Feedback and Suggestions
Feedback and Suggestions
Skull Merchant Rework: The Misguided Potential
After careful consideration of current versus potential future Skull Merchant, this seems like a massive mistake.
Removing all aspects of her current kit will make her even more confusing for players. People simply do not read patch notes and some still think her drone fields are in the game from her launch version. The average player couldn't even list every status effect in the game.
These changes would remove her hit and run playstyle and make her a pseudo dash killer. As someone with thousands of hours played as Skull Merchant the appeal is knowing where your targets are while they don't know if you're coming. Haste and Hindered were bonuses but they were not the meat of the kit.
Players who don't understand that the scan lines are tracking them would benefit from a more active UI element, so consider bringing back the Watchful Eye from her first PTB.
Skull Merchant has been wrongfully hated as the scapegoat for the 3-Gen meta being released during the height of game apathy and poor perk design. Her chess merchant playstyle isn't even possible anymore due to the 3-Gen Solution 8 kick limit. Regardless of her health people will always remember and associate her with the time period during launch.
So many steps have already been made to improve clarity from the removal of stealth mode to the introduction of grey scan lines signaling they won't affect the Survivor. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here and have players lose the identity of a character like Doctor, Nightmare, and Trickster had.
The additional complexity of guesstimating a Skull Merchants drone power and a random "ultimate" that won't have any affect on survivors outside of chase are just going to further curate her identity as a noob stomper while giving her even less of an edge against competent survivors. Survivors already have no indicator of Killer Instinct reveals so this would just be an extra punishment for no tangible risk and a reward they couldn't see coming. Additionally, with the loss of claw traps it would be another piece of Skull Merchants identity stripped from her as we have already lost the survivors panic animation when the drone fields were removed. Players will continue to gaslight themselves for imagined Haste bonuses due to her walk cycle not matching the speed of a chase.
I'm begging you please lean more into the information aspect but keep the current design as a base. Going forward, if your intention is to allow a limited ability to offer mapwide information simply allow the Skull Merchant to activate a double beam on her drones that doesn't add a Lock-On stack while also piercing through walls. Reimplement the Watchful Eye as well as the panic animation if a Survivor is hit. This will give survivors the tension of actually understanding they are seen, but without the certainty of whether or not the killer is currently acting on that information. There is already so much potential from her recent change allowing her to see the auras of scan lines so please lean into that.
Can her reputation be saved? After 2 years apparently not. But her kit and identity? Time will tell.
Comments
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It's not because some casual players don't read patch notes that no killer should ever get a complete rework.
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So you say we shouldn't rework her kit because it'll make her more confusing, and then you immediately proposing cramming even more features into her current kit that will undoubtedly make her more complex and confusing anyway?
No.
Skull Merchant has been wrongfully hated as the scapegoat for the 3-Gen meta
Also no, as someone who suffered through that era, the hate was very deserved. It was the only way to play her because it was the only thing she was good at.
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It's just an example of what the game is like from middle to bottom mmr. People are to this day confused why Dead Hard no longer gives distance. Change is often welcome and should be encouraged, but this change is all take for no give.
Doctor lost his mobile information gathering ability and UI elements as well as stance switching identity. The Nightmare lost his information on survivors and the VFX of pulling into Dream World was lost. Trickster lost many voice lines and combo elements to his knife rate, even outside of main event. Did these killers gain net positive changes? That's subjective. But I believe it is a mistake to simply remove aspects of powers instead of building upon them. The current powers of these killers range from vaguely familiar to completely unrecognizable. Surely there could be a unified version of the old and new powers?
Let's look at the original 3 killers, Trapper, Wraith, and Hillbilly. All 3 have received numerous yet recognizable changes. By and large they are considered successful as each change has tangibly improved each killer without sacrificing their identity. Trapper still has to search for traps, but now has more refined spawn logic, more traps, faster setting speed etc. Wraith over time has been able to cloak and move faster. Hillbilly has had several improvements to curve duration and speed. Yet the gameplay remains the same. Survivors still understand that traps will immobilize you. That a bell warns you of imminent danger. That a chainsaw dash has limited turn rate.
