How do you fix "the skull Merchant"

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.

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.

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.

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.

Complete rework.

You can polish a turd but it’ll just be a shiny turd.

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.

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.

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.

yay, nerf her into oblivion.Without any attempt to balance it. Why not remove her instead?

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.