A Skull Merchant rework idea

Before I begin to explain the reworked power (it is quite wordy), I wanted to preface with my philosophies behind the redesign. First, I wanted to completely strip her of any, or atleast a lot of her power at defending generators (more so than any other killer can). Second, I wanted to not only make her a lot more chase-oriented, but also more effective at tracking survivors, and be heavily encouraged to and rewarded for chasing different survivors/spreading pressure. Third, I wanted her power to more closely reflect her behaviours and strategies from the lore and tomes, an analytical egotist who lets her true colours show when hunting and killing her opposition, after learning every little thing she can about them and using that information to carry out her misdeeds. Another note, but specific numbers such as information thresholds to unlock new attacks and apply debuffs can be moved around, so there's no need to be nitpicky about them.

Drones

The Skull Merchant can place up to 4 drones around the map. When a survivor enters a drone’s radius, it will move toward them and place a clawtrap on them. After doing this, the drone will go into a recovery state, where it cannot place another trap on a survivor, survivors can hack it and SM cannot recall the drone. When a drone is hacked SM cannot use that drone again for 40s. A clawtrapped survivor can hack the drone that trapped them, but no other drones.

When a survivor is within a drone’s radius, regardless of being in recovery or not, it will sound an alarm, give a loud noise notification to SM and the drone’s aura turns yellow.

Survivors who have been unhooked are immune to being clawtrapped for 20s but cannot hack drones.

Clawtraps

When a survivor has a clawtrap, they gain a unique debuff ‘Information’. Information accumulates when sprinting, healing yourself or teammates, unhooking, dropping pallets, fast vaulting windows or pallets, cleansing totems or opening chests. Information on a survivor is counted as a percentage, 1 to 100. Clawtraps last for 90s at base. Clawtraps are automatically removed when they run out of battery, and when a clawtrap is removed, that survivor is immune to being clawtrapped again for 20s, this immunity ends if the survivor attempts to hack a drone that is in the recovery state, the hack is interrupted and they are clawtrapped, but they are free to hack it again after as the drone's recovery duration is reset.

Information

The Skull Merchant’s goal is to learn all she can about her targets, then use that knowledge to crush them, ‘Information’ is what the Skull Merchant has learned about a survivor.

When survivors accumulate enough Information altogether, the skull merchant gains access to buffs and new attacks.

information on a survivor will passively drain down to 40 if they have more than that and are not clawtrapped. (I.E SM will eventually have a minimum of 160 information at any time). Survivors lose 20 information when they are hit by SM and cannot begin to gain more information by sprinting, fast vaulting or dropping pallets for 3s. Survivors will go back to 40 information (if they had more than 40 previously) when hooked.

At 100 information total, Skull Merchant has a 25% increased lunge distance on basic attacks.

At 240 information total, she gains access to a new sweeping attack, capable of hitting multiple and through survivors. Adrianna swings in a 180 degree radius in front of her and has more range than a normal attack (discounting lunge), she can add a lunge to this that only goes 50% of normal lunge distance. Missing this attack leaves Adrianna in recovery for only 2s, but landing it on at least a single survivor increases it to 3.8s. (for reference, basic attack recovery is 2.7s on-hit)

At 300 information, Adrianna gains a downward slashing attack, this can be used to hit a survivor who is further into the pallet vault animation than a basic attack, and hitting a survivor with this in the middle of a pallet vault will break the pallet. Adrianna cannot lunge with this attack, but it has a 2.4s recovery on hit or miss, and grants Adrianna 3% haste for 8s on a successful hit.

All of these thresholds are reduced by 80 for every survivor who has been sacrificed or has escaped.

Survivors who individually have too much information take on debuffs

A survivor with 50+ information will leave a digital trail on the ground that only SM can see, these appear as orange holographic spikes, they are placed at a frequency similar to haemorrhage bleed rate and last longer than ordinary blood duration. SM can see the aura of these at a short range and they shrink in size when she is close to prevent them from obscuring sight (at max height they are still shorter than a crouching survivor).

A survivor with 60+ information cannot see SM’s red stain, making her deadlier at loops and giving her an edge over normal M1 killers like Ghostface with his Nightshroud, in addition to her basekit increased lunge distance.

A survivor with 90+ will have a hologram displayed over their head, the aura of which SM can see through walls and from any distance away.