http://dbd.game/killswitch
Skull Merchant SHOULDNT Be Nerfed... They SHOULD Be Completely Reworked.
To put it bluntly, I think the issue with Skull Merchant is her fundamental design with her power.
Im sure we've all seen the "Skull Merchant is like playing Chess" memes, or the recent Team Eternal match that took place (god help anyone who sat through that entire match).
From PTB to live, and even the Mid-Chapter changes, BHVR has constantly tried to refine Skull Merchant to make her better for all sides to play. The issue with this is that fundamental design of what they were refining was not well designed or thought out to begin with.
Think of it like this. If you have a lump of coal, you can maybe refine that into a diamond. Look at Blight for example, their PTB was really rough but they were slowly refined into a top tier Killer that a lot of people enjoy (aside for their strong addons).
Skull Merchant, in this instance, is lump a poop. Trying to refine a lump of poop still leaves you with a lump of poop no matter how hard you try to refine it. Skull Merchant's core design will always be flawed, and no matter what BHVR does to change it, she will always remain the same.
So what are we left with? Skull Merchant should receive a complete rework to her power, they need something that is exciting for EVERYONE, since it is clear that most people do not enjoy playing as or against the Skull Merchant, other than occasional masochists.
I would provide a huge essay on what BHVR could do but frankly there are many community made concepts out there that are far better and interesting than anything I can propose; also no, this isnt really feedback to the developers, I just wanted to talk about this because I felt like it. If the developers want to take feedback listen to other community members regarding rework ideas.
Comments
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The easiest way to fix her is to ensure she can't put a drone up in an area that overlaps with that of a drone that been deactivated for 'x' seconds. If this cooldown were added it would make her much more bearable and not change how she plays too much for those who like her.
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She already can't do that.
The game just flat out locks you out of dropping a drone in a way that makes it overlap an area with a drone in where it is in active mode or search mode.
Now if you're talking about making it so she can't place a drone down in a spot where one was just hacked, that's going to basically mess her up for those of us who are playing her and not 3 genning, but alternate between dropping drones mid chase and dropping drones to get undetectable in specific areas. Please understand that literally her entire character function is in her drones and without being able to freely use them she legit has no power.
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It'd perhaps be useful if you elaborated on why you think her core design is flawed.
From my perspective, her core design has the potential to be one of the most interesting we've had in a long while. I can't think of another killer whose kit is as versatile and modular as the Skull Merchant's, and it'd be a damn shame to just throw all of that out because of the 3-gen problem.
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I'm talking about the game logging the radius of recently deactivated drones and not allowing a new one to he put up within it for a certain amount of time. That's ultimately the biggest issue.
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Well, the developers said that they want to solve the problem (3 gens), so if this problem is solved, then this killer is fine
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I agree this may be a solution.
Maybe give it another read. I think you misunderstood jajay.
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Agreed. They can either make her completely useless, so that her 3 gen tactic doesn't work anymore or they rework her.
A rework seems like the better option. Small tweaks will not redeem this killer.
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And I'm saying that suggestion would negatively impact those of us who are playing her, but not 3 genning and instead wanting to constantly cover certain traversal areas or strong loop chain areas. For those of us who are trying to use the power proactively, not being able to replace drones just makes an already not great power just feel worse and less useful. Meanwhile we don't have a fallback ability that isn't tied to her drones that she can just use. The way to solve the problem is not by doing what BHVR tends to do which is make a power clunky and annoyingly locked out.
They could just as well solve the issue by altering the drone function rather than just make the power worse. Like for all the discussion that goes on in the forums about Skull Merchant the vast majority don't seem to give a damn about any of the people playing this killer aside from those using her to time out games. Tons of threads with the vast majority of opinions being take from her, make her functionally worse with complete disregard how that effects other players outside of the ones timing out games, calls for her to be outright deleted, and dumb takes from folks like Scott Jund sitting there saying Skull Merchant players deserve to only play against bots.
The fact that she needs a rework isn't something I dispute cause I in fact agree. She needs substantial changes, but they need to be good changes that take into account that people actually play and like things about this killer that are worth preserving or at least not just saddling her with bad feeling mechanical limitations.
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To piggy-back off of this...
I'm curious if other Killers, such as Blight, can hold a 3-gen hostage as we saw with Skull Merchant v. Eternal, but don't simply because it's not the playstyle that became most popular with that Killer.
I've no reason to believe Blight couldn't do what Skull Merchant did in that match up, but better, because of his mobility. He can effectively run the same add-ons as SM, or he could run his even stronger add-ons.
While my gut reaction is to agree with OP's call for a complete SM rework, I fear that Skull Merchant is a product of a Killer playstyle meta-shift, rather than her own design. If this is the case, other Killers who can lock down a 3-gen will begin doing so, and the problem will then be universal.
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I'm of the opinion that Skull Merchant's power is deeply flawed even if we ignore the elephant in the room (3 gens).
