How do you fix "the skull Merchant"
The idea of this post is that you suggest your fixes and modifications in an uncomplicated and easy way for developers
Without spoiling the main idea of this killer power
Oh please don't make her power look too similar to another killer
The goal is to make it fun to play with or against It also made her have more skills to master
Comments
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Just delete her
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And all the killers
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Drop the Exposed condition from her power, it's not really adding much value and outside of literally doing the playstyle everyone hates you rarely get it. If all of her power is going to be in the drones then the drones need to be a more aggressive threat even if that would mean having one less drone overall to compensate.
What I would like to see is rather than dumping all of her power into the drones, they could keep the tracking utility and then you could give her a secondary chase oriented power directly or have her drones give her buffs with no delay or requirement like standing still so they can be more effective tools at a loop. Or fun thought, when she drones mid chase have it just automatically give a clawtrap to the survivor instead of a full deployment.
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Start end game collapse after 24 minutes and 59 seconds pass. Any remaining survivors will be killed by the entity and not count as kills for the killer. This will, hopefully, encourage the killer to go for some chases (once again, hopefully), and it will prevent either side from ever taking the match hostage for too long ever again.
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Here's what i'd do
- Drones that exposes a Survivor loses it detection radius and will instead solely follow after the first or closest Survivor it has marked (incase more Survivors got marked at the same time) for the duration of the Exposed Status Effect, during this period it cannot be hacked and it returns to the SM once the Exposed duration ends in any way.
- Drones that get hacked causes a cooldown before SM can put another one down.
- Giving SM remote control over her drones where it switch the FOV from SM over the drones, where you can move around with them and mark people, Survivors who gets marked by a drone while remote controlled has their aura shown for a few seconds to the SM.
- Drones can no longer detect through multiple floors.
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Can you clarify the second point?
I did not understand
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What about new players?
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Probably just scrap her.
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Seems like it takes a lot of work for an app like this
But as I said
The idea of this post is that you suggest your fixes and modifications in an uncomplicated and easy way for developers
Thanks for the suggestion anyway
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I really don’t think there is a fix for her unless just giving her a completely different power, but that’ll just be the same amount of work as just creating a new killer. She’s kind of a lost cause at this point.
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Basically, when a Drone has gone into rotation mode and a Survivor hacks it, the Survivor recieves the tracker which in turn slightly increases the speed of the SM, i'd also include slight increase of interaction speed per tracker as well.
While the tracker is active, SM will now be unable put down another drone until the tracker has either been destroyed by downing the Survivor or it's duration has run out. I'd probably also give Survivors with trackers on the Oblivious Status Effect too.
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You can't keep putting bandages on her over and over again. It gets embarassing at some point.
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Why do you think so?
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It's one thing to try to patch up a Killer's power, like Knight. Dull Merchant's power is good at precisely one single thing, locking down small areas.
Unless you literally completely re-design her at a fundamental level, she's always going to be a 3-gen Killer.
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Realistically all the proposed changes here will receive backlash and possibly some praise alongside it. You simply cannot make the killer balanced with the power she currently has. I made a discussion about her on RPD which proves how overpowered she is on maps with loops far apart due to STBFL and her drones that essentially guarantee an M1 before the survivor gets exposed. However, on other maps she has to rely on her three gen potential because she's too weak in chase. It's unfair that she relies on maps to essentially be able to actually use her power properly/abuse it. BHVR have spent so much time promoting the killer by retweeting fanart, adding all these buffs/nerfs, giving them a whole tome before survivors that have been waiting for so long but no one still enjoys versing them. By making that three gen perk have the extra repair speed bonus they were discretely trying to just nerf the Skull Merchant because no other killers really do that.
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The difference between SM and the other killers is that the games against the other killers (with the exception of Legion and Le Chevalier) can be quite fun.
SM is just pure noskill: I send a drone, I camp people, I drop chase, I stay on my generators.
His power is certainly the WORST power ever created in DbD.
Removing the fact that his drones can One-Shot survivors would be a good start.
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My suggestion is uncomplicated and easy by game dev standards.
My suggestion doesn't require them to make much in the way of totally new actions. Clawtrap deployment is rule change or addition where you don't even have to modify the actual values of the clawtrap buff Merchant gets since it is already pretty small. Getting rid of expose is literally getting rid of something that actually complicates the power. Giving her a chase oriented power can literally use code they've already made for Demo or Wesker with the modifications necessary to fit Merchant. The most complex part would be making additional animation for a dash/pounce on Merchant's model. Even the extra animation could be short cut by using preexisting animation and just doing the necessary rigging. It wouldn't look as clean as bespoke animation work, but it would be good enough for government work.
