Skull Merchant changes were a failure and her playerbase is owed an apology.

The reason is that a skull merchant gets a very high value from her power with almost no effort.

On the other hand, it requires a great deal of effort from the survivor to withstand it against her.

The result is a very boring killer to play against. You will get hit no matter what the survivor does. You stay in the loop, get hit. You leave the loop and go to another loop. She will throw a drone and the first scenario will be repeated.

Even disabling the drone is useless, she will retrieve the drone and throw another one in its place as if nothing ever happened.

Just don't walk into the drones

Did you read my comment? She will throw dorns at every window or pallet you go to, you as a survivor can't stop her from doing that.

Add to that the huge speed difference where the survivor will receive a slowdown in movement speed and she will move faster.

I am probably one of few who thinks that that 3 gen mechant was more boring than nowadays merchant. While the 3 gen merchant could be defeated by only very coordinated team, I didnt go against many of them that we didnt beat. However new skull merchant is boring in all aspects, as she can not hold three gen hostage, she can still stale 3 gens effectively when needed. Plus she is super boring in chase. You get to loop, she throws drone and you get injured eventually, with one beam it is not as fast as it used to be. If she only gets the injury and deep wound whatever. But the haste and hindered is just omega boring. You get slowed by 5 % was 10 %, which means you move at 95 %, can be 92 % if she has the green add on. She walks 115 %, with scan 117 %, two scans 120 % plus blood lust 125 % to 135 % speed, so most of them just hold w around loop to get you injured and catch you with haste. You can chain loops, not really, because scanns dont decay so every scan counts, and as she gets downs slowlier she still does. I have similiar problem with Sadako changes, I only spammed teleports so survivors cant turn of tvs and I get them in 30s back and i got 2-3 condemned mories every game without single hook. Those types of gameplays are simply not engaging or fun. I personally love the drone visual desigh, not really the merchant design but whatever. I think there are ways to rework her to make her more fun.

Another chance to plug my lore rewrite? 🧐

j/k xD

On topic, the treatment of Skully by the survivor community was somewhat understandable, but also completely unreasonable. There were a genuine and long list of complaints to be made about Skull Merchant, but the asinine, childish and pathetic treatment of the character and her playerbase is simply not defencible. Not every Skull Merchant was a Chess Merchant contrary to what her detractors would have you believe.

Most players didn't even want to try and discuss how to improve her, to make the concept work, and shut down every discussion and idea with the same level of thought and quality of argumentation as your average youtube and facebook comment.

I respect Scott for example, but on SM he is insanely biased and refuses to concieve of a world where she can possibly exist. I can quote his as saying "After you've played the game a while, you get a feel for things that can and things that can't work, and SM can never work". Bullshit.

She absolutely could work if people got their head out their backside and really thought about it, but people didn't want to. The community had already decided, and so nothing could be done to improve the character. The last version of Skull Merchant still had problems, but she was absolutely fixable.

I look forward to her future rework, because I still like the idea of having a Ted Bundy/Patrick Bateman-like attractive psychopath killer with a surveillance system I have to sneak past Metal Gear Solid style. Her walk and everything is a part of that, and with a few improvements to her lore, is a character I actually like quite a lot.