What will happen to Skull Merchant? Your thoughts?

You talk like she is to easy to counter and you are forgetting that she has no skill to play comparing what the survivors need to do to counter her, she just puts the drone on loop and you are forced to leave it, you can crouch when the beam is ready to hit you but you are only making the skull merchant to come closer and eventually hit you, so you are on a lose and lose scenario

She went from a killer that mindlessly holds W until she stat-checks you with anti-loop to a killer that mindlessly holds W until she stat-checks you.

The drones are the problem, they remove interaction from every loop because there's no meaningful cool down or skill required to use them. Especially considering the three tics never go away until you trigger the nine status effects you receive from getting hit by three.

BHVR does not have the creativity to salvage the drones or their zoning playstyle. So they should be scrapped entirely and made different.

Zoning playstyles are also the most boring because it's binary, that's why zoning killers are the worst design in the game.

The Knight feels slightly better to play against because he can only have one guard up at a time and the banner exists but Artist just mindlessly spams at every loop until she gets a free hit.

We need less killers like that, not more.

I wonder if the other survivors in the game still count towards it. So if I DC I won’t count towards the kill rates, but when my teammates inevitably die will they still count?

It would explain Skull Merchant’s 70% but also make the stat kind of pointless because as soon as someone DCs it’s pretty much over for the others.

my guess is they're going to remove hindered and haste but keep broken and stealth.

I'm not sure I agree with this, the two killers have the same outcome if you stay in the loop: you get slowed down, and they get sped up.

This is especially true if you're already injured, because at that point the drone only gives Merchant a small Haste boost, and you a moderate Hindered penalty (eventually). It's still probably a good idea to leave the loop, but if you can loop Clown (which you can), you can loop Merchant long enough to drop the pallet/hit the window and leave even once you're claw trapped.

Clown and Artist also do what they do immediately. Clown slows you straight away, and you know that, so you act accordingly. Artist forces you to leave the loop immediately because otherwise you'll get swarmed and risk an injury. Knight, too, forces you to leave immediately because being put into the... Hunt? is that what his mechanic is called? Whatever, being chased by guards is almost immediate and has a much more potent risk than Artist, those things can even down you. The threat is there straight away for all these killers.

Merchant, on the other hand, has to wait. Wait for the drone to fly up into position, wait for it to activate into recon mode, wait for the survivor to trip it and activate it, wait for the looping beams to actually scan them... and that's just to get the Haste, she has to wait even longer for the injury, then wait again for any Hindered. While it's still a good idea to leave the loop, you don't have to straight away, you have time to position yourself right and maybe use the pallet.

I do sympathise with the whole "drop thing at loop, force survivor to run away" thing being boring, and SM can do it, but she's also the least objectionable version of it because of how delayed the threat actually is. It's also her only flaw right now and removing the Haste from her kit won't really fix it, that'll just screw over any Merchant trying to play her more skilfully.

What I hope will happen: Skull Merchant gets a rework. From the ground up. Everything. Her name (it has nothing to do with her power and appearance whatsoever), her visual design (let's face it, she doesn't look menacing in the slightest and her mask is the least stealthy thing imaginable), her sound design (her chase music is terrible), her animations (no, women do not walk like that), her lore (such a convoluted mess) and her power all are awful. Stationary drones will never be a good design.

What I actually think will happen: Nothing. They reworked her twice already and she wasn't mentioned as a killer that would receive changes in the near future. Also, they already have a lot on their plate and I doubt they have any idea what to do with her at this point. She is simply a failure. Maybe she will receive some number changes and end up like Freddy.

Artist and Clown are also poorly designed. And ideally all three should be changed.

It is true that SM is singled out due to bias. But it's better to prioritize fixing the crappy thing people are complaining about than the crappy things that people aren't complaining about.

Well I feel like you're approaching it from the perspective of objectivity being greater than community perception. But you have to realize that her reputation is so bad due to her terrible release state, nothing short of changing her drones entirely or removing them will change it.

Nobody is willing to give her drones another chance, even if in actuality it's not so bad, every difficulty or negative associated with the killer will be amplified due to the bias against her.

That's why she needs to be reworked. There will always be a killer that is overhated. But one with stats such as SM warrants placating the masses. Even if people more educated on balance don't agree. I personally don't find her to be too horrible. But I dislike anti-loop zoning killers and I hate her visual design so I wouldn't be against a bigger rework.

Artist and Clown just need to lose their ability to spam in favor of getting stronger hits when they do land. Something like Clown getting basekit sloppy when he lands the M1 in a slow bottle at the cost of having less bottles to throw over and over would be a start.

I'm far from a game dev, but I dislike the spammy nature of most zoning killers in this game.

Learning how to vs in games is too hard. Thinking too much hurt brain. That's why solo q is the way it is.

This is a fair point, and I wouldn't mind that change either. I was more trying to highlight that the spammy, force-them-to-leave-loop playstyle is incompatible with Bloodlust, but you do raise a good point about other issues.

We would care to disagree about the birds

How so? I'll admit I don't play Artist, but it seems like static birds would still have mid-loop utility if they didn't swarm people.

The way I see it, if this change were made, placing a bird at a loop would become a positioning game more than forcing survivors to leave: You want them to approach the bird from the front, so you can launch it and injure them, and they want to approach the bird from behind, so they can run into it and dissipate it.

Artist wouldn't be mechanically restricted and she'd be given an opportunity to try something new with her power, but that new thing has more interactive gameplay than the current one so it shouldn't be as obnoxious to face.

I don't believe the opposition is that unified to where we would see a repeat of SM situation.

There are three benchmarks that would warrant a complete rework.

-High killrate

-Community feedback

-Already received changes from devs several times

If this cannot be applied to another killer than I don't think it warrants a rework, just changes like you suggested. Which is why no other killer is in the same position she is.

She would be a first if they reworked her entirely. But hopefully she would be the last and they would learn their lesson. If not then yes they'd have to rework that next killer too.

But hopefully it stays exceptional.

It doesn't require unified opposition. It only takes one person in a match to give up for that whole match to be a wash in the stats, considering how unlikely it is for more than one survivor to leave that trial afterwards.

If it becomes popular to give up against a killer, even if not that many people do it, the killrate will rise by the amount we're seeing with Skull Merchant. It's only a 10% increase from the "balanced" spot, and that comes purely from the fact that people will immediately give up. Even players who don't hate her that much will probably cascade into giving up after one person does, because that match isn't realistically winnable anymore.

She shouldn't even be the first. No killer should just outright be removed from the game, certainly not a killer that doesn't even have a justifiable reason to be hated anymore. Like I said, starve the fire of oxygen, wait. If this is still true a year down the line, maybe, but right now the expectation should be for these players to grow up.

It doesn't even have to be lockers. We could borrow off of Xeno for this one. Xenos tunnels act 2 fold as both the entrance/exit of tunnels, and also where survivors get flame throwers. What if SM had similar structures? Reloads drones at computers spread around the map, and survivors could interact with the computer to get rid of stacks. This would avoid the annoying locker spawn problem Huntress has.