etc.)
- She was easy fodder for Streamers and Content Creators to dunk on for Content.
- Her rework massively improved her potential, but she still had problems, but instead of addressing those problems, the community looked at the previous points and decides they wanted her head, and refused to discuss anything about her.
I understand why Skully was done dirty like she was... but I see a killer that was interesting in a lot of ways, where although a lot of things missed the mark, there was a lot of potential.
If she hadn't been rushed out and had a little more time in development, I think she could have been a pretty good killer... the first strong setup/trap killer since Hag, which is my favourite killer archetype.
It saddens me how vitriolic the community was/is around her. Even though she's been cut off at the achilles tendon, and is basically an m1 killer with a bit of stealth and nothing more, so many people still wanna see her dead and buried... and refuse to offer anything constructive on how to make her better.
I can't help but think if she's that hated, might as well throw Trapper and Hag in the bin too, cause she was basically just a better version of these 2 killers.
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Skull Merchant was getting self-kill on hook/d/c. Dracula is not getting as many self-kill on hook/d/c.
every power is intuitive to play against especially if the player is exposed to the power many times…. like after 20 games against a particular killer, you should figure out what the power does by than. You can't learn to play against a killer power if your pressing leave match button on first down/self-suicide on hook and unfortunately, that was most of the problems with skull merchant.
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every power is intuitive to play against
I’m not sure you’ve understood what I’m saying.
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so the power is called Eye's in the sky. the killer literally has radar in their hand. Just maybe… the name and Radar in her hand might be a clue to her having detection.
Trap killers are not new. the very first killer, the poster boy is a trap killer. the trapper. For many people, this is likely the very first killer they have ever went against.
status effects? they're not new either. Broken is status effect all over plague's kit. Legion has deep wound. Clown and Freddy have had hindered icon for awhile. The orange scan lines, the dots on portrait. The disappearing of red light when skull merchant put a drone, indicating undetectable. in terms of killer powers, the survivor get more information on killer power than the killer.
the idea that her kit is not readable within like first 5 games even if the player has 0 clue about the game is wild. If something did not make sense, you can maybe spend like… 2 minutes reading the power description. at least for new players, otz recommend that every time they face a new killer, they take a little bit of time to read power description.
I read your post as excuse.
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Look, i hated playing against Skull merchant before she got changed to her current state. But even at her most hated state id rather go against her than a current Dracula due to how stupid the wolf form hitboxes are. They need to go back and figure out how to better balance the wolf hitboxes and maybe even the base range of the lunges. Disagree with me all you want, but to me he is overpowered still.
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Yeah you’ve completely missed what I was getting at
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The "bloated kit" criticism of the SM rework was more directed at the fact that her power relied on inflicting a disparate collection of status effects on survivors and buffs on her. A lot of people felt like the fact that her kit revolved around inflicting broken and hindered and deep wound on survivors all while giving her haste and undetectable and let her track survivors made her messy thematically and clunky to play against, a problem OnryosTapeRentals pretty definitively explained in their post. Despite this, I've actually seen a lot of people actually say that BHVR went too far with how they nerfed reworked SM. Most comments I've seen have suggested that only one or two buffs/debuffs needed to be removed in order to make her kit cleaner.
Dracula is more reflective of BHVR's more modern approach to killer design, where they seem to be trying to make killer kits more robust and multifaceted. You mentioned Vecna, who has a dash, an information ability, a zoning power, and an anti-pallet ability. In the previous year you had Unknown, with a ranged venom grenade and teleportation; Xeno, who has map mobility through the tunnels and a mid-range zoning ability with its tail; and Singularity, who has information through the pods, map teleportation, and a chase power with Overcharge. Dracula being able to shapeshift between three forms that give him mobility, in-chase dashing, and a mid-range zoning attack seem like they are following BHVR's recent design trends more than anything.
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I don't remember people complaining that her kit was complicated and bloated at all. Most complained that her kit was very boring on both sides and encouraged unfun playstyles. Mainly the chess merchant as she was called.
Because of that, even after the slight reworks people still loathed her so she got more or less nuked since she's going to get a full rework later
It's slightly similar to what went on with Freddy. Also sort of Twins but they're so rare to see that it's not nearly as big of an issue.
