Addressing The Skull Merchant

"Unhealthy" is a word without an objective definition, but that doesn't make it impossible to define. For this purpose, I would consider anything that allows for subverting skill expression or interaction to be unhealthy; I like the skill expression of hiding drones to surprise survivors, but I think that getting to benefit from that crossmap with no further interaction or expression is unhealthy.

Granted, you still get a speed boost even with my proposed changes, but I think that's a fair tradeoff for the amount of effort you put in. If you want more than that, you should have to react and engage with that survivor.

For another example, I think showing survivors when SM can see them is healthy because it promotes actual gameplay reactions to her power. Skull Merchant doesn't get to blindside someone who didn't know she moves faster, the survivor doesn't get to actually avoid the fact that she moves faster, they both play around that fact.

You're welcome to disagree, but I'd ask you not to state or imply that my suggestions are just "for the sake of people seeing her less". I've given my reasons, and they aren't that.

My issue with this list of changes is that it kind of guts everything that makes Skull Merchant who she is, and also what makes her actually better than similar killers.

With your Lock On changes, she now can't build up stacks over time, instead of it being possible if survivors neglect to manage their new secondary objective. With my changes, she becomes a killer with a small amount of built-in slowdown; if you're somehow in a position where someone's running around with one or two stacks and you're not in chase with them (which shouldn't really be happening anyway, but real games are messy, fair enough), you can leverage one of two things. They're either ignoring those stacks, which you can capitalise on later for a shorter chase, or they're finding and hacking a drone, which keeps them off generators for a bit longer.

With your changes, she needs to commit way harder to every individual chase, which actually reduces the potency of setting drones up ahead of time. She has to get her scans in that chase, and any drone she set down earlier could be hacked, so she might as well keep them on hand to force stacks however she can mid-chase.

There's also drones taking longer to arm, which removes part of her skill ceiling in an attempt to fix something that isn't currently broken. Survivors only don't have time to react if the Skull Merchant hits them dead-on with the beam, something that takes good aim and good timing. Otherwise, the beam just starts rotating, and they absolutely have time to react to that.

Moving onto the removal of Haste, that just makes the drones completely non-threatening until the third stack onwards. There's absolutely zero incentive to play around the beams and dodge individual scans if they just don't do anything beyond let the Skull Merchant see you on her scanner, meaning that the entire mechanical depth of that minigame is - at best - cut down to a third of the importance it had before. In my opinion, that is Skull Merchant's identity as a killer, especially from the survivor side of things, and I am extremely opposed to it being removed. Dodging beams is the thing that sets her apart from other killers, and making that basically unnecessary for a majority of the match isn't a good direction to go in.

Which sort of brings me to the big overall complaint, which is... what exactly do her drones do after all these changes? She gets barely anything for individual scans, so she's now building towards a ranged injure and a worse Clown slow. The Broken would help set her apart from other killers in this regard, but she's still gone from a comparable jack of all trades to just being flat worse without much in the way of an identity or appeal.

She gets Hindered in chase, but it's worse than Clown's and takes far far longer to actually affect anyone.

She gets Broken on survivors, but it's on a timer, and it takes longer to build up than Plague's without any of the potential passive gain via infecting generators and other objects.

She gets stealth, but it's also on a timer, so she's not a good pick for a pure stealth killer either.

Right now, she has an edge over those other killers because of individual scans affecting the flow of a chase, and that effect pushing both parties to play around each beam as though it's individually important, because it is. This is both a purely mechanical advantage, and also an experiential one, because actually playing as and against her feels very different from playing as and against those other killers due to playing around individual beams.

(Hypothetically, anyway. I know survivors mostly give up against her, but we're talking about the overall idea rather than the grim reality.)

Sure, keeping the Deep Wound makes sense if we're cutting out much more important parts of her identity and making her worse in the process, but I don't agree with that direction, somewhat obviously. I don't mean to come down on you too hard here, I'm just chronically wordy and passionate, so it comes out this way sometimes.

