A Better Direction For Skull Merchant

jesterkind

The latest design preview is up and showcases some potential changes for the Skull Merchant. I think those changes are broadly quite bad for a variety of reasons, but I think there's a few things that could be nudged in a different direction; the devs seem to want to make Skull Merchant's drones far more active and personally controlled, and they want to streamline her power to be easier to understand. These are both understandable goals, so here is a direction for them that I think is more appropriate for the Skull Merchant.

We'll be breaking this up into two broad camps, the Drones and her Global Detection Power that the devs have a version of in the design preview that I shall humorously be calling Big Sister as a placeholder name.

Drones:

In the broadest sense, the drones would be very similar to the way they currently work. Five of them, rotating beams (ideally two), running through them adds a stack of Lock On that could be avoided by crouching or standing still, three Lock On stacks applies a Claw Trap, and survivors can hack them by doing the short minigame to disable them.

Like live, they'd also spawn active. The main difference is that Lock On and Claw Traps no longer directly injure or apply status effects. Instead, the power works like this, bullet pointed for ease of understanding:

• Lock On still puts survivors on the radar. This has always been the gimmickiest part of SM's power, but it's thematically important, so it stays.
• Active drones can still be rotated. It's a small detail but it raises her skill ceiling, so it stays too.
• Active drone beams can be "electrified", causing them to speed up and apply a Hindered effect for a short time. This is the big one. If you want the drones themselves to be impactful, you'd need to actively electrify them with the right timing to hit survivors without them ducking or standing still to avoid it. If successful, they'd scream and be Hindered for a short duration.
• Claw Traps auto-apply the Hindered if a survivor is in the drone's radius when the button is pressed. If you keep messing up the timing or the survivors just ignore the drone's beams entirely, you get one shot at applying the Hindered on a survivor with an active Claw Trap. This process would break the Claw Trap, so you'd pick your moment carefully. It's still just Hindered, after all, you'd need to be able to close the distance for the hit.

The goal here, which I hope is clearly conveyed, is that the Skull Merchant player would need to put active effort in for the drones to function in chase, but there's leeway for not needing to play absolutely perfectly to get something since you'd still get info and you'd get one shot at Hindered for getting a Claw Trap on someone.

There'd still be incentive to engage with the power's interaction for engaging gameplay, since there's risk, but it's also a lot simpler and less punishing than the current power. Dodging beams is good and you want to do it, but if the beams aren't electrified, you're not actively harmed- and your teammates can't give her Haste anymore, which is a bonus.

Big Sister:

This would be the other thing that Lock On does. The Skull Merchant would have a power gauge, potentially one that auto-fills slowly like Blood Fury and Nightfall but potentially only filling actively, that ticks up every time someone gets scanned by the drones.

When the gauge fills fully, a loud audio cue plays to inform survivors, and the following effects occur:

• Any survivor not crouching is revealed on the radar. Similar to the dev's Red Light, Green Light suggestion but still covering survivors performing actions. The goal is similar to the dev's design preview, give her a state that leans heavily into her surveillance concept, but give survivors some methods of stealthing for the duration if they need to.
• The Skull Merchant becomes stealthier. This could be achieved a number of ways, from her getting Undetectable to the survivors getting Oblivious, or even something fancy like replacing her terror radius with a lullaby of ominous whirring drones. The goal here is to let SM act on her information better.
• Drone beams are electrified for the duration of Big Sister mode, but cannot be sped up. Simple enough, her ultimate mode makes the drones a little stronger. They can still be dodged by survivors and rotated by Merchant, so it's not a guaranteed hit by any stretch, but they're a bit more potent.

The goal would be something similar to the Dredge's Nightfall; a short burst of unpredictability that causes a bit of a tense scramble without really being too disruptive. Certainly less so than Nightfall itself.

Miscellaneous:

A few extra details I'm putting at the bottom of the post to not clutter the main power description.

• Obviously, with Big Sister mode being so heavily focused on stealth, it's likely that Merchant also getting Undetectable from deploying drones would be a bit too much. This could of course be tested, and either way I think keeping the smaller terror radius she has now would be appropriate.
• Deploying a drone should, ideally, slow the Skull Merchant down more than it currently does, to incentivise placing them ahead of time instead of trying to zone survivors away from loops. This version of the power would be even weaker at doing this than the live version anyway, but discouraging that boring gameplan is good in general.
• Since the Skull Merchant would be expected to interface with the radar a lot more, to rotate beams and electrify them, it should be much smoother. A toggle to bring it up/down, and the options coming up a lot quicker, would be appropriate changes.
• To emphasise counterplay both in and out of chase, hacked drones should stay disabled for longer, encouraging the killer to go out of their way to replace them instead of just waiting out the duration.
• A LOT of these numbers would need to be fine-tuned and I don't have the know-how to even make reasonable pitches for them, so consider this a broad overview instead of a hyper-detailed pitch.
• Older power effects could be grandfathered in via addons that disable other elements of the power. For instance, a brown addon could replace a Claw Trap's auto-aim on the Hindered zap with pallet breaking, like the original Skull Merchant had, whereas an iridescent could reintroduce Haste for individual scans at the cost of removing other elements.
• Survivors should have some way of knowing when they're on the radar. Maybe the PTB's old eye symbol, maybe something else, but that's important for people knowing what's going on.

TL;DR:

Drones now only apply Hindered and must be manually activated to do so for a short window, and in exchange, she gets a stealth-and-info focused ultimate mode like Nightfall or Main Event that builds up over time.

I feel this would preserve more of Skull Merchant's identity while moving her towards the direction the devs clearly want, without homogenising her into another dash/projectile killer. This power would be much more streamlined, much easier to understand and more intuitive, and would require active engagement to use.