The Skull Merchant changes sets really bad precedent and should be unacceptable
Look, I hate SM as much as the next guy, but this whole situation is really disturbing
It's not only BHVR rewarding and encouraging survivors DC's and hook suicides ("Look guys, you don't like X killer? If you DC and suicide on 1st hook enough times, we'll nerf them to the ground"), but also making content many people payed money for or spent hundreds of hours leveling up unplayable for year+ (it was confirmed that her rework is coming either Q3 or Q4 2025) is just straight up unacceptable, period. At this point people should ask BHVR for refunds for their her and her skins ect.
Just nerf her slightly and let her be. We lived 1 year of current SM, we can survive for another year. I really hope that most of these changes won't make it to live because that will be really bad look for BHVR
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Yeah this is overkill she not even that strong to warrant this guttering (kill rates dont paint the whole pic) i dont understand why the devs has wasted time and resources on her when she is getting a rework next year.
While i dont agree on the refund since its a live service game, we shouldnt accept these kinds of guttering where it is clearly meant to drive people away from playing a character despite what been said as reason for her guttering (i wont call it a nerf this is a guttering)
If they want to tone down her kill rate which is fair enough even though i highly suspect it due to survivors hook quitting. Then get rid of the hinder and let her keep haste re work the hinder addons to give a 1% increase to her haste speed or a 1 sec increase duration then leave her till her rework
iam clearly frustrated with this guttering and my gut tells me all this feedback will fall onto deaf ears but im willing to voice this as if we accept this guttering style then it will have a nasty ripple effect for future killers balancing
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It's a year unless BHVR decides to either push back the rework in favor of some other "higher priority changes" (AKA Freddy) or abandoned the rework (AKA Twins).
Leaving a killer in this state, when BHVR doesn't even have a good track record of delivering good reworks in the first place is just a tragedy.
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I completely agree with @Crowman here. The character will remain in a terrible and extremely weak state for a year (at best) while waiting for a rework that has a high chance of failing or making her even worse for the game.
These changes really shouldn't go through.
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And the worst thing they leave her in this gutted state since middle of 2025. So her changes should be treated like post ptb sadako changes for bhvr revert some changes or make her rework high priority.
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I agree, the changes seem very callous rather than approached objectively with balance in mind.
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ALL THE DEVS HAD TO DO WAS REMOVE THE HINDER AND HASTE FROM HER KIT
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I completely agree with the OP and others in this thread. I been on here ever since the dev blog saying the same thing over and over. The devs should never gut a killer without a plan to rework them within 6 months at most. Leaving any killer not just SM in a weak state for a year+=is just terrible game design. The dev they have either needs to be better or get replaced with better ones. I'm sorry but it's time to demand these ppl to do a better job and get thier priorities straight. Stop the new killer every three months, focus more on the killers y'all already have and the health of the game overall.
Also devs don't make promises you cannot keep. No one actually believes you that you will have SM rework done by next year. It took y'all two years to do Twins, and Freddy's rework has be pushed back several times. Stop making empty promises and do better.
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Agree with Op theses changes cannot go live
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Skull Merchant currently is the top killer at average MMR, which is why her kill rate is so high, and why she gets the most complaints. She has the highest kill rate, even when BHVR removes games with DCs. That is the tier list that matters. The tier list that affects the majority of the players.
Fake tier lists, based off of 6,000+ hour comp players, don't affect the majority of the games. In the majority of the games, people aren't playing against 6,000+ hour comp players, that can massively overperform on a killer. Instead, they are facing other average players, which currently are overperforming with Skull Merchant.
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We knew that SM was going to get hit with a nerf as far back as spring when the devs showed us their update towards the ideal 60% kill rate.
However, in light of the devs own words on the matter, this nerf feels disingenuous; it's not really targeted towards addressing the serious flaws in SM kit so much as it's designed to force SM into a place where the majority of players avoid playing her until they can “maybe” fix her in 12+ months.
I’m hoping that maybe they walk back some of these “changes” so that SM isn’t completely unviable until late 2025 (assuming that the reworked isn’t delayed, as is common with killer reworks.) However, when we look at history (Freddy, Legion, Hillbilly, etc.) it's unlikely that they walk any of these back.
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I have this crazy theory that some DBD players think that the actual game of DBD is to make the opposing side as miserable as possible. This post would seem to perfectly support that theory - first of all because it argues in favor of keeping a thing that makes a lot of survivor players miserable, but second of all because it assumes that survivors make their own choices as part of some grand strategy to destroy things killers might like.
Let me be clear. Survivors quit against skull merchant because they do not like playing against skull merchant. They do not quit against skill merchant because they kinda sorta dislike playing against skull merchant, but would normally be OK with toughing out a match against her, but because they need to try to fulfill the secret evil survivor cabals goal of nerfing her and making killer players miserable they have to quit; that's simply not how most people approach the game, and IMO the only way someone could come up with the idea of "they're trying to get her nerfed" is if you yourself think that way.
Let me put it another way. Skerchant was reworked nearly a year ago. There was no reason to believe they would revisit her again, so it likely wouldn't be on anyone's mind to quit against her to force BHVR to rework her again so soon after one rework. It seems far more likely that they are quitting because they simply don't like her.
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I'm honestly very surprised to see so many people actually advocating for SM to not be gutted. I've seen way too many streamers and redditors celebrating the fact SM is essentially being removed from the game for the time being and while I am biased because I personally enjoy her, even if this was happening to a character like Blight or Nurse that I despise I would still be upset because it's not about balance, it's as you say, this is rewarding all those people with the mentality of "I'll never play against Skull Merchant" by nerfing her to an unplayable state. This is, just as you said, incentivizing people to refuse to play against a killer they hate and if enough people do it eventually they'll just kill that killer.
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This is how I feel. I am a Skully main, and I have since her rework advocated for removing her Hinder from Claw Trapped Survivors because it simply isn't needed and creates frustration and situation where the Survivor literally cannot win no matter what they do. I will defend her Haste though, that is a hill I will die on because she has no other way to down a Survivor. Another thing I have wanted removed is her Stealth Mode, it's just like Hinder where it creates situations where a Survivor will get scanned and there's not really any way for them to know they were about to get scanned. Those 2 changes alone I guarantee would make her less frustrating to play against, remove her Hinder entirely, and remove Stealth Mode entirely, that's all they needed to do and those would be fair nerfs, not this absolute meat grinder they're putting her into.
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Because that is not how you balance a game. If players hate skull merchant so much that they give up against her so often that she becomes by far the highest kill rate killer in the game. The answer isn't to just blanket nerf her. The answer is to find out what is unfun to play against, and nerf/rework that thing, and then buff other things to compensate. Especially since she isn't actually that strong of a killer.
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It's not just disrespectful to the people who already played her a lot and have spent many bloodpoints on her (as well as shards or even auric cells for cosmetics), but also to any new player who is now, unknowingly, going to buy a faulty product. A product that did not just arrive broken, but was shipped broken.
This deliberate nerf 'just in case' for some rework with an unacceptable ETA (second half 2025, and that's provided they even make that) is extremely bad practice. Major L on the part of the devs here.4 -
These changes can't go live
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No shes really not, shes a low pick rate mid tier killer at best. Her kill rate is massively inflated because people give up and go next on hook without even trying to play. And then those people who refuse to even try just whine endlessly due to their skill issues, irrational hate or poor mentality towards the game in general.
The odds of even getting her are low to begin with, she it no where near popular enough to even begin to be an actual problem for people in any significant way whatsoever on a pure numbers and statistics level. I've played against her (and escaped) 5-6 times in 600 hours of survivor gameplay.
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