In order:

1: Of course it'd be possible, it would just require survivors to ignore their stacks. That doesn't change with my proposed adjustments to her power, that part remains the same, so it's just placing drones in unexpected angles. The thing about that one is that you see when they take that stack, which means bare minimum they're setting themselves up for a chase.

The part I think a lot of people miss is that hacking drones removing Lock On stacks only penalises setting drones down ahead of time if people are running around with Lock On stacks outside of chase. That isn't something that should actually happen, and if you do drop chase on someone with Lock On stacks, at least you know they're probably staying off generators to go find and hack a drone... which you know about, so they're not exactly safe in this scenario.

2: Of course there's a point to doing it: Chase survivors into it. Actually be there and capitalise on the fact that you surprised a survivor with an unexpected angle. Bare minimum, if they run to the drone and disarm it, they're spending time doing that instead of generators, but even so- they're traps, you should actually be there to act when they're sprung.

Also, if it happens multiple times, each hack is only one stack removed. It'd take time to get two gone, meaning you can ambush them for the third, especially if you are dropping chase on survivors with Lock On stacks for whatever reason.

3: They're injured, and you have stealth. Forcing them to not heal makes them vulnerable for later, or forces them to play much more cautiously, which slows down their efficiency.

4: I have no idea how STBFL would change this, but even if it does, that's one perk you may or may not have. I don't think it's super relevant to this conversation?

5: I agree that Broken is more effective against newer players, but I don't agree that this should mean we can't put it on a killer's basekit. That's a full half of Plague's identity, and while Plague doesn't have stealth by default it's hardly as though that makes a ton of difference against newer players and it's not as though she can't have stealth.

As for never dropping chase against claw trapped survivors, sure, you probably don't want to. With Broken, at least you know you could and have something to capitalise on later. The Mend action does not take that much time, it isn't all that useful for you and Merchant isn't really designed around it the way someone like Legion or Deathslinger would be. She has a lot more going for her and none of it requires Deep Wounds.

1: And it'd be possible afterwards if survivors are careless. What it wouldn't be is guaranteed for any player that knows the right trap spots, and it probably shouldn't be. If Merchant actually got random free injures across the map, people's complaints about her being skill-less would be more accurate.

2: That's where drones go...? You put them between objectives and in key loops, that's where they go. They're not really doing much for you if you put them directly on a generator, they don't work like that anymore.

3: Zoning survivors (the default killer concept, not a power thing) is a skill. Trap killers need to be able to influence the direction of the chase to some degree, or cover their bases by picking multiple spots skilled survivors would want to run to place their traps in.

4: She doesn't. That was an example, not a direct comparison.

5: Marginally, and after that small amount of time, they're back on gens anyway but they're healthy. Them being on gens injured is better than them being on gens healthy, especially if you can see them the whole time either way.

6: A fair point, but Deathslinger is still designed around it more than she is, it's to make up for the fact that he has to invest time into every hit due to the reeling mechanic. Merchant doesn't need it to make up for anything, because of point seven here.

7: That's the thing, a drone does do something against an injured survivor, I said this in the post. Even setting aside Broken, it provides you with Hindered, making the down significantly easier. The Deep Wound honestly isn't doing anything, especially without Broken, that you wouldn't get anyway.

1: It isn't, though. I already laid out the scenarios where it isn't 100% avoidable from the survivor side. The main tell for a drone that can't be outright seen hovering in the air straight away is the ring that spawns on the ground, showing you the radius of the drone. If the drone is a little bit higher in elevation than everything around it, though, that ring attempts to project onto the air, and thus just isn't visible.

This makes some drone placements quite hard to reliably spot before you're in a position to be scanned by them. Again, this is a good thing overall, but because scans outside of chase should be 100% avoidable anyway, that means there should really be a way of removing the scans you get when the killer isn't on you to capitalise. If you've got an idea for that beyond tying it to hacking drones, of course, I'm open to hearing it.

2: You might feel encouraged, but again, I don't think that would actually be the more optimal way of playing her. It wouldn't actually be flat out encouraged, especially when Skull Merchant isn't considerably better than most other killers at doing that to begin with.