It's terribly repetitive and introduces a tedious prerequisite just to do the most boring part of survivor gameplay. Hacking a drone was a cool and novel concept the first couple times. It's beyond tedious to do it for the 10th time in a trial just to work on the same gen over and over and over.
The nature of the drone detection area makes certain map layouts extremely unbalanced. She essentially deploys two drones any time a drone is placed in a multi-floor layout. You're essentially locked out of second floor gens unless you feel like throwing the game and going down instantly. It turns 3 gen situations into 2 gen situations.
It feels cheap. There's no skill expression here. The drone is deployed and works passively. If the survivor has a claw trap, the pallet just breaks. The killer can straight up hold W and get hits on claw trapped survivors. No mindgames, no power usage, just press forward until they force a vault.
This power is a giant swing and a miss. Rework the killer completely. In the future, let players have these prototypes earlier to prevent DOA powers from making it all the way to PTB.
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She's objectively unhealthy for the game. She should be placed in a state where she can't hold a game for 50 minutes until bhvr gets around to reworking her.
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I sympathise with you, but you're too few and far between. Big change is needed for her but I don't think its going to please anyone who plays as her unfortunately. She's too fundamentally flawed imo.
Post edited by jajay119 on0 -
No. Blight in fact would be worse at this tactics. Blight does not have ability, that prohibits you from working on a gen for guaranteed tens of seconds or being exposed. Blight does not have any addons, that make hitting skillchecks so damn hard. Blight has no ability to track survivors, so if he does not look behind that rock next to a gen, then survivor can start to work on a gen 1s after blight turns away.
Don't get me wrong. Blight is stronger. Thanks to his ability he can also hold 3gens quite well. But he is nowhere near as good at holding it as SM. And if he decides to kick gens instead of chase (because say survivors with 5k hrs each can consistently outsmart learning blight), then he is in much worse position.
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I still don't understand why they didn't make her power more interesting. There's so much they could have done with this. What a lazy design.
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Blight has an add-on that proccs tremendous skill checks during his rushes.
He doesn’t really need tracking if he is locking down a 3-gen, and his gen stall comes from Survivors needing to respect his speed.
By the end of the SM v. Eternal game, Eternal was hopping on gens as soon as SM left. On the same set-up, they would not have been able to do that against Blight because he’d immediately turn back and run them down.
I’m not particularly interested in making a case for Blight, though. I am fairly confident that Blight could dominate the “win by making the match take 60min” sphere—at least in pubs.
The issue at hand is whether or not this play style will catch on, and if it has enough legs to be played with at least half the Killer roster. If so, reworking SM would be wasted time as it’d be treating the symptom, not the virus.
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This is a playstyle that isn't even new. Hard 3 genning has been a thing for a very long time with the previous culprits being Doctor and Freddy.
Every killer can do the same thing, but to varying degrees and needing different kinds of build considerations. If not for the fact that Skull Merchant's power functions the way it does and the fact that from jump folks have hated her I doubt the uproar would have been as strong as it is now.
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Its dumb anti loop 3 genning with no drawbacks to placing or removing them for SM, with the only counters being not looping or giving her MFT and 30s of wallhacks. Wide area based zoning is inherently bad game design because dbd is designed around staying in one area for extended periods of time.
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The main flaw with Skull Merchant's design is in regards to how it functions and interacts with the environment and players.
Let me explain this the best I can.
When you look at Skull Merchant at a base level, it is incredibly simple. You have a Killer who places AOE fields that provides buffs to herself and debuffs to enemies close by. The AOE fields can be disarmed and debuff the enemy. AOE fields can be further modified with addons. On paper, this does not sound that bad, the issue is that DBD has a wider variety of complex and nuanced interactions between the Killer and Survivor.
Skull Merchant's entire power relies on placing AOE fields via Drones. Of course you can place these anywhere and their effectiveness have a wide variety of factors to consider when placing a Drone. Retaining back to what I mentioned before, with it debuffing enemies, it would naturally make sense for these Drones to be placed around Generators since they are an area where you a guarantee Survivors will go to since it is their objective to repair them.
Of course the discussion would end here, but there is also another thing you have to mention.
While the Drones can provides the undetectable status as well as moderate "anti-loop" from a loop, the Drone takes awhile to activate it's effect, and Survivors are given plenty of time to react to how they are used within a loop, which often results in them leaving a loop. Skull Merchant, upon their release, had borderline nothing goings for her within a chase.
She was later updated to receive a stacking Haste effect whenever a Survivor disarms a Drone and receives a Claw Trap. Survivors who have a Claw Trap on them would also instantly break a pallet upon vaulting it.
The situation that is created with this change is Survivors NEED to disarm a Drone for these effects to activate, Survivors are realistically not going to disarm a Drone in the middle of the map that nobody is going to run into. Survivors have to be obstructed to feel the need to disarm a Drone... so why not place them where the Survivors objective is?