Now let's look at the 3 most notably changed killers. Doctor is now able to damage immediately? Reverse skill checks? A loud buzzing made you scream despite avoiding terror radius until the last second? Nightmare is visible but only sometimes? There was no warning before you got hit now there's pool's of blood slowing you down? The generators are leaking but only sometimes? Healing smothers you in Ash? The Trickster is catching up to you faster than ever before? You thought a straight dash would make it to a pallet but even though chase just started so did Main Event?
The changes are so severe that they could have been released as entirely seperate powers. I could go into depth about my wishes for the entire killer roster but that's not important right now. The reasoning is the same. Killers should be able to be buffed or nerfed but never at the cost of their identity and playstyle. This is especially true when it leads to the loss of animations and VFX that are iconic of that character.
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I am proposing a variation of her current power that allows Skull Merchant players to enjoy what makes her unique compared to the rest of the killer roster, while also limiting pain points from the Survivor perspective. I am only suggesting that the devs reimplement features that had provided clarity to the Survivor side. Removing them did not buff the Skull Merchant in any way and only served to nerf the rock bottom of survivor mmr, so they should return as it is of no cost or concern to concurrently active players.
As for your second comment, all killers are capable of kicking generators. Hope that helps.
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"Provide clarity" by adding new functions to drones to memorize. Now sometimes the lasers give you lock on, sometimes they don't, the lasers go through walls except when they don't, and now there's an eye symbol that players from the past 2 years aren't going to recognize at all. Not to mention adding even more buttons for SM to press on her drones all over the map because now you can reverse a drone, recall a drone, put drone in a different mode…
All this text won't even fit in the killer's power description on the screen anymore. Playing this SM would require opening the wiki for a full rundown.
As for your second comment, all killers are capable of kicking generators. Hope that helps.
Are all killers capable of putting down detection fields on three generators that notify them when survivors approach them, stall survivors by forcing them to remove the detection field or risk getting one-shot, and can immediately replace the field even if survivors do remove it, infinitely, ad nauseam, from the very beginning of the game? Because launch Skull Merchant could, and it was some of the least fun I've ever experienced in DbD on both sides of the match.
Hope that helps.
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Everyone, including the devs, just needs to stop making excuses for the people who don't read power descriptions, patch notes, play as the killer, or even watch gameplay of a killer. If they cannot even be bothered to do those things, do not balance for them. It's one thing to say, "We should balance for our inexperienced/casual players as well." I don't agree with it, because you don't ever balance for people who don't know what they're doing OVER those who do, but here we are. And this, how Skill Merchant has been handled, goes one step further than that. It's saying that the people who can't be bothered to do… anything... just DC every time they see the killer they don't like and that's the extent of their thinking, that we should balance around them! I mean, if any other game's community pulled this, they'd just be laughed out. "I don't like snipers in CoD. Insta- leave game." "I don't like Zangief in Street Fighter. Insta- DC." That doesn't get you anywhere. It's childish and petty. I don't know why it's put up with it here, because "it's different."
Sadako's current state puzzled me for quite a while, but when I simply took a moment to think about it, and play her a match or 2, I understood perfectly. She's pretty much like her release version, with a few changes. Her Condemned affects survivors around all active TVs, not just the one she TPs to. Her tapes turn off TVs and remove Condemn, but don't prevent further Condemned from active TVs. And when she hooks you, your Condemned you've acquired so far becomes locked in and can't be removed. She has the exact same counterplay as before, minus that last part. Skull Merchant is similar. - You hack the drones, crouch or stand still to ignore scan lines, watch out for stealth, and don't get scanned by a new drone or she gets speed. She is as bare bones as you can get with M1 killer design, besides literal 1-dimensional killers like Myers.
