Skull Merchant - Does broken actually help her?
In this forum I've discussed Skull Merchant with numerous people many times, and it feels like there are quite a few good suggestions lingering around to take her to a place where Skull Merchant can be OK. Not loved, that's a long sailed ship, but generally met with acceptance like our dear boy/girl Legion.
She isn't too strong, just people don't like her, so the goal isn't to nerf her, but make her more engaging to face. That said though throughout all discussions, one thought that rattles in my mind is... does the broken effect on her claw trap actually help her at all?
If someone is in chase:
Broken does nothing. They can't use medical syringe or styptic because they are deep wounded... they can't heal cause they're actively in chase... so no value broken is bringing here.
If someone is not in chase:
They can't heal sure... but that means the only choice worth their time is doing gens...
If broken is removed from her kit, the survivor is deep wounded so they can't heal immediately... it takes 12s to self mend or 8 for an ally to mend, and then to heal themselves it takes 24s, or with an allies help it takes 16s to heal.
The claw trap lasts for 45s... to heal themselves at peak efficiency would take 36s, for an ally to do it would take 24s. This is 36s of a survivor or 24s of 2 survivors not doing gens/useful actions, vs. the current 12s/8s to remove deep wound respectively.
If she breaks off chase to go for the injured survivor, even 24s is enough time to get to them... They are not moving this whole time they mend/heal, and are detected on the SMs radar... so there is definitely incentive to heal, and the potential gen time bought for SM from survivors healing against claw traps.
This also makes SM a little more interactive for survivors, as there is an actual decision to be made, rather than just "I'm broken, shes in chase, better get on gens".
I'm not convinced the broken effect actually helps her really, and while there are a number of things I would suggest be modified in her kit, this one seems like a benign change that actually might help her rather than hinder, but also make her a little more engaging for Survivors.
Comments
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it does help her because it forces survivor to work on generators injured while she has tracking. It makes her stealth strong because a survivor is encouraged to work on generators where they can get stealth-1 hit downed.
It also helps with 3 gen because it is common for survivor to take hits to work on generators then reset but if your broken for 45 seconds, then you cannot reset heal which slows game down for skull merchant.
Broken is also strong for anti-body blocking. Load of comp players have noticed that Forced penance perk+tunneling is powerful because you punished bodyblocking. survivor cannot repetitively heal > body block a tunneler. Skull merchant drones have anti-bodyblocking base-kit.
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Broken is literally first thing I would remove and I am mostly Skull merchant main.
I will prefer survivors healing over working on gen any day…
Skull merchant is simply noob stomping killer and broken has part on it. New survivors are not able to play injured.
So by removing broken, survivors will still get punished, if they don't pay attention outside of chase → get injured, but they have chance to recover from it at least.
It's some time since I wrote my suggestion, so here we go again:- remove broken → always mending
- disarmed drone aura is diplayed red
- drone is disarmed for 35 seconds (was 45)
- drone can't be recalled while disarmed
- reduce hindered to 5%
- rework haste
I would make haste work based on only two stacks, each giving 3%.
3% is for claw trap duration and 3% is when any survivor got detected by laser. That would make it easier to track for survivors, her average haste will be slightly increased, but maximum decreased → less noob stomping again.
Disarming drone would become trade off again → completely disable drone in trade for information. It would actually make it viable to disarm mid chase, which is just too funny for me. Right now merchant can just instantly recall her drone, so there is no point in doing it.
I rarely use Hindered, so I don't care that much about it, but there just should be something, so drones can't be completely ignored by injured survivors.2 - remove broken → always mending
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It was you I remember seeing! I went looking for this rework and lost it. I liked this rework a lot, and personally actually enjoy playing vs. Skull Merchant, mostly cause I find having to careful look around the map to avoid getting scanned while moving engaging and enjoyable. Trying to crouch through scan lines and account for her distance to me feels like a good skill to develop.
I also don't mind holding W if she slaps a drone over a tile… I know other people hate it, but it's not that different to my mind to what people do against Pig when she crouches. Otherwise is you stay at loop, it's not much difference to Clown, who since he lost his blinding effect I also don't mind at all now.
- The changes to claw traps to remove broken I feel is much healthier and less noob stompy.
- Drone disarm and disable is a great change, actually being able to partially deny her power makes doing it worthwhile, especially if she is just throwing drones over tiles and loops without a care.
- The reduction in downtime is fair given it now removes that drone from her usage completely. 35s feels a little short… though I understand that if everyone does this it can quickly lead to to have no drones available… I'd prefer maybe something where it's 45s, but for each other drone that gets hacked after this one, the drones downtime is reduced by ~5-10s (like a network shutdown failsafe protocol or something), just so disabling one over a gen is not a bit of a waste of time, but I see the argument either way.
- Hindered change is fine, this always felt obnoxious and this seems much more reasonable as something that denies a fast vault instead of basically breaking the survivors ankles to stop them moving.
- Haste change is good, not the way I would do it, but I've often lobbied for her haste to be standardised rather than scaling based on number of survivors scanned. This makes her much more consistent and learnable, which I'm all for, regardless of how it's implemented.
The only thing that I might ask you about is bloodlust. Currently she can check her radar for where you are once scanned, and keep building bloodlust on you while doing it. Combined with her scan speeds basically giving her bloostlust basekit, do you think this is fine, or should bloodlust disable when checking her scanner?
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I don't think checking scanner is really an issue for bloodlust, but I also don't think removal would be big deal for her.
I probably wouldn't change it, simply because I don't think there is need for that. Only change I missed that might be good to impletement is to give delay / cooldown for rotation changes. Rather cooldown, so you have chance to catch survivor mid chase if they are just running nearby.1
