Musings about the Skull Merchant buffs
So Skull Merchant is getting these changes tested in the PTB:
Which I must say, this surprised me, cause it is returning elements the Skull Merchant had before, which were, as we know, largely, and sometimes unfairly, heavily maligned... I assume the power Overhaul is still coming, but this did get me thinking about what if buffed variation of Skull Merchant, somewhere between 3.0 and 2.0 came back instead, but with some new ideas?
One More Skully rework suggestion for Old Times sake?
I used to post endless suggestions for Skull Merchant, and since this may be the last time do so (and not to be taken too seriously), I'll make one more punt at her.
So in addition to the changes above, I would add:
- Fix the deployment position and direction of the drone to be at the end of the deploy animation instead of the start.
- Drone count is increased from 6 to 8 drones to assist with area control and preventing hold W to defended tiles.
- Undetectable when placing her drones is removed.
- Stealth drones brought back into her kit, and are the deploy state of drones.
- Stealth drones have no circle underneath them to give away their presence.
- Stealth drones spawn with 2 invisible scan lines instead of 1. The drone is stationary and does not rotate.
- While holding the radar, use the "rotate" function while targeting a Stealth drone to immediately switch to a Scouting drone, giving an Enhanced Scan, retaining both scan lines for 3.5 seconds (equivalent to just over 1 full rotation) before returning to a normal Scout drone.
- Scanning a Survivor a single time with either a Stealth or Scout immediately applies a Claw Trap. Stealth drones switch to a scouting drone, the initial forward facing scan line on deployment being the single scan line.
- Optional: The enhanced scan will also reveal Survivors standing still or crouching on her radar, but will not apply a Claw Trap. This allows her to monitor gens, but also gives an incentive to try and disable drones.
- Claw Traps no longer injure the Survivor.
- Survivors suffer the Oblivious status effect when afflicted with a Claw Trap.
- Whenever a claw trap is first applied to a Survivor, or a Survivor is scanned with an active claw trap, the Survivor is "Locked On" for 12 seconds, indicated by a red border on their HUD visible to both the Skull Merchant and the Survivor.
- A Survivor taking damage during Lock On will apply the Deep Wound status effect, and the Broken status effect for the remaining duration of the claw trap.
- Disarm mini game is extended to 8 inputs.
- Disarm mini game has a time limit of 6 seconds. This is to make is so wandering around disabling her traps is tricky and has some actual time pressure, where Survivors trying to interrupt her are more likely to make mistakes. The stealth drones as well also are harder you find and can be manually triggered, so interference is more difficult.
- Failing to disarm a drone will immediate apply a claw trap.
- Failing to disarm a drone with an active claw trap will immediately Lock On and injure the Survivor.
- Optional 2: Triggering an enhanced scan when an drone is being hacked with cause the hack to fail.
Goals
The key point I feel is getting claw trapped doesn't injure the Survivor, instead it reveals their location for 45 seconds via the claw trap. This feeds far more into her surveillance part of her lore. In conjunction with Oblivious, that creates a paranoia on if Skully is actually coming for a Survivor or not.
You also don't have this annoying "I have 2 stacks, though I do have an m1 here, I need to screw around trying to get my third scan" problem... instead you just take the m1.
Overall this version Skull Merchant is much more of a set up/trap killer, with the goal of orienting her drones in sneaky locations to catch Survivors during rotations to hooks or gens, and to assist her with downs by pushing Survivors into her rotating drone beams in they stay or her hidden static drones beams atnither paths for the slow.
I opted to remove her Undetectable from her drones, because it's clunky and weird to have to throw a drone in a random location to get access to it, and simply she doesn't have enough buttons to spare to have Undetectable. While Oblivious IS another status effect slapped on to her kit, at least it does actually feed into Skull Merchants stalk and hunt her prey idea quite well. She has seen you, and she is coming, but you don't know where... and as a bonus she has this without having to have it annoyingly compete with her drone placement.
I feel like this would be pretty fun, she'd have lazer tagging on drone placement, but she actually does have to aim it dead on the Survivor and time it with when the drone is actually placed; she isn't gonna get the sweep to help her either, at least not without an enhanced scan. Timing a enhanced scan would also be pretty fun to deny a Survivor hacking her system...
Ultimately I feel she is still an m1 killer here, and has to win actual m1s for downs, but has a weaker Clown slow and perfect mind games to help her, in conjunction with stealth to exert pressure.
It won't happen…
I know this will never happen at this point... but it was fun to think about 😅
Comments
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Some of those ideas are good. The problem is that her issue was that survivors had too less of a information what is going on. Current Merchant is ez to understand. If she deploys drone, she's stealthy for the moment and if you get scanned three times you get injured, therefore you have to crouch to force m1 before third scan.
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I mean, cheers for commenting dude, I fully expected this thread to just insta-die... 😅
Hmm you raise a fair point. The stealth drones do make it hard for a newbie to figure out you can crouch by. Maybe if you crouch for 1 full second while having LoS of the drone, the stealth scan lines reveal themselves in grey, standing up the effect lingers for 1 second, and switches the colour to the orange lines before it fades out again?
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An issue is when lines are always visible it just means drones are completely useless outside of chase.
Stealth drones made it that you had at least a chance for survivors to run into them. Instead of completely removing this, they should have just remove broken, so it's less punishing.1 -
Drones doing nothing out of chase is fine for me. I said they can make lock on decayable and return the claw trap on hack so you have more infor through game.
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Thing is there is not really reason to disarm right now when it doesn't affect survivors on gens. You can easily ignore all drones.
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While I think that Claw Traps and Lock On are fine in the current form, I kinda like the Stealth Drones and the Enhanced scan. Also I like the Oblivious basekit.
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Aye, tried to solve that…
I have been pondering if the optional enhanced scan SHOULD apply a claw trap... since Skully herself has to trigger it...
The problem of course is that removes the crouch coubterplay completely... I thought of maybe having it apply a trap if performing a Conspicuous Action, but you literally just let go and it does nothing, so unless you get a wayward skillcheck that ain't gonna work...
Maybe if you use Oppression then immediately trigger it, but I'm really starting to reach now... and this line of thinking ultimately proved fruitless.
I figure the enhanced ability scan gives some additional options to Skully for her monitoring and chase, and ultimately because none of it cause an injury, even if you get tagged, it's not the immediate horrible feeling thing it was for Survivors.
I'm ofc aware she is not very strong on this configuration... I have been toying with the idea of giving her her old "claw trap breaks pallet and disables claw trap when the Survivor vaults a pallet" feature from version 1 Skull Merchant...
Though that does somewhat contradict the oblivious and broken "stalker" aspect of the kit... so not sure.
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