I think we should just make her drones like Nemesis' zombies, patrolling the map, just scanning people instead of inflecting them. If we're gonna force simple design because people can't think further than, "Man, that killer's too strong," and rage quitting on sight, this design is the one I'd go for.
Kind of a tangent here, but you have piqued my interest on one thing though. If they were to push new Skull Merchant and others as these really info-value intensive killers, it would coincide with the devs nerfing Distortion and proposing anti- extended hiding mechanics. That's a good thing and a bad thing. It would be good because killer can always do with more info (still waiting on that individual hook counter), and because the real skill and excitement in this game is looping, not hiding. It could also be bad because maybe the devs think that's enough. Good survivors already don't care if you see them or not; they will just loop you to death. Info disproportionately affects lower level survivors, because they think they're being clever hiding, not knowing the killers can see them, meanwhile they're not doing gens or looking to heal. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be that way, because it's punishing bad survivors and doing basically nothing to the good ones. But we've had it before where if something that was nothing more than a noob stomp tool, because low level survivors lost to it constantly, that would indicate to the devs it must be OP and needs nerfing because it's "meta."
In the end, I'm really not invested in Skull Merchant. I've lost patience in trying to justify her being strong without being OP, because there's too many people thinking a killer can't be the former without also being the latter. I've tried the same with other killers. I think the devs realize it too, that they messed up big time on a killer's concept execution, and are now gonna start from basically the ground up. She's been nothing like I expected from the initial teaser of the cyborg skull on the table. When we saw that, a million good ideas sprung to our minds, none of which made it into her final design. So I encourage you to keep fighting, because you're passionate about the game and about a killer you like, but I'm done with her.
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Its too bad. Skull Merchant will always be hated by mob mentality. She has a reputation of being a scapegoat for the gen kick meta and that image is apparently unshakeable. The issue with her isn't that she's too hard to understand, players outright refuse to do so. People will proudly boast about how they will never play against her and they get cheered on.
Unlike other games, DbD has an extreme lifelong issue with Tribalism. There's no generational war between Sniper and Shotgun clans in CoD or basic versus special movesets in Street Fighter. But Killers vs Survivors has been a constant battle of entitlement by players who do not engage with playing their opposing role of choice. If players didn't use certain weapons or fighters you would never know. But when DbD survivors never play killer (or vice versa) it is a proud display of purity for having never tried half of the game.
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Out of the 3 killers you mentioned the only one I agree with is Freddy, since his gameplay changed completely. The other 2 however? nah.
Doctors rework is probably the most successful and have not heard any complaints about his rework. His stance switching may be gone sure, but everything else about his kit remained true and faithful to his character and identity. His shock remained the exact same but with better numbers, madness stayed the same with the addition of more effects, and his add ons pretty much stayed the same as well. Even his gimmicky builds like Stealth Doc and Sniper Doc are still in the game. I think Doc is an amazing example on how to fix a flawed design
Trickster I have no idea what youre on about here. His identity never changed, how ever the devs attempt at making him feel better to play as and against just didnt work out at all. Not sure what you mean by removed voice lines, his combo ones (well, the maniacal laughter) is still very much there.
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Plague, wesker, singularity, artist, demogorgon, sadako etc…
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I’m not really the most avid member of the community, and I don’t know anything about the reworks of the other killers you mentioned. However I really do agree that the complete redo of the skull merchant is kinda trashy. Or maybe just the way the redo is. I love that I can just deploy my drones and then hunt survivors with an edge in controlled areas. I’m mostly just upset at how active they are making her power, I think you labeling it as a “dash” type character is apt and honestly dbd has enough of those.
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I also think idea is bad, and a lot of people have proven it in the comments.
In short, her ability also remains difficult to understand/implement. The game is becoming less dynamic. She's losing her trap-playing style.
My idea:
- The drone ability should be simple and intuitive for everyone, so drones will quickly scan the area, providing a lot of information, but no more. We intuitively understand that scanning is getting information, so we are afraid of the drone (and we don't get obscure debuffs or damage because we ran next to it). The survivors don't want to be exposed, so they can hack into the drone, but then the turtle dealer will receive a notification.