As I mentioned before, you can get consistency by placing Drones at Generators before that change was made, and afterwards her core design still enforces placing Drones at the Survivor's objective. Her core design was flawed since it could never provide something substantial within a chase but provided something substantial when defending Generators, it was only a matter of time before people optimized her core design's gameplay loop to what it is now.
You could argue on and on about it being Shotgun Speakers or Adi Valente Issue 1 being problematic (which they are), or how the perks being used are carrying her, but the issue will always be her core design. She was never a chase Killer, it was never her design, she was meant to be a Generator defense Killer, and the only way to realistically change that is by completely reworking her power.
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There's a couple flaws in reasoning here.
First, I'll go over the quickest and simplest mistake here- survivors do not need to hack a drone for you to get Haste. The Skull Merchant receives that Haste bonus whenever a survivor is tracked on her radar, which happens when they have a Claw Trap on and when they're standing in an Active Drone radius. Simple mistake, common misconception, but it does undercut this idea that SM NEEDS to place drones on generators because that requirement for them to be disarmed isn't actually there.
More generally though, I get the sense a lot of your reasoning here is based on the idea that the only viable place for Skull Merchant's drones is on top of generators, and that's faulty logic to rest on for two reasons. The first is that it's not actually true on live servers right now, but more pressingly, the second is that we're talking about her core design, not what she can currently do on live. Her core design includes stealth- if they buffed that, any Skull Merchant who wanted to use it certainly wouldn't be putting her drones on generators, she'd be putting them between generators so that she can leverage them for Undetectable and survivors would have to go out of their way to disarm them.
A similar principle applies without having to assume any changes to her balance. A lot of people seem to think that the only way you possibly even COULD use Skull Merchant's drones in chase is to place one down in a loop while you're actively in chase with that survivor already, but that's pretty obviously a bad idea on the face of it, given how long it takes for the drone to be placed, enter the Active state, and then how long it takes for something like Lock On to actually build up. The far better way of using her - right now, this isn't hypothetical - is to place the drones in key loops and between generators ahead of time, and then chase the survivors into them.
(There are flaws here, in that this playstyle is most useful when you use expensive purple addons and I personally don't think you should have to invest that much for her to have a viable chase power, but we're talking about core design rather than the hard specifics of her live balance.)
It seems like the people who think her power is fundamentally flawed and can never be balanced are incapable of viewing it as anything other than generator defence, when that's far from the only thing it's capable of doing even on live servers, let alone with some small-to-moderate number changes. Misconceptions and misunderstandings seem to lay under that take all the time, like the idea that Haste only comes from Claw Traps or that playing SM for chase would require placing drones mid-chase instead of setting them up ahead of time.
I hope it's clear that I'm not saying Skull Merchant doesn't need changes, because she does. What I'm saying is that her core design is far from a failure, and isn't so flawed that it can't be salvaged. It isn't even all that far away from healthy, in my opinion.
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I have to say I don't have enough imagination for that one. I hope you are right, but considering how freakish bad she is - I don't even want to risk it and would much rather she her nuked and restarted from scratch
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Exactly, it isn't anything new.
There are a ton of things that have been in the game for a while, that have recently become increasingly problematic. Similar to how Circle of Healing redefined the way Survivors value healing, the gen-kick meta redefined the way Killers value 3-gens. The Knight and the Skull Merchant were released into this perfect storm, and I'm predicting now that they are the catalyst for change in how Killers mentally approach a match.
As a whole, I don't think people want to be playing 60-minute DBD matches, and that is largely the deterrent from this play style becomming wildly popular. ...but I also know this community to be very stubborn. If Killers are really struggling to win games, they will turn to "3-gens, 60-minutes is all I can spare to play with you," and they will justify that behavior on account of "this is the most optimal way to play Killer, blame BHVR."
That is how I see things unfolding, anyway. I could be way off the mark, but it is still something to consider when deciding whether or not to nerf SM or address 3-genning.
I think her main appeal for dropping drones on gens, rather than between them, is the Exposed status effect. It is low skill, high value, whereas placing drones for Stealth requires skill AND is reliant on other factors.
What would you think if the drones were solely used for stealth and tracking, the amount of drones she has is relative to map size, and then Survivors are exposed whenever they hack a drone?
She'd be Plague adjacent, in that Survivors effectively choose how they want to die. They can let SM build an undetectable network to traverse, or they can nullify her stealth at the cost of temporary exposure.
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I made a post about how I'd change Skull Merchant in the feedback section a few days ago, and it did involve removing the Exposed- though I wouldn't make those other changes. I'd basically propose buffing stealth, increasing claw trap timers, and giving her a big addon overhaul so she has addons for all her potential playstyles - chase, stealth, hex defence, claw trap haste - without needing to invest purple-level price points on the usable ones.
Her power is modular and versatile even on the live servers. I'd propose leaning into that while lessening how threatening the drones are for generator defence. How you play SM should be informed by what addons and perks you bring, and she does have that versatility already.
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