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The new Skull Merchant Design Preview will lead to unfun game patterns if implemented

VibranToucan
VibranToucan Member Posts: 674
in Feedback and Suggestions

Hello, I started to think about the Skull Merchants design preview as soon as it dropped. Reading it I saw an issue with the design and thinking it over I just saw more. One of the mission statements was "Preserve the intel focus of her kit, while making it intuitive to understand for both sides."

My two opinions are:

  1. New Merchant will lead to unfun, unintuive and downright stupid play patterns.
  2. New Merchant will not have an itel focused kit anymore.

What is up with new Merchant

Firstly, I go into this with the following assumptions:

  1. The Design Preview drops as it is with no changes or new additions.
  2. The cooldowns, speeds, ranges, etc.. are comparable to current Killers.
  3. Both the Merchant Player and the Survivors will know what they are doing.

The new Merchant is basically this: She has 5 Drones she can drop across the map. These Drones have rotating scan lines that can be clearly seen by the Survivors. Survivors can disarm the Drones, sending them back to the Skull Merchants Inventory. Being scanned will notify the Skull Merchant. The Skull Merchant can manually control Drones. Similar to how Twins controls Victor she just stands still will doing that meanwhile the Drone moves around fast and can do a dash attack. That attack will destroy the Drone and, on hit, injure a healthy Survivor and inflict them with a claw trap. They will seemingly have no effect on Survivors who are already injured and claw trapped. Drones have a power stat, this drains passively as the drone idels and drains faster as you control the drone. Power running out return the drone to the killer. The Skull Merchant also has an AMP dart she can fire with a short cooldown. On impact it will create an area. It downs any injured and claw trapped Survivor in that area. In addition to that, on a regular cooldown, there is a global detection power that reveals the aura of any walking or running Survivor.

So lets look at how you would play as and against the new Merchant.

To me there are 3 ways I imagine you could use the Drones.

  1. You place them in areas Survivors are likely to be outside of chase, like Generators, exit gates or choke points.
  2. You place them in areas Survivors are likely to be during chase, like in or between loops.
  3. You keep them with you and place them mid chase.

Lets imagine how gameplay would look in these scenarios.

Placing Drones in important areas

The Skull Merchant walks over to a, lets just say generator, drops a drone. What then? Well you walk away if you stay there Survivor won't come there and just do other gens. So you walk to another gen. While you are gone a Survivor comes over sees the drone and disarms it. Remember: This is new Merchant. Disarmed drones come back to your inventory and are gone until you place them again. Sure you could walk over there, but assuming you see other Survivors anyway, why? So you can be a M1 killer with essentially no power to a a healthy Survivor. Assuming you have a hunch of any other Survivor thats closer, there is no reason to do that.

Which is why I have my second conclusion. She isn't really an intel Killer. Global Deteciton Power is intel I guess but like the only way any experienced Survivor will be affected is if it triggers mid chase. Otherwise they can just start crouch walking. And the drones have very visible scan lines. The only way they detect anyone who knows what they are doing is because that person chose to disarm it. That would be like saying Cenobite has an intel kit because he gets killer instinct on someone opening the box.

But back to the drone. Lets say by some miracle you get an Aura Perk trigger or somehow the Survivor doesn't the scan lines or you happen to randomly control the drone at the right time or something. Great so you use the drone for the injure. I will get to issues with attacking with the drone later, so lets just assume you land the hit. What now. You walk over there, shoot them with the dart and down the Survivor, right? Well the Survivor isn't stupid. They won't wait for you and let you shoot them. They will start by getting rid of the Claw Trap ASAP and they will likely have gotten rid of that by the time you found them. So after putting in all that work, you are a M1 killer with no power to an injured Survivor. Not great either. Lets compare it to other Survivors that can easily one hit Survivors with M1. Legion can enter Frenzy again, Ghostface has crouching and no terror radius, and even Tier 3 Myers has faster vaulting speed and a lot of great add ons. Skull Merchant would take longer to get to that point and still be a M1 killer with no power against this Survivor.

Preplacing Drones in or between loops

Alright, so placing Drones in important places does not work in any way. But what if you preplace them in loops? You place them down and once you chase a Survivor there you take control of it and fire it at the Survivor and use the EMP Dart to get the follow up down. Sounds like a good plan. But it still has a lot of issues. You have 5 drones. So you can cover max 5 loops on the entire map. Survivors, if they notice the drone will disarm it if you are not there and avoid the loop if they are actively being chased (more on that later). Even if you can interrupt them with your drone while they disarm them ahead of time, odds are they are going to remove the claw trap in-time so while its a hit, you can't really capitalise on that. Also remember: The drones only last a specific amount of time, so you would need to go out of your way to reguarly replace them. So while it will give you great value if it works, odds are its not going to work.