The question I always have here is, why are survivors walking around with a single Lock On stack outside of chase anyway? You'd have to have dropped chase on someone who you'd built up stacks on for that to happen, and in that case-- well, in that case you're already making the decision to commit to something else, most killers have to give up some power for that, but in Skull Merchant's case you at least get a mini-Pig slowdown effect from that survivor going out of their way to find and hack a drone. Two, if they have two stacks and want to reset to zero.

3: I think giving aware and competent players (on either side) more room to make informed decisions is generally a good thing unless the information is supposed to be hidden, like a stealth killer's whereabouts. You can already see this effect in motion, so I would argue you're supposed to be able to know that it's happening. Giving players another small indicator would only be a nice QoL effect.

4: Yeah, not sure what there is to really say to this one. That's nice? It's still healthier for survivors to have ways to remove Lock On if they either successfully evaded the killer, or the killer dropped chase on them. My pitch is something that the killer gets to benefit from too, so it's not just survivors being in control of your power's effectiveness-- and it isn't that at all, also, you would still be just as much in control as you are on live, there's just another layer of decisionmaking if you decide to break chase.

Survivors can already hack drones, which already actually mitigates your power's effectiveness for any drone you placed ahead of time. That concept may not always be strictly the most fun, but it is sometimes necessary.

...So you just crouch walk everywhere, the whole game, just in case there's a hidden drone you wouldn't see coming somewhere on the map? That doesn't sound reasonable to me. Additionally, losing one Lock On stack for a hack is not a second chance, it's a reward for employing counterplay.

To the 3-gen thing: People have said this, and I suppose it's possible I'm missing something, but I just don't see how. Her power isn't an AOE so gens can be done while ignoring it, and survivors will only get scanned when they leave generators, which also isn't guaranteed to happen. Is there something I'm missing here?

To the last point: That's pretty obviously wrong, slowdown effects that don't put survivors at a massive time deficit are just a regular part of good killer gameplay. Anything that adds to the basekit amounts of slowdown the killer can generate is obviously pretty good, considering that basekit slowdown is usually enough if you're skilled, and Pig + Merchant aren't the only two in the game who have it.

Solving the Lament Configuration, setting down flamethrower traps, grabbing EMPs, finding vaccine/first aid spray chests + opening them + using the item, these small timesinks all add up when combined with regular old pressure the killer's building.

1: I've laid out a few times when the survivor wouldn't know, because the information they'd be using to gauge when to crouch would be hidden. Are you going to acknowledge that at all?

2: Okay, so, setting aside whether that actually works on live - though I don't see how that's any better than the killers who don't need to build stacks to begin with - my changes definitely don't encourage it.

Let's look at that scenario again, but assume my changes are in place. Survivors A and B are both working on a generator with a drone nearby, both sitting at zero stacks because the drone won't detect them while they're repairing. Skull Merchant approaches Survivor A, and chases them away from the generator, causing them to get a stack of Lock On in the process. She now leaves to go pressure Survivor B.

What happens next is that Survivor A returns to their generator, hacks the drone to remove their Lock On, and keeps repairing. Now, when Skull Merchant returns to harass them again, she has to replace the drone, meaning Survivor A gets to remain at zero stacks while running away-- and all the while, Survivor B is hacking their drone to remove their one stack.

These changes actually further weaken Skull Merchant's 3-gen capabilities. The way you'd end up playing to utilise Lock On most effectively is... exactly how you'd play her well now. Get the stacks in chase, and use smart drone placement ahead of time + good aim and prediction for lasertagging to make that as quick as possible. Encouraging the most skilful and most interaction-based gameplay is good, I'm sure you'll agree, and that's what this looks like.

3: You're falling into the recursive logic fallacy I like to call "no good survivors", here. The loop goes as follows: "That won't work against good survivors" -> "How are good survivors defined?" -> "The survivors that won't work against".

