My take on the second Skull Merchant design

WeaverReaver42

Two Prefaces for this-

First of all: Not having an official place for people on the forums makes this WAY harder to respond in a way that isn't guaranteed to get lost in a tide of comments. I'm sure the devs are looking plenty at the Pixel bush post, but due to being a content creator there will be some bias for or against what they have to say on the topic. The way you did the previous preview was great- it allowed a somewhat centralized location to discuss the potential changes, but also didn't force all of us to ONLY talk about skull merchant in the rest of the forums if we wanted to be heard.

Last preface: I want it noted that despite how harsh I am here, that is because I LIKE what they were going for in skull merchant. Trapper was my favorite killer for the longest time, and thanks to the buffs they gave him a while back- has become so again. Skull Merchant got me hyped we were finally getting another killer of a similar play style (hag is the ONLY other trap killer I can think of). Simply put- I am biased IN FAVOR of skull merchant on principle. Any criticism I have is coming from a place of what I was hoping for when the killer initially came out, and how I feel would best fit with the killer without being unpleasant to play as or against.

___The Post____ (I copy pasted this from my response on steam, as I am unsure if they read those comments, but it gets across what I needed it to)

As it stands- this is actively a hard downgrade compared to the last preview. It's just worse for the person playing as her in almost every way- while only having a slight improvement when considering the overall themes of the killer. You made it harder to capitalize on your traps, made the traps more easily avoided, reduced the threat of her traps, and the detection from your power is LESS CONSISTENT than last time while also being totally out of the killer's control. It feels like the design is moving in the opposite direction: forcing the killer to hunt down survivors directly, rather than having drones do the finding for her while she closes in.

1: stealth drones and global detection are too easily noticed and countered, making it more difficult to use your power because it gives you NO information without any counter (besides just going over there personally- but that goes against the inherent design of SM)

In depth: Being able to avoid both drone lines and global detection with just crouching on it's own makes the power entirely worthless unless they are already running away from you. You can't apply the claw trap on the survivor if you don't know they are at the area, At least the previous version the different forms of detection covered the weaknesses of the other theoretically. Now you have to spend every other moment swapping from skull merchant to a drone, which unless it works like singularity that is A LOT of time wasted for an information power and a CHANCE to injure. There also is no indication that crouching wouldn't also negate your detection from the global effect even after you apply the claw trap. If true, the global detection would see no real benefit from the claw trap either way and you would just as easily lose a survivor even without them taking it off.

2: The traps themselves aren't an individual threat. The EMP dart is only mentioned to come from your personal drone- which negates any lethality your stealth traps COULD have without you there. It also doesn't help that the survivor might get the claw trap off before you arrive. This happening means you still couldn't use the dart to put them in the dying state, negating your power entirely. That forces you to already be near the area, going against the play style and missing the point of this preview's design and the killer at a conceptual level.

In depth: You have to connect to that drone so you can ATTEMPT to INJURE a survivor and give a claw trap, reducing the threat of each trap by a LARGE margin even compared to the previous option of just throwing them at a survivor. The only good part of this ability is it doesn't require them to trigger either your drone or the global detection, otherwise you wouldn't be able to use this part of the power AT ALL. However, along with the issues mentioned about tracking, the inability to put a survivor in the dying state without your personal drone forces you to move there directly so you can actually make use of your personal drones and darts- which functionally negates the value of having more than one trap since you can only be near so many at once. It also means that you are wasting time putting traps down outside of where you are already close to, patrolling the map as a killer whose entire power is detecting survivors through traps seems counter intuitive.

TLDR: survivors have to actively ignore the trap and refuse to crouch in order for a drone to warn you of them, which makes your drones and global detection worthless for information. The personal drone being the only option to put a survivor in the dying state restricts your ability to adapt and threaten areas effectively as this killer without being personally nearby. The power feels like it fails in the most basic aspects of what was advertised and requested, at least in my perspective.

I'm sorry this probably comes off as harsh, but I am genuinely upset because the previous design felt like an amazing step in the right direction- and this new iteration felt like you doubled down on the worst aspects while neutering the parts I was excited for.