Placing Drones mid chase

This is what I think will likely become the most common way to play her, maybe combined a bit with the previous playstyles, depending on how easy recalling drones is. With the EMP dart seemingly being a combination of Huntresses and Unknowns projectiles, getting the down on claw trapped Survivor will be very effective. So you drop a drone in a loop mid chase, then use that drone for the injure and use the dart for the quick follow up down. With both EMP and drones being strong ranged attacks, and the alternatively being a M1 with essentially no power, I honestly think people will do this even on injured Survivors non-claw trapped Survivors.

Which brings me to my next topic:

Issues with attacking with the drones

The drone dash attack seems extremely problematic. There seems to be no thought given to Survivors hiding in lockers which makes the "attacks while the Merchant is on the other side of the map" from the first possible use for the drones way less effective. Then we have another problem. Lets look at scan lines since I think its a good comparison. If you watched prenerf Skull Merchant (2 rotating Scanlines) you sometimes saw Survivors starting to crouch walk mid chase. Why? Well lets say you are healthy have been scanned twice:

  1. You can let yourself get scanned. This opens yourself up to being double tapped. Even if not any further Scan slows you. The Skull Merchant does not get slowed from you being claw trapped, rather she gets haste meanwhile you get hindered.
  2. You open yourself to get M1ed. This does not let you get double tapped. The Skull Merchant is on M1 cooldown and therefore is slowed and cannot use her power. If you get scanned again it puts you in deep wounds, and increases the speed difference, which is not nice but better than getting that on the first hit.

So while its not 100% of the time, if you are healthy you'd usually rather get M1ed than claw trapped against pre nerf Merchant. You might see what I am getting at here. Lets say you are healthy against new Merchant:

  1. You get hit by a drone and get claw trapped, allowing the EMP follow up down.
  2. You get hit by a M1 and are injured against a killer with essentially no power.

This will lead to frankly absurd situations, where the Survivor will ram their face into the Merchant trying to avoid the drone and using the Merchant as a shield, or they might jump into a locker mid chase because the Merchant took control of a Drone, waiting for her to switch back to jump out, or similar behaviour. The Skull Merchant will know this too and try their hardest to get a Drone Hit even if the Survivor is healthy, just so that they have an ability to use the EMP against them. This will lead to optimal gameplay from both sides being absolutely stupid with the Survivor trying their hardest to avoid a drone, completely willing to take a M1 meanwhile the Skull Merchant doesn't M1 to not give the Survivor a speed boost and tries their hardest to hit a Survivor with a drone. You might compare this to killers like Plague, Bubba or Huntress who would also rather use their power than M1 in many scenarios but these are different. For a variety of reason.

  1. Ease of use. These 3 killers have a frankly simple to use power. Its literally just "hold the power button." For Skull Merchant it would be to place a drone, wait a bit, take control of it, press the power button to hit the Survivor, press the other power button for the follow up hit.
  2. Counterplay. The way to avoid Plagues, Bubbas or Huntresses Power requires you to stay away from then. Yeah Huntress and Plague also use LOS blockers, but you still have to stay away from them to counter their power.
  3. Reward. For Huntress the reward for hitting a power instead of M1 is a very shorter cooldown M2 still works on injured Survivors, even if the first hit was M1. The reward for Plague is that she can easily keep all Survivors injured, she can still switc to the projectile that always does damage (she starts with 1 infected pool and can get more through add ons). The reward for Bubba is a faster down but he can, and often still should, use his Chainsaw to get downs on injured Survivor to move faster or to break pallets. For Skull Merchant hitting the drone is a chore, if you get the first hit with the M1 you can't use the EMP for the down, and if you use a drone on an injured Survivor that is a waste of resouces because you wasted your time and gave free distance with the M1.

This playstyle will be completely stupid and unituitive, but it will be her strongest.

Which leads me to my last point

Unintuive

A complain about old Skully was that she was confusing, unituitive and complicated to counterplay. This rework is worse. Two projectiles, one that can't down and another that can only down, drones spiring to live, red light green light, etc… This new rework seems to hbe very confusing as well which kind of I thought was the point of this rework.

So yeah, overall this new Merchant is not an intel killer but rather a chase killer with weird unituitive gameplay and counterplay.

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