If that's the case, sure! All those mechanics are worthless against good survivors. You're not facing good survivors in this case, though, because those mechanics all provide small amounts of slowdown that build up in tandem with the pressure you build naturally, just like I said. Maybe there's a 1% of the playerbase who get to ignore it, somehow, but statistically facing those seems unlikely.

It's also not off topic, because it's the supporting evidence to my argument...?

I did see your post halfway through making my own, and there's definitely some good stuff in there- it's where I got the idea for the Lock On turning red when you're scanned, that's a pretty genius idea! There are a few base assumptions that I disagree with in it, though, and I think I'll respond to points four and five here to get to some of my issues.

1: So, removing Hindered and giving her back pallet break. While I agree that her pallet break was a really neat and interesting part of her old kit, as I explained above in a response to someone else, I think that currently the best feature Skull Merchant has is the idea that single beams actually matter, and so everyone is trying to play around them. Survivors dodging them, killer trying to force them to run into it anyway, that's interactive gameplay and I think preserving that as her core identity is a good idea.

Without the Hindered, being scanned with a Claw Trap on isn't too threatening, especially when you're already Deep Wounded. However, I do have a bit of a compromise in mind: Currently, her Expired Batteries iridescent addon is kind of worthless, so maybe that could be what we have it do? Claw Traps no longer provide Hindered when scanned, but instead allow pallets to be broken when vaulted while they're active. Since it's an iridescent, we can keep them not breaking when that happens to make it a bit scarier.

2: I don't think this would be a bad thing necessarily, but I'm also of the opinion that cooldowns and slowdowns should both be considered very carefully. It's worth mentioning that old old Skull Merchant, the PTB version, had both of these features and it's part of what made her feel so awful and clunky. I'm somewhat hesitant to put them back, but this one in particular might be somewhat workable.

3: I'll also tackle the idea of SM's speed being based on just the survivor she's chasing- I get why this is frustrating, but it's only really being examined in SM's case because of how scrutinised she is in general. I would argue that it's far more frustrating for a teammate to feed Myers a ton of Stalk or Oni a ton of his blood, or for a teammate to waste all the Xeno turrets putting them in stupid places. These all impact your chase far far more than someone tripping a drone and giving her a little Haste, and they're all also basically fine imo.

It is a team game. At some point, your teammate's mistakes are going to affect you.

I've already acknowledged that Skull Merchant's hate is irrational and that these changes aren't in any way related to the way most of the playerbase talks about her, it's in the post.

I don't think I should keep just repeating myself, so I'll say these about one more time and then I think we'll just have to go our separate ways:

You shouldn't be getting random claw traps on survivors outside of chase, unless they're massively messing up and completely ignoring drones. That isn't something that'd be fair if it were reliable, you should have to put some kind of effort into getting claw traps onto survivors. It's possible, but as a hypothetical, like a head-pop on Pig: it's not meant to actually happen, it's meant to be a possibility that pushes players to act.

There's still a point to creative and hidden drone placements, which is that survivors will run more blindly into them in chase. Hiding traps is better than putting traps right in the middle of the loop where the survivor can see them from a mile away no matter which trap killer you're playing. Survivors have eyes, if the drone is obvious they'll be doing their best to avoid it. Plus, y'know, hitting survivors with random scans outside of chasing them is still good for you because it's information and Haste? It doesn't have to convert to a claw trap to be useful, you get those two things even if the drone is hacked straight away and the Lock On is removed.

Survivors being able to find and hack drones to clear Lock On is good, because it's a time investment away from generators and because it pushes the killer player to be less passive. This is due to it being less likely to win a war of attrition by relying on single scans at cheap loops, meaning you have to actually try. You, as a killer, can also deny them that possibility with your drone placements and with recalling, depending on how you want to play.

Broken is better than Deep Wound because it allows you to drop chase on a claw trapped survivor and have that actually matter. Deep Wound is a small time investment and makes a tiny difference in chase, sure, but Broken is both more powerful and more coherent with what she does. Getting scanned exposes your location, makes you vulnerable, and makes her more deadly. If you're claw trapped and Broken, you're at the mercy of a killer who knows where you are and can hide her terror radius. If you're claw trapped and just have Deep Wound, you can heal up safely and being claw trapped barely matters.