Skull Merchant's problems are very deeply rooted though and if the goal is to have not only just be less annoying for survivors, but actually be fun to play as because though I love her, she's not actually all that fun, chances are she's gonna need complicated work done. Generally speaking though, a lot of people on the forum don't even want to put thought towards making her actually fun and interesting to play or even just decent, they want to make her bad and useless to exact punishment against everyone who plays her since she's not getting deleted.
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Oh now I understand
But I think the rush needs some adjustment
I think it should jump and land on the survivor
But while jumping, she can't attack
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Not the worst power
There is a video of OTZ that proves the opposite of what you say
But if you have things to improve, even a little, such as (encouragement - more benefits in a particular aspect - etc.) So write it down
It is killer with simple power
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I don't understand why they didn't make the drones more like the singularity power. She can control the drone and look for survivors and claw trap them. Then she can get a small speed boost and they are tracked on her radar. And the power goes on cooldown. One drone, that's it.
Why should a drone be stationary. That doesn't even make sense.
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Well, you don't want her to rely on floored maps
So I think the detection area should be increased slightly (the detection area is 10 meters) so I will increase the range to 12.5
As some have said, perhaps the drone can be made to move with the killer for a while
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No Active Mode for Drones.
She can place drones anywhere on the map. Placement is akin to a Nurse Blink that shows where the Drone will be placed.
Drones can never be unhackable.
Survivors that trigger the Scouting Mode scan range have a Claw Trap shot on them.
Claw Traps last indefinitely and Break when a Survivor is put into the Dying state. (Or Vault a Pallet, destroying the Trap and the Pallet)
Having a second Claw Trap placed on a Survivor links both of them and causes the Survivor to enter the “Game on” state, being Exposed for 60s and triggering Killer Instinct for 10s. Afterwards their Batteries die.
Survivors can Hack Drones when wearing a Claw Trap.
(Still has the claw trap application for Hacking)
Basically the Skull Merchant will want to learn the best chokepoints to place a passive drone to take advantage of the scan angles. (Such as placing to scan gens)
Survivors will always be able to deactivate the drones somewhat easily, but the Claw traps will persist on them until they Hack another drone, triggering “Game on”, or get scanned while having a Trap on. Or if they get found with a Trap still on and Vault it’ll destroy a Pallet. So there is incentive to try and bite the bullet and trigger “Game on” under your own terms.
Might need to up the penalty for being in-chase with a Claw Trap…
In chase she’ll need to know the best way to place a drone and then route-shift to cut-off the survivor into her drones sweep.
She won’t be able to use her Drones in every loop given hold W, which is where passive placement and zoning survivors into corners will take precedent.
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Well, is there a cooldown period between drone shots, or is it like machine gun ?
Is it possible to add some improvements to the radar device?
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That literally makes her even stronger on RPD...? Might solve the issue on other maps but cause a bigger inconvenience on the rest.
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I mean to compensate the killer for using the floored maps
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Okay sure that might be a good change but you still haven't addressed how to fix how annoying she is on RPD. They literally use map offerings because they know how badly they can abuse their ability. You cannot fix an issue like that by lowering the radius of detection on maps like that otherwise no one will play as her. It's a dead end.
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Well, do you see that the problem is with the map or with the killer?
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Both. However, if maps don't have any major effects on other killers then why should she be an exception? Do you suggest reworking a map in order to accommodate a killer no one likes?
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Since you see the problem in the killer
So what do you suggest to fix and improve it so that it does not depend too much on maps?
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You can't without reworking her entire ability.
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She has win Freddy's hitbox!!
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Well what would you change?
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Genuinely, I think survivors need a way to take away drones more permanently. The fact she has 4 doesn't even allow survivors to prevent her from sitting within the same 60m of a map just W'ing to each gen. You take a claw trap, you get hit and she'll just place her replacement 4th back down and there, no progress is made. Even if you somehow manage to catch her at a point where all 3 survivors are able to sync their timings so that the drones: A) Aren't in the unhackable state and B) are not close enough to the killer for her to interrupt you, then even then that's now 3 survivors being tracked for the next 45 seconds and she can still lock off 1 generator after all of that. Claw traps need to stay on the survivor somehow, make some sort of debuff but dear God, there needs to be some longer way of removing her drones from her.
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Complete rework.
You can polish a turd but it’ll just be a shiny turd.
