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Explain skull merchants drones
As in every aspect of them. THey've changed her so many times I no longer understand what they even do. Ppl seem to act like shes so strong but I feel so weak as her.
THeres now only one line of scan. Sometimes it doesn't seem to even do anything. Other times it instantly injures them and then others it does that weird raise above the ground scan thing. Can this be explained?
Just for the hell of it I tried using this so called OP totem build on her and got destroyed.
Make a mistake disabling no longer causes exposed? Do they come back on their own? What is the point is changing the rotation? I just don't get this killer anymore.
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Drones spawn a laser that rotates around them. If they touch a survivor while that survivor is walking or running, they get scanned. If the survivor gets scanned 3 times, the drone injures them with a Claw Trap which also applies Broken until the Claw Trap's battery dies and falls off. If a survivor is scanned or has a Claw Trap, they appear on Skull Merchant's radar.
Survivors can hack drones to disable them temporarily. They will reboot on their own over time. If a survivor fails a hack, they get scanned.
Skull Merchant can change the direction the laser rotates in case it'd be more optimal for it to turn one way than the other.
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Ppl seem to act like shes so strong
This is very surprising, actually.
Skull Merchant is probably one of the weakest killers in the game right now. Hell, I think Freddy is better than her in common scenarios, and that says something.
It is absolutely baffling just how severely this killer was nerfed, when her previous iteration was fine the way she was. If players had just stopped with the petty DCs or hook suicides and had given her a chance, we wouldn't be here right now.
That is why I believe all of her recent nerfs should be reverted, and the rework should be scrapped. Refusing to adapt to something that is not problematic to begin with, just like Freddy immediately after his release, is something that should never be rewarded.
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This is going to be a sort of long comment and might as well be its own thread, but I've been wanting to explain Skull Merchants power for a while now, so I'll give a shot here. I'll explain it in a bit of detail, so bear with me, I'll try to make it as straightforward as possible. Her power just has a lot of stuff crammed in.
If you're only interested in understanding exactly what the drones do to survivors and don't care what they do for Skull Merchant, you can just read the "How drones work for survivors" part, but I suggest reading it all, maybe you'll learn something that you didn't know. When I say "you" I mean the survivor, this guide is sort of written from the survivors perspective.
Basics:
Skull Merchant has 6 drones when the game starts. Placing a drone grants her 8 seconds of Undetectable, and puts her power on a 10 second cooldown before she can place another drone. About half a second after a drone is placed, it will activate and begin to spin in a circle, scanning survivors that are hit by the scanline. The drones can be Hacked by survivors, which will disable them for 45 seconds, after which they will reactivate and begin scanning again on their own.
How drones work for survivors:
Active drones have a single scanline. When it is yellow, it can scan you, and when it is white, it cannot. The scanline is yellow and can scan you when you are:
- Running
- Walking
The scanline is white and cannot scan you when you are:
- Standing still
- Crouching
- Crouch walking
- Fast vaulting over a pallet or a window
- You were just scanned. Then you are immune to being scanned again for 2.5 seconds, even while running or walking
Getting scanned applies 1 stack of Lock On, with the maximum being 3 stacks. From the survivor perspective, the 1st and 2nd stack don't actually do anything to you, but you cannot remove the stacks. But the 3rd stack applied a Claw Trap. This will do the following:
- You become Broken and cannot be healed
- If you are healthy, you will become Injured and get a small speedboost, same one you get if you get hit normally
- If you are Injured, you will get Deep Wounds
The Claw Trap lasts for 45 seconds by default. If you are currently Claw Trapped, getting scanned again will do the following:
- You will be Hindered by 8% for 6 seconds
- If you are Injured, you will get Deep Wounds
- Skull Merchant can see you with Killer Instinct for 3 seconds
That's quite a bit of info, but the short version is, run or walk into a drone scanline 3 times and you become injured/broken/deep wounded, and the scanline can be dodged by standing still, crouching, crouch walking, or fast vaulting.
How drones work for Skull Merchant:
After placing a drone, if the drone scans a survivor within the next 5 seconds, Skull Merchant gains 5% Haste that lasts for 8 seconds. She will also get this haste if she rotates a drone, and this drone scans a survivor within 5 seconds of being rotated.
Skull Merchant has a Radar. Any survivor that is scanned will be revealed on the radar for 12 seconds if it is their 1st or 2nd stack of Lock On. If a survivor is Claw Trapped (aka 3 scans, broken, etc), they are always visible on her radar.
Skull Merchant can see you on the radar anywhere on the map, but if you are farther than 32m from her you will be at the edge of her radar and she can only see which direction you are. If you are within 32m, she can see your exact location. She can also see if you are above or below her. This is what her radar looks like from her perspective, in this example the survivor is about 15m away, directly in front of her:
Skull Merchant can recall a drone, which will bring it back to her so she can use it again. This can be used to remove drones she no longer wants or that are hacked by survivors. Rotating and recalling drones can be done across the entire map, but she can only place drones right above herself.
So the short answer for what Skull Merchant can do with the power is:
- Get undetectable after placing a drone
- Get 5% haste after scanning you with a newly placed or newly rotated drone
- See you radar if she recently scanned you, or you are claw trapped
- Rotate, place, and recall drones
If you want, I can give some small tips that can really mess a Skull Merchant up, but this post is long enough as it is. Or, since you mention wanting to play as her, I can give some tips, builds etc for playing as her.
