Skull Merchant Design Preview 2 Feedback: Leave the dash, take the Drone Buddy.

curiousTerminal

Long and short of it: Design Preview 2 is built on the back of the first design preview which I did not want for Skull Merchant. A new killer sure, with some kinks to iron out, but not her. Drone Buddy, however, would be an excellent addition to her current kit, for reasons I will detail below.

In order to better understand why Merchant needs this rework, I'd like to describe what I, as a Skull Merchant lover, believe is the main issue with her power, as it was prior to the 8.3.0 nerfs. It's two problems in a trenchcoat, really.

First is that the moment-to-moment state of what she was capable of doing was absolutely not communicated to the survivor in any reasonable way. Her current movement speed was changed ever so slightly incrementally via tracking survivors on the radar, information the survivors do not have access to. And as MFT proved, a 3% movement speed difference can make a world of difference in chases. It's important to know what the killer can do to you right now if you hope to avoid having it done. Blight has his charging animation and yell, Huntress visibly and audibly readies a hatchet, Kaneki's tentacles glow bright red/blue. Skull Merchant sauntered her default saunter 4% faster.
This leads to the second problem, informing the first: Survivor teammates making a mistake remotely could change Skull Merchant's lethality for whoever she is chasing, without warning. If I'm running for my life at the helicopter on RPD and someone in the library walks into a drone beam, Skull Merchant has gained pressure on me for what my teammate did. And if I'm not in active communication, or looking at their profile on my HUD? I don't know they've been scanned. It's not uncommon for survivor mistakes to lead to negative outcomes for other survivors on their team, but those are generally either done in close proximity to each other (an accidental bodyblock, a failed pallet save, an unsafe unhook), or it is extremely telegraphed in advance (Reverse Bear Trap kills, a 5-hit Legion frenzy, being caught solving the Lament Configuration)

Combine this with the status effect barrage of drone scanning (pinpoint accurate location tracking via the PDA, an injury, a deep wound, broken, hinder, haste on Merchant, and with addons possibly also oblivious, an aura reveal, exhaustion, hemorrhage, mangled) and it's no wonder that survivors had trouble with her.

The 8.3.0 nerfs did solve problem 1 and 2 by tying the main chase ability of her haste and hinder into drones she's actively interacting with, and making it a consistent number. But it also left her without the majority of the lethality she enjoyed from her status effect barrage, despite its continued presence.

This is where Drone Buddy comes in.
Keeping Skull Merchant largely as she is currently, the addition of the EMP dart from the Drone Buddy would satisfy several major complaints from both killers and survivors. Remove the haste, hinder, and possibly even the deep wound from gaining a Claw Trap. Take all those status effects and put them to rest, finally. A survivor with a Claw Trap being susceptible to a small range AOE downing effect gives Merchant back the lethality she lost in 8.3.0, and reduces the complexity required to understand her power on survivors down to the following:
Avoid the orange beams of light. If you get hit by one, Merchant can see your exact location on her PDA. Get hit by one three times, you get injured and she gains an AOE dart to down you. Disable the beams temporarily by hacking a drone. Keep a watchful eye out, because she gains brief stealth after putting down a drone.
That's simple! It's elegant! It leaves in the skill expression of setting up a web of traps for later use as well as the active component of drone rotation for scans to access the real lethality of your power. Stealth players keep their stealth, chase players keep their chase, trap players keep their web and cheeky drone placements, and survivors no longer have to do trigonometry while running for their lives.

The stated goal of this rework is to reduce her complexity, right? Make her easier to understand? Design preview 2 is so long and contains so many specifics, it gives Skull Merchant so many half-powers. It increases the complexity of her kit a LOT and requires players who may be coming back from a break to relearn her entire kit again. Keep it simple.

EDIT: I'd also like to see the return of Stealth Mode drones, but with Low Power Mode built into them, for use as a kind of tripwire, with manually rotating them turning them on to active rotation mode, but if the goal is simplicity then I can live without it.

SoGo

This could be a nice way to do things.

Keeps both sides somewhat satisfied, and keeps the trap playstyle.