You still won't want to drop chase on claw trapped survivors either way, but with Broken, you can if it'd make sense and you'd be getting something out of doing so. With Deep Wound, you get next to nothing and dropping chase is something you cannot capitalise on later.

Responding to entire sentences might help you here, instead of just fragments.

For instance, the full sentence for that second point is this: "It's possible, but as a hypothetical, like a head-pop on Pig: it's not meant to actually happen, it's meant to be a possibility that pushes players to act."

Taking the entire sentence into account, we can see that when I say it's possible, I do not mean that you'll actually get to rely on it happening in a real match. When survivors go hack drones, yes, they won't be claw trapped outside of chase. This is what we want, because it's forcing survivors into certain actions, and they wouldn't be forced if the possibility weren't there. As I say, it is a hypothetical, not a guarantee.

What we don't want is for survivors to end up getting claw trapped outside of chase because they messed up once after the Skull Merchant kept passively hitting them with one or two scans and dropping chase, for whatever reason. What we don't want is for the thing people say about Skull Merchant - that she takes no skill because everything she does is passive value for hitting a button - to actually be true.

It isn't true, currently, because there are plenty of elements of her kit that take skill and aren't passive. Those are the things we should emphasise, and the passive, cheesy, war-of-attrition stuff needs to be de-emphasised. Ergo, survivors need a way to clear Lock On stacks. I think this being tied to hacking drones is a good idea, but if there's some other good idea out there I'm open to hearing it.

If survivors do blindly stumble into a drone because they weren't paying attention, yes, they should get to clear that Lock On stack. They've already given the killer information and Haste-- if the killer wants anything more than that, they should have to try. They should have to actually put some kind of effort, skill, and gameplay into capitalising on the survivor's mistake, instead of getting given it for free. That's already how you play Skull Merchant well, so losing this would be completely immaterial, it shouldn't affect you.

Remember, also, that survivors getting scanned outside of chase shouldn't happen. They can see drones both in the air and in the ring projected onto the ground. So, if we give lesser skilled players a helping hand to make sure they aren't getting scans built up outside of chase if they react to the drone they missed (or more skilled players a hand when they couldn't see the drone's ring, if the placement is good), that means we can adjust Skull Merchant on the assumption that scans only accumulate in chase, which means that hypothetically she can be buffed in that area if she needs it. You can't make scans or claw traps too punishing if they can build up randomly across the map without any input from the killer.

1: The key word there is think, because you wouldn't be able to tell just by keeping an eye out. Ergo, you would have to crouch walk around every corner just in case, because that is the only way to check if there's a drone in one of these spots. Because the ring on the floor that indicates where they are, the thing you're keeping an eye out for, is hidden. If there's nothing to actually use to gain that information, it's not skill, it's guesswork.

Smart placement would still make them better traps. That hasn't changed. They just won't build up Lock On stacks passively around the map without any interaction from the killer, and that's good.

2: This is getting kind of absurd at this point, surely? All these extra steps and conditions on a playstyle that already took major hits between her rework and the anti 3-gen system, just to get a worse Clown power and Broken on those survivors, and somehow after these extra steps and conditions are added it encourages this playstyle?

No, it just doesn't make it 100% impossible. Anyone who wants to do something other than 3-genning would have absolutely zero incentive to do it, and anyone who DOES want to 3-gen is going to pursue it regardless, even with my hypothetical changes making it awkward and finicky.

She'd probably still do well in a 3-gen, of course! Almost every killer does if their goal is to actually win the game, since it's inherently a tight area that shrinks the map considerably. There'd just be very little in her kit to encourage it.

3: What I am describing is not brute force, it is the literal opposite. It would be finesse in using the drones actively, rather than relying on them building passively with little effort. I don't want Skull Merchant to win wars of attrition where she never commits to a chase until the Lock On builds enough to make it very quick, I want her to actually have to use and play around her drones in the smart and skilful way.

