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I guess Skull Merchant is dead now?
I'm expecting to see her far less than the Twins. Glad the 3 gen got butchered but now you won't be seeing a Skull Merchant maybe only once in a millennium.
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I just played against her. She got no kills...
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Love making conclusions 2 hours after release
Truly a DbD moment
Post edited by Shroompy on18 -
As long as the 3 Gen start is dead it is a success... If she is too weak now they can still figure out buffs, but it was either that or killswitch her...
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Well. I'm playing her now. I got 2 kills then a 4k after. I may play her more tbh now that she doesn't have a bad rep as a chess merchant anymore. Hated that gameplay style. But now I can freely play her as a chasing killer.
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...which is only accessible to a fraction of the playerbase, for roughly a week and a half, AND contains stuff that will see changes when it goes to live.
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Mission accomplished. Problematic Killer gutted and left in shambles.
Could they have completely redone her power? Sure, but that wasn’t the point.
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She's practically just an M1 killer who can go undetectable. Sometimes you might get a free hit with drones and benefit from the slowdown, but it takes quite the time investment to trigger that and frankly the game moves too fast for her to do that in every chase.
You would be better to play Ghostface who at least can expose survivors with the potential to avoid chases in the first place.
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skill issue, I played her for 2 hours i haven't lost a single game, you can even still 3 gen with overcharge-sloppy and skill checks add ons, it's slightly less effective that's all. New drones injure passively you don't need to do anything and new hindered is brutal
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I liked to play Chase Merchant before this patch and had her at P82. Now, she is officially dead for me. That "rework" removed not the 3-gen strat only, but also completely destroyed her chase potential and strength. The drones are so unbelievably useless now. The only viable thing with the current SM is a Undetectable after placing the drone. And I'm not even talking about the worst chase music ever they decided to give her for some reason...
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She is most definitely NOT dead. She has new life breathed into her. She is much faster and unpredictable now. Killers are probably trying to play her the old way; that no longer works. She is all about the chases now. Give players time to learn.
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wow... that is exactly what i predicted on live servers. that 3 gen skull merchant works but everything else is so bad that there is no reason to do anything else with her.
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They removed the 3gen but basically gave her nothing in return, and that was pretty much the only good thing about her
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I had 4 SM matches in a row.
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She feels neutral.
Nothing exciting, nothing great or much interesting however nothing bad or awfull either. She just feels like new version of Trapper 2.0 but better than Trapper himself for sure.
Its way too early to judge it anyway, but go ahead dbd forums / twitter.
Post edited by Chocolate_Cosmos on3 -
Sad that all of this is absolutely true
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Did you even read the changes she got afterwards that weren't even tested in ptb?
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They're not even remotely comparable. She's fine as she is now. Killers don't need to be S tier to be viable.
She's a decent M1 killer who you can't really loop.
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It's not like she was getting played before the changes. I saw her maybe once last month.
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In the lowbie console tiers I'm actually having a lot of fun with her, with the added benefit of her not feeling Scummy to play.
Mind you I am someone who tends to enjoy off meta things, I enjoy playing Pig, Trapper, Dredge, Twins, Legion and Myers, so I'm probably a bad sample... closest I get to meta is Huntress, Artist, Plague and Spirit... and I don't play the latter much as people tend to get a little sore and quit.
However from the noob perspective... Adriana feels quite rewarding to push survivors into drones and force them to take wider paths than they would like... and her skins are pretty dang cool...
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I would've preferred if they had just done a full (viable) rework. New power, new outfits, new lore, new sounds etc etc
That being said, this SM is a much healthier Killer than old SM, so I suppose I'll take it.
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PTB has never shown the full picture for basically everything.
Things like Spirit and Blight for example were dog and were received pretty poorly on PTB and even shortly after their release in Spirit's case. And look at where they are now.