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Having a cooldown to put a drone every time someone hack one
No longer activate drones by distance, so she have to move if she wants to activate it
No cover two floors with one drone
And if somehow they rework her, maybe she can’t put drones over gens, but over structures that maybe block windows and pallets and expose you in ten seconds, idk
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That isn't an option if the drones constitute her entire power. This is a lesson it took the devs a couple years to learn with Trapper which is if you center a killer's power completely on or in an object that survivors can break long term or permanently the killer basically will end up in situations where more often than not they don't have a power. Skull Merchant's biggest issue is the fact that right now her power relies on survivors interacting with it for it's greatest value, but survivors literally have no reason to interact it with unless it is blocking them from doing their objective.
So we have an issue where your power doesn't really help you unless you do the strat that survivors actively hate dealing with. You can drop them at loops and try an use the undetectable, but more often than not dropping the drone just makes some run to next tile. Merchant doesn't really have an answer to other than follow and try to repeat the process. The current range limitations on placement doesn't allow drones to be close enough to overlap so you can't really create large zones when you have your active zone buff to try and chase survivors into. A lot of her issues stem from the fact that her power isn't well for the expectations they seemed to have had in mind for how she would be played.
So, giving survivors a way to deny her getting the use of her drones isn't really a workable option. If she were to be given a proper secondary power that didn't rely on drones then it would be an option depending on how it was handled, but even then it should be more than 12-16 seconds at most. The way DBD is currently plays out too fast to have power lock out moments that last past that amount of time.
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well said lmao.
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Let me refine that, more or less pounded out some surface thoughts. I'm not all that familiar with Skull Merchant or her Power.
From what I've read of her Power Description, and from what I've heard on the forums, the largest pain point about her, is her Active Mode, and how she can keep Active Mode up indefinitely, which is compounded in point-defense*.
An indefinite Active Mode isn't technically a bad thing, however what's bad about it is what Active mode does.
- A Survivor being in the Active Zone is enough to show the Survivors on her Radar, giving her wallhacks without needing to move at all when playing point-defense.
- SM technically gets a speed boost for every Survivor in the Active Zone, making her patrol or intercepts in point-defense easier.
- Depending on the scope of the Active Zone of a Drone, Survivors may or may not have that much time to repair a Gen if they want to dip in-n-out of the zone tapping the Gen, given the slow decay time of Lock On, and SM's intercept capability given wallhacks and Haste.
- If a drone is hacked while she's playing point-defense in a small area, it's trivial to replace it, resetting up another Active Zone. Which also gives wallhacks.
- Active Mode also is LoS independent, which means clever use of terrain can make reaching the Drone that much more time-consuming and interceptable while playing point-defense.
- Survivors that successfully Hack a Drone (which they do instead of repairing a Generator), can't Hack the drone she replaces if the Drone is in Active Mode. "Walking into the Area of Effect of any Drone while wearing a Claw Trap will cause the Drone to enter an unhackable state" (And she can keep the Active Mode of a drone up indefinitely). So deactivating the drone is a punishment and de-incentivized during point-defense, but required as it's the only counter-play during point-defense. #########?
Basically, Active Mode has too little counter-play, Skull Merchant has too little time-investment required to keep Drones in Active Mode at all times, and Survivors are punished too harshly when Hacking a Drone during point-defense.
*point-defense - What I mean by this is when Skull Merchant places Drones in a manner such that she has the least amount of movement required to reach her drones, the Gens she's watching, while maximizing the distance Survivors need to travel to reach her drones/generators within her Drones Active Mode.
My opinion is that instead of making so many rules, constraints, and numbers regarding Active Mode, focus on Scouting mode which has consistent visual counter-play at all times: Avoid the Beams. Play it off like she's playing a game with Survivors, and balance hacking under the assumption that she expects the Drones to be hacked, and the Beams to more or less be visual flair, a game to be played.
Also a Drone suddenly descending next to you on a Generator sounds terrifying.
Back to your response: It would not be rapid-fire unless for whatever reason the Survivor runs back into a Beam. so probably a 1s grace period after a Claw trap is attached to a Survivor crossing a Beam.
If you want to improve her Radar (and tying into the fact that Active Mode no longer exists in my suggestion), Maybe let her press a button to cause all Survivors in a Drones radius to suffer from the Oblivious status which lingers for a duration? "Press [x] to emit Noise Obfuscation"
Which also gives her a more easily used disinformation aspect to her Power. if she can set up zones where she knows Survivors will not hear her coming. Great if she can place them behind the walls to Generators, at the expense of being unable to force Survivors to deal with a Drone immediately if the drones scanner doesn't pass through the Generator.
