Skull Merchant and unavoidable hits.

Are you actually attempting to understand what I'm saying here?

Referring to the clip, the survivor should stand still when the beam is crossing them to avoid the third scan. There are two outcomes here: Either they just avoid the scan and keep the chase going, or they lose distance and take an M1. Both are preferable to being claw trapped, and both are generally how dodging damaging powers works in general.

In this clip, the drones were not countered. The survivor camped an unsafe pallet for a stun, did not account for the killer's power being a source of ranged damage, and were hit by the ranged damage they were ignoring.

Setting aside that the reason they camped the pallet was to get a stun, not to counter the drones...

...You agree, then, that this clip shows a survivor misplaying, and not a killer lacking counterplay?

you can remove the lock-on by purposely getting lock-on when she is far away. In general there is no reason to get lock-on in most cases so acquiring a lock-on stack is a mistake in itself.

No, them camping a pallet doesn't matter. As I clarified a few messages down, I don't consider them camping a pallet to be a mistake or a bad call. It was a good play! If they'd followed that up with countering the drone, this would've been a perfectly reasonably done chase. My point in bringing it up is that standing still at the pallet is irrelevant because it's not the point in this clip where they actually needed to just counter the drones.

As for how precise you can be... very? You know where the beam is because you can see where it's projected, and you know which direction it's going. We, the audience of the clip, might have a hard time figuring out where the right moment to crouch is, but that's because the survivor isn't looking behind them to actually get that information. Even if it is really difficult to do it on the fly, it's the kind of thing you keep an eye out for and practice so you know the timings.

As for them getting hit before their next pallet, I just don't believe that. When they briefly turn their camera as they get hit by the claw trap, we can see that Skull Merchant is still behind the desk on the other side of the pallet. The killer is fully on the other side of the room, and we know that this survivor has at least some resources close by depending on which variant of RPD it is. Crouching for half a second isn't going to let Merchant cross the entire room and get them before they slip out - you could partially walk off Exhaustion in this scenario if you're confident.

I'd also like to point out that even if the choice really is just "be scanned or get hit", the survivor STILL misplayed, because the M1 hit is vastly preferable to getting claw trapped. There's just no way of reading this clip that isn't the survivor messing up somewhere.

I mean, sure, but that's hardly a Skull Merchant problem so it feels a little irrelevant to bring up

Most killers get harder to counter if there's noticeable lag, including every other ranged and precision killer. It's not unique to her, is what I mean.

Yes, same as a lot of other powers and hits at windows/pallets.

I respect the time and effort it took to crunch those numbers, sincerely. I won't contest them at all, I've never been great at working out numbers that way to begin with. I'll assume all of that is true! To tackle your points in order:

1: The thing about this is that it's technically true, in a vacuum, but in a real match you can absolutely get away with doing it. From both killer and survivor perspective, I have seen very confident survivors intentionally not make the maximum distance that they could for some purpose- either to taunt, or to clear Exhaustion, or in some cases as part of counterplay for a power.

While the drones can damage you at range if you're not careful, Skull Merchant herself is an M1 killer. In this specific scenario, ducking the drone gives you plenty of room to make distance to the other resources on the map, especially if you're chaining towards something like the window drop down to the first floor out on the balcony.

It is important to think about more broadly-applicable counterplay, but it's equally important to not lose sight of what we're talking about here-- and in this clip, Meg had time to reach more resources and extend the chase if she ducked the drone. That won't be true at every loop, that's where some other counterplay comes in depending on situation, but here it applies.

To briefly tackle the drone's beam from the start of your point here: It might take a few goes, like I said, but you can know exactly where the beam is based on the information available to you. I don't personally think it's a bad thing for a killer's power to take a few tries before you can consistently outperform it, especially when using that same information takes practice on the killer side too.

2: They don't look at the drone at all, and only even look behind them at the last second, that's what I mean. Unless you're very confident in knowing the drone's beam timings, you should be looking at the most directly threatening thing in the room. That's part of why I think this clip is so annoying as any kind of proof- this survivor doesn't seem like they're respecting the killer's power at all, and people are claiming they somehow outplayed the killer anyway.

3: Mostly the same as point one, all these numbers still break out in a usable way in the moment. I would like to briefly mention that Meg is not in a kinda bad spot because of Skull Merchant's power, though- they're in the position they're in because that loop is terrible and doesn't get you much value against any killer.

This is where that thought experiment I proposed to someone else comes in. Everything about the clip is the same, including the survivor's pathing, but the killer is Huntress. What happens? They get hit- and unlike against Merchant, it's not a single scan that might be an injure specifically, it's just a health state. They'd need to dodge the hatchet... which would lose them a bit of distance, but that'd be a fair trade for countering the killer's power.

4: Sure, they'd be claw trapped in the next loop if they took an M1, and that means they'd be Hindered in the loop after that. They're claw trapped here after taking the drone hit, though, so they're being Hindered in the next loop instead. It extends the time before SM is put in her best case scenario, which is the entire point of chases to begin with, you extend them for as long as possible.

The "defense" of Xeno was "Xeno's cooldown on miss is currently bugged. Please wait for her to be fixed before screaming for nerfs."

To be fair, this clip isn't exactly proof of anything.

Doctor, Artist, Huntress, even Freddy could have gotten that hit simply by using their power. This only caused a certain outrage, if I may put it that way, because the Skull Merchant's hate train hasn't dissipated yet.

This Meg attempted to loop an extremely unsafe pallet and she got hit as a result. This is natural, it is part of the game.

The button press isn't what punished this survivor. The survivor not changing their pathing or responses to account for the power being present is what punished them.

The investment from the killer was low: A button press. They didn't even put it in a particularly smart position, in this clip.

The investment from the survivor would be equally low: Watch the drone and hit crouch.

Huntress does have to aim, unless the survivor runs in a straight line, like this one did. At that point the punishment comes from not respecting the power, not from the fact that Huntress only had to hit M2.

I like playing as and facing SM (even when she could 3-gen) so I may be biased but I think Meg could have avoided that hit if she’d paid more attention and remained calm. I think she panicked, misjudged how close SM was to her (and thereby thought SM could m1 her), and forgot about the drone.