Post edited by Shroompy on5 -
idk, the most annoying thing about her seems to have stayed; matches drag on for way too long. Or at least that's how the two matches I had so far went. Same strategy - less efficient but nearly as time consuming and annoying. Tho, tbf, now she reminds me more of hit-n-run-sloppy+slowdown-wraith.
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Look at the scoreboard of this random single match that was pulled where i was running a meme build but won't actually show video of the match to show that i probably hard camped/tunneled or the survivors played like absolute trash to prove that i am right and everything is fine.
Every time.
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This is a "chase the obession" build, but please, by all means, apply your simplistic logic and make assumptions about how I play. The reason this build works is because it works well with her kit. What advantage do I have to camp or tunnel with this build? I chase the obsession all match, and it switches up constantly. People are in this thread saying she is getting no kills, probably because they are playing against Skull Merchants trying a dead 3-gen strategy instead of trying her new strength: chase.
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You have nothing to say about the random people saying they went against a Skull Merchant in a random match and she had zero kills?
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She feels like a revamped killer where people take a bit more than a few hours to get used to and master.
For all the talk of DBD needing hundreds of hours to be good at, it seems crazy to immediately know how a killer is after only a few hours of their power being redesigned.
Let people adjust to her and learn her. She has a fair bit of potential and I can see a few ways she can excel. Certainly way better than the dross of the original power.
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Not something you’ll find me complaining about.
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While what you're saying is true to an extent, people have figured out DBD by now. For those of us with thousands of hours in the game, it's pretty easy to accurately determine a killer's power level and potential after a few games.
She's one of the better M1 killers and perfectly viable, but still a low tier killer and probably won't be a ton of fun to play as or against. I doubt much of that is going to change.
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I'd argue that people who have played the game longer than most are actually at risk of being stuck in their ways and assume they know better than they actually do, resulting in - not necessarily being unable to understand - but unwilling to look at things from different, fresher perspectives.
It's not uncommon; look at jobs where experienced workers often overlook things newer employees find, despite them believing the experience they have gathered over the years should prove them the expert. Happens quite a bit in the care profession.
As with any killer, it takes time to properly assess a killer and to learn new ways to utilise them. Some people feel she's crap, whilst others believe she has untapped potential. Time will tell.
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That was unrealistic and you know it
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ah yes 2 hours after release and 2 weeks since she was revealed. not like there were minimal changes to her in the ptb period or anything.
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Spirit and Blight were also killers who received minimal changes from PTB to Live, and look at where they stand nowadays.
Now am I saying Merchant's on their level? No. But from what I can see she's definitely in a better spot than she was previously and is probably around Hag's level in terms of viability.
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Blight received ridiculous amounts of changes from ptb to live??? In PTB he got basically stuck on everything, also his fov was way too low for some stupid reason...
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Majority of his changes (if not all) from PTB straight to live were bug fixes. In a later hotfix he got the ability to break pallets and walls with his power, and 6 months later his FOV was fixed
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She wasn’t getting kills before though? She just stalled games till people DC’d. Lol
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Played as her last night, i didn't really like her. The fact lock on progress resets on downs makes it feels like the power will rarely actually do anything. I know it does pressure a survivor in a chase but it just feels unrewarding. I do think it's better than the old version, i really didn't like playing as that, but she's still not a killer that appeals to me i think.
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The point stays though, if you have to evaluate what you have at some given standpoint you cannot take into account what might be fixed in some way... Therefore Blight got basically a lot stronger with all the fixes...
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Well, just seeing the evidence, comp players have given a quick and accurate opinion on the recent 4-5 killer releases, so if we go by track record the only thing that happens is that the people eho said "give the killer more time" ended up agreeing with comp players day one opinion or still live in copium somehow everyone is wrong and they are the only ones who see the real picture about that killer.
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But even then people still had negative impressions of both Spirit and Blight even after the changes which subsided after people actually giving them a chance. I've seen it time and time again, everyone just jumps to conclusions the moment something releases.