Or, y'know, anything else. I don't much care to dictate playstyle, I just want to take passive value out of her kit for the most part. She gets stealth without commitment, and sometimes she'll get info + Haste without commitment when survivors trip drones accidentally, everything else would need to be something you're actively trying to capitalise on.

Also, I really cannot stress this enough, this hypothetical would only kick in if survivors hack drones, meaning you could recall drones to deny them that option if you really wanted to pursue this kind of option. I wouldn't mind that gameplan if you had to think about where your drones are and which ones would be at most risk of getting hacked + by which survivors.

As an aside, you are harming your argument extensively by highlighting that anything in her design or gameplan involves tunnelling by default. We want to minimise and weaken tunnelling, not create killers who excel at it. I don't even think Skull Merchant does since survivors come off the hook without any Lock On stacks, but still, if the gameplay you want to highlight as her core identity involves tunnelling, you're making an extremely hard sell.

1: The speed bonus stacks for every survivor that is shown on your scanner, not just for claw traps. Either way, though, at no stage have I suggested making it impossible for multiple claw traps to be attached to survivors, I've just stated that it shouldn't happen randomly, for free, with no input on the killer's part.

This is where I'll point out again that if it's tied to hacking drones, you can deny survivors the ability to do it. If you want to split pressure on your Lock On stacks, you just need to make sure there are fewer drones out than there are scans to remove. Hell, if you're quick enough on the draw you can recall a drone immediately after a survivor trips it and deny them the chance to remove that stack.

2: No, actually using her drones and playing around them is the skilful way of doing it. If anything is brute force, it's forcing single scans and relying on random mistakes to win a war of attrition.

There's a lot of skill that goes into using her drones properly, they aren't just fire and forget.

3: So this is more of a fair point and I'll try to be as specific as I can in responding to it, because I do have an answer.

Hag's Phantasm Traps (and also Trapper's Bear Traps, for that matter) are different here for two major reasons. The first is that they're much smaller- not in terms of physical model size, but in terms of effective range. You have to step on them (or at least very very close for Hag) before they activate.

The second is that they have a logic to where they'd go, unlike the spots we're talking about for Skull Merchant that are highly specific and would require flat out memorisation to counter on the survivor side.

Those two things combined mean that you don't actually have to crouch walk everywhere, you can just take a wider path around the areas that traps would go in. This wouldn't work against Skull Merchant's drones because they have a pretty hefty radius, especially compared to a Phantasm Trap.

It's also worth mentioning that a Hag's traps don't do anything unless she decides to act on it. You don't trip a Phantasm Trap, build up a stack of something, and eventually get injured without the Hag ever having to even look in your direction while you're doing it. Similarly, if you trip a drone and Skull Merchant comes to chase you, that then matters because you don't have time to remove the stack. It's about whether the killer actually has to do something to capitalise on the trap triggering, and Hag does. Right now, Skull Merchant kind of doesn't, though I wouldn't go so far as to call it overpowered. Just an unhealthy element that should be scaled back so there's more skill involved.

Something I've neglected to really elaborate on, and that is my fault, I'll cop to it, is that getting claw traps out of chase would be something the killer can make happen. I've been hitting the point that it shouldn't happen randomly and without input from the killer, and I stand by that, but we should of course acknowledge that the Skull Merchant would have some control over it.

Remember, with my hypothetical changes, survivors would have to hack drones to remove a single stack of Lock On. So, if they're sitting at two stacks, but there's only one drone on the map and it's nowhere near them... they're just sitting at two stacks, permanently. That might seem like an extreme example, but consider a more plausible one: Three survivors are sitting at two stacks, and the fourth is in chase, but there are three drones out. Not everyone can hack twice, there aren't enough drones, so those stacks are going to stay-- and if any of those traps are hidden ones, trying to find something to hack might result in an unexpected claw trap instead.