Post edited by MrMori on9 -
great comment - thank you! Genuinely learnt from it and was totally unaware of some of these things even having read notes etc lol
p.s. the pic with her hand looks very predator-esque!5 -
The biggest thing I noticed is that the drone's scan range will randomly glitch out or something, because it looks like it only goes out 1 meter. So a survivor can just run around the drone and never be hit by its scan, whether you change the direction or anything. I've even tried replacing the drone, and the range is still that pathetically short nonsense. I almost want to say this bug or feature was present before her nerf.
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It doesn't surprise me. When it comes to nerfing killers, this community and these devs can be very petty and vitriolic. No one in their right mind would have taken the 2 scanners on drones and changed it to 1. Even after Skull Merchant's been nerfed for like the 3rd time, they still rage quit on sight against her, or say she's OP.
What they've been doing is crutching on 1 example they were given which supposedly proves that Skull Merchant 3-genning is OP. I'm referring to that 1 cocky Skull Merchant main/bully vs Team Eternal match. This was when she had Exposed instead of the new claw traps, but it changes little. That team has got to be the biggest group of fakes I've ever seen in competitive gaming. They don't deserve the "best team in world" title as so many suckers have been conned into believing. 1) They did nothing to split the map, nor '99 the second to last gen, even though they knew coming into the match that he was gonna 3-gen them. They just gave him a free 3-gen. 2) Once they were in the 3-gen, they played laughably bad. They threw down multiple pallets when they didn't need to, didn't use that time the killer spent breaking to push gens harder, and even allowed themselves to get downed and hooked with no added gen pressure in exchange. - Every time they switched to some other teammate when that happened, what were they doing? Nothing. Just walking around, not attempting a flashlight save when in position to, and barely running back to gen to work on it for 5 seconds when they know it should've been 20+ seconds WITH 2 or more people. So that's why a meathead Skull Merchant held "the best team" for 30+ minutes. 4 of me, in my mediocrity, would have been a better team of opponents. Hens' fake excited commentary just tricked people into thinking they were watching something high level. An M1 holding a 4-man on comms at a standstill. What a laugh.
So she should have her nerfs reverted. We should be balancing around players who understand basic strategy and game sense, not people who know nothing and contribute nothing. They're just gonna keep nerfing killers until current Freddy is the most "viable," because they don't understand anything, especially not the real balance issues of the game.
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Having only a single scan line is ridiculous, I agree.
And honestly, I don't even mind that people complained about her original version. But her previous iteration, the one we had before the recent nerfs, was completely fine. She was not overpowered, not even in the slightest, and people would've learned this fact if they didn't DC every time the killer happened to be Skull Merchant.
I've had full solo queue games where we all escaped against SM simply because everyone in the team decided to stick around and actually play the match. But instead of players adapting we get another Freddy situation, exactly the same thing that happened in october of 2017: something that is perfectly fine for the game gets nerfed because people just don't want to learn.
It is wild that it has happened with SM, when there is a clear example in Freddy as to why this shouldn't be done. I strongly believe her nerfs should be reverted and people should be explicitly told to learn and understand the killer, instead of DCing every single time.
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Give dat man likes.
OK maybe i misunderstood one bit though. What causes the lines to be yellow or white???
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It's based on the fact if you can or cannot get scanned. Yellow = she can scan you, white = she can't scan you.
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https://youtu.be/opIq7RJo4-0?si=c9NZIqxxu10XU6De
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Link fix. This video by Spooky with PixelBush as a guest explores Skull merchant in fine detail.
It is 40 minutes long, but it is a very interesting watch.
Spooky himself plays the role of a layman who doesn't know or understand Skull Merchant, and asks all about her with in game demonstrations from Pixel throughout explaining how things worked and why she basically got taken out back and shot in the head.Survivors do get kinda called out for their bias quite often… and you can consistently hear Pixel's exasperated sighs whenever he has to talk about how dirty survivors played with their SoH and DC tactics to get her killed… and to be fair to Pixel… he's not wrong… it is kinda disgusting the lengths survivors went to to destroy this killer… but as long as you go in with a open mind, there is a wealth of valid and interesting info in this video.
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Yeah I liked her second iteration rework. Nothing wrong with it at all.
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She could have been left alone, honestly. She should have. All these nerfs weren't needed.
it is kinda disgusting the lengths survivors went to to destroy this killer
What makes it worse is the fact that it wasn't the first time.
The exact same thing happened to Freddy a week after his release, and the developers know that. In fact, they regretted doing what they did to Freddy back then (Cote's words, not mine).
So why do the exact same thing with SM? It doesn't make sense.
Which is why I believe all of her recent nerfs should be reverted, and the rework should be scrapped. Those who refuse to learn how to play against something that isn't problematic for the game should never get their way.
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So the same drone line would look different to each survivor depending on their action at that current moment?
If a drone is there and someone is running near it. It would appear yellow? Then if another was crouching it would look white?
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Well, we all know this game and what goes on. She never was that strong. Her first version was pretty dang good but the problem there was she was good because of survivors GIVING UP. I rememebr testing her and playing a way I thought was unbeatable. It was possible to defeat her and it all depended on survivors simply REFUSING to do gens in the drone field.
THey were terrified of exposed. yet when you're plague every just loops while broken anways. its so odd.
Even as this new weak version many people DC against me.
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Even as this new weak version many people DC against me.
Surprisingly I haven't been getting as many DCs with her as I thought I would, but it does happen yes.
Also one of the many reasons why I believe all of her recent nerfs should be reverted. If the petty DCs won't stop, then there was no reason to gut her.
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