The best examples of this recently is Singularity and Sadako, they both had a rough start but are more than capable of holding their own nowadays. Most people finally realized Sadako is actually quite a threat now but there are still some people who think Singularity is this undertuned killer just like he was on the PTB.
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If some see something in a killer that others cannot, then there is clearly something. As mentioned before, it takes time to properly evaluate a killer.
Besides, the vast, vast majority of players are not comp, so what matters more is the impact this killer has on that vast majority, not the select few. Also, many parrot a lot of what others say as gospel without trying to find out themselves. I prefer to find out myself and see how they are, compared to others.
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Doubt it, Twins is still a massive buggy mess on top of being one of the most niche killers.
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Not really. If you ignore the hyperbolic nonsense like THE SKULL MERCHANT IS DEAD, most knowledgeable players have pretty much nailed how a killer will play on day one. Who was the last killer who significantly moved up or down with people's opinion of their power after the first few days? I can't think of anyone. Skull Merchant isn't like a Blight or Wesker where there is tech to figure out. It's pretty easy to see her potential.
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after playing killer for 2 days, she is feels weaker in both chasing and defending gens. for controlling area's, it is relatively easy to just disable drones when there is 1 gen left so she has no late game. in early game, the map is so big that odds of survivors running into your drones is relatively small in the chase. you have very few drones and giant map. against efficient gen teams, the chases take too long. survivor that chain pallet after pallet can easily delay lock-on stacks to produce long enough chases. bad teams are easy 4k's and good teams are like 1 kill games. for me, she feels like below average killer.
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I mean a lot of the 'experts' with thousands of hours in DBD have been completely wrong in the past, and SM just got a massive redesign, so no, you can't really tell how good she is until people have had a chance to master her new kit.
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She got a massive redesign, but functionally lost a great deal of the complexity found in her original power which is bad because she wasn't all that complex to begin with. What they gave her didn't actually change her intended play pattern instead it just made her worse at it by removing anything that didn't facilitate bulldozing through chases. SM is a killer who was meant to be extremely easy to solve from the killer perspective of playing her. So if she's gotten worse at just about every unique feature, lost playstyle variety in her addons due everything being clawtrap centric, and lost her highly deviant unintended playstyle there is very little good to see there.
It was good she lost 3 gen, but they took a killer who wasn't strong and just made them weaker. It's very easy to tell weakness in DBD and in Merchant's case what's propping her up is that she's an m1 killer so perk synergy isn't an issue for her. She on her own, relying solely on her own tools is quite stunted. She doesn't do anything that other killers don't do better or at least in a more unique way. This rework actually pushed me out of the game entirely cause this is like the 4 time I've dealt with BHVR ruining a killer I had invested time into and I don't have the patience to wait a year or two before they actually give her something more well rounded.
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Can you name one killer from the past two or three years whose power level and potential weren't accurately predicted after a day or two? If you're doing a letter-graded tier list, it's pretty easy to get them in the right letter right away. It takes a little longer to figure out where they belong in that grade, but they rarely move up or down unless they were on the bubble to begin with.
Maybe Sadako since it took a while for her condemn strat to really gain popularity, but the Skull Merchant has nothing like that in her kit.
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Given how hard it is to get claw traps onto survivors I really think they should bring back their old mechanic where survivors had to manually remove them. They aren't super powerful on their own and it might justify running some of the claw trap based addons too since they could remain on survivors a little longer rather than falling off on their own.
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What is there to master? You put drown down and it does something, it is not like this killer is mechanically challenging so you would need to put in some work to figure out what she is capable of...
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Well, I have tried her multiple times.
There will be more adjustments in upcoming Bugfix-Patches, but for now, I think reworking her was a nice try, but her overall base-design is just not interesting.
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Yet there are still conflicting ideas as to whether she will be good or not. After a few days there are YouTubers talking about her being good or bad, so there is a clear difference of opinion. If there is a clear difference, then there's no substantial conclusion either way.
Personally, she looks a lot more fun than before. That's the most important part.
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