If the killer is actively paying attention to Lock On stacks, keeping track of their drone locations, and making sure to recall drones that look too easy to get to and hack, they'd still stand a reasonable chance of getting claw traps outside of chase-- at the very least, they'd be able to keep survivors close to being claw trapped for their next chase.

They'd just have to try. It wouldn't be passive, there'd be room for messing it up, and there'd be room to counter it. That is all necessary for a balanced and fair power.

Alright, I'll pull back a bit to try and explain what we're talking about here.

The major point I've been trying to get across, something that we might've lost sight of when dissecting very specific sentence fragments outside of their context, is that Skull Merchant shouldn't get given the whole value of her power without having to try. So when I say that survivors shouldn't be running around with single Lock On stacks, there's an asterisk.

That asterisk reads: Unless the killer is employing some kind of strategy revolving around leaving survivors with single stacks. On live servers, it'd be to win a war of attrition by getting them to two stacks and having a really short chase afterwards, which I think is rather unhealthy and passive, and I'd prefer to see that made harder so playing her more skilfully and actively is encouraged more.

With my changes, you'd still be able to do it, you'd just need to juggle drone placements and try to deny hacks wherever you can. This could just be not leaving drones out for too long, or it could be hiding them and trying to react to the survivor tripping it so you can recall the drone just before the hack starts. It'd still be doable, but it wouldn't be passive anymore, you'd actually be putting in active effort.

To make it even more simple, I'll lay it out like this:

If a survivor trips a drone outside of chase, here is what you should get: Information on your scanner, and twelve seconds of Haste.

If you want more than that, you should have to actually chase that survivor. If you want a claw trap on them, you should have to chase them. If you want to try and build them to that point without chasing them, you should have to pay some kind of attention and exercise some kind of skill and effort.

What you shouldn't be able to get is random free injuries on the other side of the map, because you played sloppily and had to drop chase a lot but stacks can't be removed so they still end up claw trapped from one unexpected drone.

Getting full value from skill expression, trap management, and chase fundamentals: Good.

Getting full value from sloppy passive play that requires little effort: Bad.

Getting small value from survivor mistakes: Acceptable, but it shouldn't match what you get by actually trying.

What I just laid out is how it should work.

I am fine with it being functionally impossible to get random claw traps outside of chase. I haven't given up on the idea of multiple survivors having multiple stacks, because I laid out that I don't mind the killer trying to spread those stacks IF they have to manage their drones and avoid as many hacks as possible while doing it.

My problem with the current scenarios where multiple survivors have multiple scans is that there's no effort or skill involved on the killer's side. It's a war of attrition that, if they win it, won't have required much from the killer. I don't think this currently a huge must-fix-immediately problem, since the killer's also fairly likely to lose the war of attrition, but it's still an unhealthy element that should be fixed.

So, yes, with skill and effort, you could get traps outside of chase. You'd just have to pay attention and be smart with your drone placements + recalls. It'd be harder than focusing on getting a trap on one person, which it should be because you're doing it to multiple survivors at once and trying to avoid needing to focus on them, but it would be doable.

So, no, we don't agree that it's a massive nerf. It's a noticeable one if you're the kind of player that does try and rely on stacks being permanent to drop chase frequently, but if you use her drones more actively you'll barely notice it at all and if you just put more effort into spreading stacks you'll be able to overcome it. That breaks out to a moderate nerf at worst.

I want to remove Mending because I don't feel that it does much of value, isn't particularly coherent with the rest of her kit, and probably contributes to the feeling of her kit being bloated with too many status effects. I'd rather keep the ones that make sense and help her, while removing the single one that doesn't really add much.

As for the addons: I was going to go and count how many claw trap addons she actually has, but apparently the wiki is broken and specifically won't show addon lists at the moment? That's really inconvenient, goddamnit.

Anyway, there aren't that many and if we discount the ones that obviously won't change (specifically, the aura reveal on claw traps being applied and on them being broken), most of them aren't even that good to begin with. I'd welcome changing those to something more useful, but it'd be inaccurate to claim these changes would really affect them much. The ones that are bad now will be bad afterwards, and the ones that are decent now will be decent afterwards.