Do y'all think there's a Skull Merchant full power rework being worked on?

I havent heard anything about it so i doubt it.

Not really.

I doubt it. The problem is that Skull Merchant would need a full rework. She just isn't fun to play against, and so long as her power remains setting up drones that basically prevent survivors from using those areas, then she's always going to feel boring to play against.

Zoning is fine, when there's counterplay. Look at Dredge, for instance. If Dredge uses remnant, then the survivor is put into a 50-50 situation. Do they greed the loop, and go for the remnant, or do they leave the loop in favor of a new loop? Both have the risk of getting injured, but that all depends on how well the survivor mindgames the Dredge.

Against Skull Merchant, though, you're put into a lose-lose situation. If you stay at the loop, then you become broken. If you leave the loop, Skull Merchant M1s you instead.

Plz give her a rework where she can control… Just give her a rework where she plays exactly like crypto from apex.

I think it's pretty unfounded to say that the goal is to make people like her, considering the rework was very much an attempt at fixing the problems that were reaching a fever pitch.

People liking her is a nice bonus, and a few people do. Even the vocal set of players yelling about her has shrunk from where it was before. Considering she has no huge glaring issues and just a handful of small ones, I see no reason that number wouldn't keep shrinking over time.

Probably not, at this point it's an waste of time because survivors gonna say nah to literally anything as long as it looks like a skull merchant

I think the kill rates for SM, even if most of them is due to hook suicides, is enough for BHVR to step in and start writing a draft for a SM rework. I personally don't mind if SM gets reworked or not, but I'm really betting that SM will inevitably be reworked sooner or later.

I mean. Her power doesn't do those things?

Well, I'm sure it messes up console players with overlapping inputs, I don't know that for sure but that seems like a consistent problem.

What I mean is, it doesn't injure on its own, and the drone radius doesn't make you faster + the survivor slower. That's just not an accurate rundown of what her power does. Injuries are based on successful scans, and the drone beams make you faster, as well as slowing survivors who are claw trapped, not the drone's radius.

There's also a difference between "skill expression" and requiring skill. To get bare minimum results, you don't need to put that much skill in, kinda like killers in the vein of Clown or Legion. However - also like those two killers - there are things you CAN learn to do and improve at to get better results, which is what skill expression is.

So if the goal of the game developers is not to create a fun experience for their players and like the content and therefore buy it I don't really know what you think is then? Characters having glaring issues can be the reason people don't like them and fixing those issues should lead to a more balance and fun game. Usually it is more important if a game is fun compared to if it is balanced, you can have the most balanced game out there, but if it is not fun then basically nobody will play it.

That seems a little bit like playing semantics, to me. Trapper's bear traps and Hag's Phantasm traps also aren't something you personally take over to activate, nor are Pyramid Head's Trails. Using those well still obviously involves skill expression.

But, moving on from that, you're still conflating skill floor with skill ceiling. Sure, you can mostly get away with just throwing drones down wherever and get some basic results against lower skill survivors, but like every other killer with a low skill floor, there are still plenty of things you can learn to do to get better results.

Even if you never HAVE to use them, her kit still has the possibility for you to express your skill if you WANT to. There is no denying that her rework added a fair amount of nuance and skill expression for you to learn if you care to put in the effort- and frankly, you're gonna need to learn a little bit if you want to compete against halfway decent survivors.

Her power pretty much relies on survivors messing up rather than SM doing much. I still think there's more important things that BHVR should put their resources towards than another SM rework, since this version isn't game-destroying.

We can only hope.

So, right off the bat: Knowing where to set the drones is an element of skill expression. You can't just throw them down wherever and expect them to work, knowing both the right areas on the map and the right position within that area are skill expression and shouldn't be entirely dismissed.

Moving on from that, the biggest thing to point to would be lasertagging, which if you aren't familiar is the process of placing a drone in chase with just the right aim to make sure that the beam tags a survivor as soon as it spawns in, since they always activate pointing straight forward. I'm not going to say it's the most difficult thing in the world, but it is an element of skill expression.

We should also acknowledge manual rotation. There's a timing and positioning game involved there that does take some skill and that you can get better at over time, so that'd count as skill expression to a degree.

There's also hiding drones. Normally, when a drone is placed, there's a circle the survivor can see overlaid on the ground. With the right elevation, that circle is prevented from spawning, which makes the drone harder to spot and can cause survivors to stumble into them unexpectedly. Knowing those spots, finding new ones, and following up on the scan you got would be an element of skill expression.

Finally, this might have a little bit too much overlap with just drone placement, but because of how the drones work it's possible to have the beams pass through tiny gaps in terrain, like Trickster knives. Placing those drones as traps and timing it so you can chase someone into the beam as soon as it passes through the small gap is, again, an element of skill expression.

Is any of this to say that she's the most difficult and nuanced killer in the game? Nah, not really. It's just to say that she does, objectively, have nuance and skill expression in her kit that can't just be waved away as too insignificant to count.

I don't see how that's different to what I'm describing?

You can go for a cross-map snipe, or, you can just hit survivors in animation lock when they vault something. There's a low-skill option and a high-skill option.

Skill expression, as a concept, doesn't require that you must use the high-skill option and that there not be any low-skill options. You just need to have those high-skill options and those high-skill options have to give higher rewards, both of which apply to Skull Merchant.

I mean. I just gave you a list of the things you could look at and call a skilled play.

It is possible for her to have skill expression that you simply don't find compelling, for the record. You don't have to find all skill expression equally interesting and exciting.

It's literally a case of laziness/no skill. Every match I play against Skull Merchant, I feel like I'm the MVP, whereas my teammates are always handing out free pallets, free injures, free 3-gens. Then they blame the killer for being too strong. Seriously, if they just disabled drones, looked out for Undetectable, and pressured 2 gens instead of 5 at a time, we'd almost always beat her.

It would be great, but I doubt it. In the end, it might not even change much, her reputation is already completely at the bottom. They should have just put way more ressources into Reworking her after the went live (ideally they should have pushed her back, since the PTB-Feedback for her was also bad, but they probably wanted to appeal to the horny part of the DBD-Community) and offering a money back-option for those who dont like her.

Her latest Rework solved the greatest issue, yet she is still insanely unfun to go against and also to play. IMO the only time someone wants to play Skull Merchant if they a) REALLY like her or b) want to be annoying. I cannot see myself looking at my Killers and think "Woah, no I want to play a game of Skull Merchant, it will be fun."…

But yeah, overall, I really doubt something will happen.

Did they solve the problems Mostly? SM can still place drones on gens yes it wont do anything while your on the gen but as soon as you move your getting marked or clawtrapped

Yes, they did.

She can barely 3-gen at all, and the degree to which her power does anything in that scenario - scanning survivors who run away from gens sometimes to build, eventually, to an injury specifically - is significantly weaker than a lot of other killers' ability to 3-gen.

She used to be able to stall the game until the server closed. Now, she can only get an injury after harassing one survivor away from one generator three times. Is that fun? Not really, but it's not fun when any killer does it. Is it problematic compared to other killers? God no.

It's entirely gone. The problem wasn't a generic "Skull Merchant benefits from 3-genning", both because every killer benefits from 3-genning and because the problem was much more specific than that.

The problem was that she could stall matches out until the server closed. That problem is completely gone.

When it comes to benefiting from 3-genning, I'd argue there's no problem with Skull Merchant specifically now. Any killer can benefit to the amount that she does, and a lot of killers can benefit more. Her just still being able to do it is a bad metric to use, because every killer is able to do it. The question must be, is she any better at other killers when she does it? The answer to that is "no", and also that a few killers are significantly better than her at it.