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it’s funny you mention that cause skull merchant actually did have a function to tell survivors they were being tracked
In the first ever ptb for her if you were scanned or had a claw trap on if she pulled up her scanner a giant orange eye would appear above the survivor indicating your being tracked and locked on
She did actually have a tell but it was removed from the ptb
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no i didn't. i am arguing that her power have more presentation than what your suggesting.
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So we just aren't allowed to have interesting or complex killers because a bunch of people don't want to try or don't want to bother reading?The key words here are 'a bunch of people don't want'.
This could be: 'a bunch of people don't want the color blue' and it would still apply. The bunch of people are also called customers. And this doesn't just apply to DbD, but any game.
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Remember that sick looking eye visual that showed up when she was tracking you on her first PTB? They could really bring that back to fix at least one of the confusing issues.
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Because people pick and choose when a killer is strong, how strong they are, and how much they need a nerf, and how hard they should be nerfed. As much as I disagree with a lot of people on here, they're making actual arguments, with multiple points and somewhat understand the game. Others, the majority, just want something nerfed because they don't like it, or because they see it too often. No nuance, no double perspective (they play only survivor or only killer), no real argument, just emotion.
You're right, just from skimming what you've said. Despite Skull Merchant being worse in almost every way (speed, anti-loop, adaptability, tracking), people wanted her nerfed way harder and way before they even thought of nerfing Dracula. Why? Because she could defend gens, have occasionally stealth, and was sometimes fast... Doesn't that describe what a ton of killers can do? Wraith, Ghost Face, Chucky, Spirit, Xenomorph? Or any killer with gen perks, stealth perks, or Haste perks? "Oh, but she gets those for free." No she doesn't. She gets those things at the cost of a real killer ability, with real lethality or map pressure.
Really, people cannot even deal with a basic M1 killer. And for new survivors facing experienced killers, maybe that's understandable. But MMR is meant to keep those groups separate. If it was working correctly, that alone would fix the issue, because killers at that low a caliber aren't playing to their full potential just like the survivors aren't. If you just apply that logic to any killer, suddenly lots and lots of killer buffs become justifiable, because it'll minimally help the lowest level, and maximally help the highest level (which needs it the most). Instead, what we have now is killers judged at their top level strength being nerfed for their performance against bottom level survivors, with arguments of shaky foundation and inconsistent logic (as you point out) to justify it.
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You hit the nail on the head! Perfect understanding of her problems explained perfectly. I hope she gets a proper rework though.
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She's not that much different from other killers, not to the extent you imply. You make it seem like nobody knows what her power is after 50 matches of playing against her. Aren't there tons of people playing who view Freddy, Ghost Face, Singularity, Unknown, etc the same? "Oh, it's Ghost Face. What the heck, I'm instantly down?!" You literally find out what Skull Merchant does after like 2-3 matches against her. Or simply play as her, that's a thought. Or just read her power description or look up gameplay on the Internet. That's not an unreasonable ask, and I'm sure 95% of the people who play the game have done just that for all the other killers that interested them or have given them difficulty.
Skull Merchant is just a character in a game. She's not info-immune in and out of the game, like Kira from Death Note or something. I'm more confused by how Sadako works, but that's because she's been changed like thrice, and I have just been too lazy to read on or play as her enough. And I've argued elsewhere here: Are we sure that the problem isn't with matchmaking? Because even if Skull Merchant is as convoluted as you argue, wouldn't that make it hard for the killer as well? Aren't new/casual killers just as capable of inefficiency and misunderstanding as survivors of that same level? And surely you're not suggesting that high level survivors just don't know anything about Skull Merchant either?
I know we've argued about this once before. If you're still not convinced, no point in beating a dead horse. I won't push the issue further. Hopefully we can agree on other things.
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These all can't be used at once, did you think of that? Skull merchant could also injure Survivors by spamming a button, is that fun or fair? No. Dracula has a cooldown on all these individual abilities, which are also quite counterable. Dracula has a skill ceiling too, its not like Skull Merchant where anyone can just press rotate at open loops and get free injures, you have to aim to get hits, it actually takes skill. Something Skull Merchant mains do not possess
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Actually good explanation of why Skull Merchant was ass.
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