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Honestly, I tip my hat to you😃
You are as if you were a doctor who was able to diagnose a patient's condition while dozens of doctors were unable
I have no objection
It might be the best suggestion I've seen😃👍🏻
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Appreciate it. However I haven't played as her or against her, relying mostly on prior experience with the game (not that the game has changed much over time) and YouTube vids. So not sure how well the suggestion would fit, if it detracts too much from the feel of her power, or if it would take too much from her chase, or other overlooks.
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She doesn't need much, at this point. People keep making her the scapegoat for the 3-gen problem even though it clearly exists outside of her, so now that she's had the change to how drones and claw traps work and now that the two most obnoxious 3-gen perks are dealt with, we'll be taking that off the table for discussion for now.
Which leaves us with Skull Merchant as played... I'd like to say 'normally', but it seems people not attempting a 3-gen are the exception and not the rule, so we'll say played properly. The problems she has, in my opinion, are similar to the problems Sadako has, in that the elements of her kit don't mesh as well as they should, leading to them all feeling weaker than they could be.
The biggest problem element is her stealth, insofar as she basically doesn't have any? There was a great video by Pixel Bush during her PTB that showcased the kind of killer she could be if her stealth was buffed, where she could set up webs of drones between generators that give her instant and lingering stealth for better map traversal, while also pushing survivors to leave their generators and actually travel to take care of the drones. I think leaning further towards this would both improve Skull Merchant's strength and remind people that she can in fact do things other than 3-gen defence.
So, my proposal would be something like: Remove the startup period for Undetectable, you just get it as soon as you enter a drone's radius. Given that it takes a few seconds for your terror radius to entirely shrink when you get Undetectable, I don't think that would be too strong. Additionally, I would propose that the Undetectable status should linger for a good handful of seconds, somewhere in the ten to fifteen range? With some addons tweaked to increase that number. To compensate I think it'd be fair to nerf Lock On, since it would be better served imo as a deterrent that pushes survivors to act a certain way, rather than something you're actually supposed to see straightforward value from; think Pig's RBTs being a slowdown tool, rather than a tool to pop heads consistently.
With these changes, Skull Merchant would have a lot more versatility, especially with addons involved. Players could build towards chasing survivors into drones for active effects and a chase-heavy playstyle, they could prioritise using drones for information, or they could prioritise using the drones to gain actually usable stealth, all having clear answers on the survivor's side.
Though, it must be noted that a decent chunk of the problem as it is right now can't be solved by balance changes because it's a community attitude issue. She's already capable of more than just 3-gens, but that doesn't stop the prevailing attitude from being the exact opposite. That part, I don't know how to fix.
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It has a problem, which is that the drones affect several floors
This is what makes it so powerful in maps with more than one floor
So I thought of making the drones only affect the same floor and to replace it, I will increase the detection range from 10 meters to 12.5 meters
And as you suggested, she will gain an effect once she enters detection range
She will retain this effect for 7 seconds when she is out of detection range
What is your opinion?
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The multiple floors thing can be an issue, though it kind of breaks both ways in that she may not be on the same floor as the survivor she's affecting. Still, in general I'm kind of in favour of deleting effects that travel through floors, so I'd be totally on board with that.
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Well what about her perks?
You may think that my words have nothing to do with my post
But as you read the title, "How do you Fix the Skull Merchant,"
power - add-ons - perks
I don't know why everyone focused on her power only
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I think her perks are fine?
They're niche, but they're perfectly usable. Thwack! is a perfectly usable tracking tool, Leverage is kind of inconsistent but does do something and it stacks with other sources of anti-heal, and Game Afoot is honestly pretty slept on, it's an Obsession swapper for when you need that and its actual effect is genuinely pretty useful.
I suppose you could buff them, but I don't think they're in an emergency state where that's of a high priority the way other perks might be. They're not meta-defining but they're mostly fine.
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I think Leverage needs a little buff
I will increase the values from 5 to 6.5 and the activation time from 30 seconds to 45 seconds
The problem you are talking about will be fixed in the future
The developers confirmed this
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You may be able to make excellent suggestions when playing with or against them
Your ability to analyze the problem without playing a single match against or with it It's very cool
You may be able to change it for the better when you try one match against or with it
Fortunately, the developers want to solve the problem (3 gens) in future updates
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yay, nerf her into oblivion.Without any attempt to balance it. Why not remove her instead?
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Funny is when boons work like this, it's fine.
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She needs a rework. Her power is near-useless in chase, her lack of mobility and the speed at which drones can be disabled means they just aren't that threatening unless she babysits them, and the small radius of the drones makes the stealth element of her kit almost useless. All this combines to create a predictable, one-note Killer whose power is on par with Freddy's for how worthless it is when it isn't being used to 3-gen.
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