Skull merchant rework
Hello. I'm a dedicated SM main (currently 13k clawtrap downs) and after playing her ptb version for some time I'd like to give my feedback. I am happy with the removal of haste and the introduction of the single scanline mechanic. However that's it. I was really surprised that instead of compensation, she received further nerfs. Cutting her hinder in half makes her power worse than bloodlust against an injured person. I think instead of reducing its strength, it would be more fair to cut its duration in half, to force skull merchants to rotate their beams and chain the hinder properly, which would raise her really low skill floor, for which she is so hated. Removal of stealth drones complitely kills her trapping playstyle, to the point where I'm not sure why she has 6 drones available because no survivor with eyes will get caught by them. Instead of complitely removing stealth drones, it would be better to have drones start in scouting mode, but enter stealth mode after 15 seconds, which would be refreshed by detecting survivors. Last thing, I was disappointed to not see ultrasonic speaker implemented basekit, as every skull merchant main will tell you that you cannot play her seriously without this addon. Overall these tweaks seem to be made with complitely no regard to Skull Merchant's players and I hope she gets proper changes that elevate her skill floor without making her complitely unplayable against competent survivors.
Comments
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Also a side note, survivors hate skull merchant because her counterplay is unintuitive and often feels unrewarding. You could make her slowdown when placing a drone and add a cooldown to rotating so survivors have more wiggle room in chase and compensate her by reducing the drones' deploy time. Another big issue is that there's often very little feedback in chase. You could change it by adding a sound cue whenever she rotates a drone
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Solid take. Very much agree.
The haste removal and single scan line changes actually look like there is potential for her design... everything else is the intended 'clip her wings' effect.
I think there is value playing her in this state, if only to get an idea of where her future rework should go.
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Oooh this sounds actually like a good idea, this adds good counterplay that survivors can use, helps make just throwing drones in less effective, and doesn't hurt her trap based playstyle, I really like it.
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agreed
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As a SM main as well I actually disagree on her Haste removal. MANY players don't realize this, but SM has an average amount of 3% Haste during chase and MAYBE 5% Haste IF a survivor outside of the chase has an active Claw Trap. 3% Haste on a 4.6 m/s killer only truly makes a 3.45% difference in speed and 5% Haste only making a 5.75% true difference in speed. A flat 10% Hindered on survivors is a 10% true difference in speed and same with 14% Hindered. This means it was only her Hindered actually causing problems.
The ONLY changes that I think she needs for now until her rework to make her better is:
- The removal of her Hindered since it's a significant difference in speed compared to her Haste. This way the survivors are only having to deal with being injured from Claw Traps rather than being punished further.
- If a survivor is in chase they skip the mini-game for hacking a drone upon interacting with it, but the animation either gives them decent Hindered or prevents them from moving foe 0.5 seconds which will turn the drone off as usual.
- When a Claw Trap deactivates the survivor with the Broken status effect that the Claw Trap gives should be returned to the Healthy state much like how curing yourself of Plague's infection does.
- Hacking a drone removes a Lock-On stack or 33% of a Claw Trap's battery life and give a few seconds of scan immunity, but interacting with the drone when you're in the scan immunity time after getting scanned however will prevent this from happening to discourage players from blatantly running at the drone and ignoring the scan lines. (This will also work if the survivor uses the mini-game skip during chase as well that I mentioned in change #2.)
These changes alone would ease some of the frustrations of playing against her while giving a bit more of counter-play to her while also giving a fair/reasonable way to remove Lock-On stack and speed up getting rid of Claw Traps in a relatively balanced way so that she has a more meaningful reason to interact with her power since her power just simply lacks that interactivity for her design. That is all she truly needs right now until her rework from my experience with her.
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Good suggestions overall. Although I think the 2 scan lines should remain. For visual reasons, if nothing else. One scan line just looks weird.
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With the addition of a single line I would prefer if the devs made her purple add-on (that stops rotation) partially basekit (i.e, drone starts unmoving and stays unmoving unless SM triggers a rotation, which would then start up the drone's normal rotation.)
This would still allow for more trap oriented play while leaving her more skill expression based chases open as an alternative.
Just a thought.
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I think her hindered is the healthier part of her kit. Her haste wasn't an issue by itself in my opinion, more the fact that survivors were sometimes paying for the mistakes of their careless teammates who step into her drones outside of chase. But the hinder gives her the very much needed lethality against an injured person. I think the idea of returning back to healthy is pointless because clawtraps refresh upon further scans and if they didn't, it would promote boring counterplay against SM of just predropping every pallet in the map to avoid going down. Hacking drones removing lock-on would complitely kill her trapping playstyle, but I could see it work if there was a limitation, for example you can remove a lock-on stack this way only once per match, kinda like survivors get to lock lockers against the dredge only once.
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it also doesn't really hurt her using drones at loops if she's going for lasertags instead of mindlessly throwing them at a loop, which raises her skill ceiling
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