Hot take: Skull Merchant Rework is OK

While I was playing the PTB as survivor I never understood why I should care about or interact with her power and I still don't.

That's only part of the issue (and I'm not even sure if that's a bug lmao).

You can just ignore the power by standing still for a second. There's no need to think about positioning when deactivating Drones anymore, you just play Red Light Green Light. The nerf makes no sense when it's now super easy to keep the Drones deactivated.

The immunity buffer is also way too generous, and the Drones also rotate too slowly.

She's just not good at doing what she's intended to do. Claw Traps take ages to apply and the fact that they have a 45 second battery AND don't destroy pallets anymore makes it a lot harder to get value out of the Hindered that they can provide.

That's not even mentioning the super annoying cooldowns that make her feel bad to play.

Her new design, however weak, is much healthier for the game and has room to be improved. The goal of the rework was achieved, which was to make her presence in the game not actively harmful to people's desire to keep playing.

Any rework for Skull Merchant that makes it so that she doesn't need to be willingly choosing to handicap herself and play sub-optimally to not make the survivors want to DC rather than play against her is a successful one.

She might end up weak, but the new design is interesting, gives a unique experience for both the killer and survivors, and can safely be buffed in the future without hurting the game. And this game has plenty of weak killers who do fine because of the casual nature of this game's playerbase.

And let's be honest here, I don't think people suddenly became Skull Merchant fans. The instantaneous backlash she received upon her reveal was focused on her aesthetic design and backstory more than her power. I don't think those people who made the subreddit even more insufferable than it usually is with daily Skull Merchant hate threads changed their viewpoint on her. They're still not going to play her even if they made her good.

She's always going to be regarded as one of the biggest flops BHVR ever made, the important part is that she's no longer a flop who also makes the game less fun by being in it.

honestly yeah, she just really needs some buffs and QoL changes in order to feel good to play. maybe like increasing the undetectable duration, make hindered apply on the third detection instead of fourth (so remove fourth entirely) so its more impactful in chases, make drones in stealth mode not show ANYTHING remotely close to a radius until they scan a survivor, and more

AKA hot take: im survivor main and having another trash killer is good thing.

your post is just sentiment that she's dead killer with no redeeming qualities. your glad she is deleted from the game.

Honestly im really bored of this copium "if you put work and keep trying, you will make every killer good!"

Thats just straight up false. Onepunchwilly, BEST Onryo player in the world got destroyed by random SWF party(before rework). You cant make weak killers work, theyre weak, yes you can destroy solos survs or just bad SWFs, but thats it. Right now with ptb changes skull merchant goes into the freddy level garbage, even lower.

Yes, there are killers that have high skill floor and they will be geniunely good if you put work into them, like Singularity(who is still probably getting destroyed by high skill SWF) and Blight. But most of them arent like that. I dont want to have another garbage killer in the game just because survivors are crying. And what is funny its probably survivor mains themself who play skull merchant boring builds, because every killer main ive spoken with, either dont play SM, or plays something interesting like Hex build, and not "overcharge, oppression, eruption, sloppy butcher".

Those aren't QoL changes, those are buffs.