If the survivor makes a mistake during the hacking, the drone self-destructs (system overload), causing damage to all survivors around it (+ notification). The survivor is severely punished for the mistake, but he got rid of the drone. Now the survivors can specifically sacrifice their health to destroy the drone.
The drone does not have energy / fuel, the drone is either recalled or blown up, otherwise it works constantly and provides information.
That's all! We have a simple and intuitive ability that provides a lot of information in a certain area and which can injure a survivor for a mistake (we have increased the chances of this by giving an additional reward to the survivor) - Additional ability. I like that this maniac has a hidden style of play unlike the others. I want this idea to develop further. To make her a unique stealthy killer. I have a few ideas for additional abilities: grenade - smoke screen, drone - smoke screen, drone - blinding beam.
2a. Grenade - smoke screen. We stick to simple and straightforward mechanics, so this is a projectile that you can throw/shoot/throw under yourself (like a ninja?!).
The shell explodes on contact with the surface, spreading thick smoke in which the survivors can see very poorly, but not the skull dealer. There are several shells that can be replenished in the locker. Thanks to this ability, you can create scary moments for survivors, make ambushes, disrupt coordination, confuse, drive away. This will make the maniac even more secretive, unexpected, and sudden.
2b. The drone is a smoke screen. The maniac targets the drone and causes an explosion from the smoke screen. This is less effective than a smoke grenade, since we are limited by the drone and cannot quickly cover the area we need with a smoke screen in order to hide there.
2c. The drone is a blinding beam. The killer aims at the drone and activates the blinding beam mode. Now the scanning beam becomes blindingly bright. When a survivor is hit by a beam (even if he is not moving), he is blinded!
There will be no blinding only if the survivor has his back turned.
The turtle trader is not afraid of this blindness.
Thanks to this ability, we also support the stealthy killer mode, we have the opportunity to disorient the survivor and make him afraid of the drone during the chase.
All these abilities are very simple, understandable, and obvious.
In order for the additional drone-related ability to be really useful, you need to increase the detection radius of the drone. The drone only gives information about the moving survivors, so we can afford to do it! But a smoke screen drone/blinding beam drone will be really dangerous.Yes, it will be a weak maniac who walks and can only injure M1 (most often), but will he be interesting, does he have potential?
0 - The drone ability should be simple and intuitive for everyone, so drones will quickly scan the area, providing a lot of information, but no more. We intuitively understand that scanning is getting information, so we are afraid of the drone (and we don't get obscure debuffs or damage because we ran next to it). The survivors don't want to be exposed, so they can hack into the drone, but then the turtle dealer will receive a notification.
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Doctors madness used to decay to 0. Shock Therapy did not pacify survivor actions. Madness did not affect the ability to use perks or items. Snapping Out Of It was considered a healing action at one point. Madness would take longer to build for higher tiers. Madness would charge more quickly in closer proximity to the Doctor. Is Doctor thematically recognizable? I would lean on yes but his gameplay has changed so much over the years.
Trickster has a complex design and tumultuous history in DbD. Many of his voice lines especially related to combos are no longer playing (at least audibly.) His various iterations constantly play with laceration decay, walk speed, knife rate, even laceration threshold and main event activation. On paper he seems to be the same killer. But in practice he has largely shifted from a methodical killer peppering down his targets over time to a spray and pray DPS maxxing spammy type. His visuals are largely preserved from the many small tweaks but when looked at as a sum of the changes the game flow has shifted greatly.
Many of his sound designs are unclear whether they are truly bugged or simply just removed to accommodate his faster gameplay. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPMngzN64MWQ60BFTVqraTf5zKWSe1FP1&si=WhAF7YPvpCu_9Eof
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Everything you mentioned about the Doctor changes here was changed WAY before his rework in 2020. Most of them were in 2017 with the Doctor Cube. Also his Madness could not decay to 0, only back to tier 1 when some one would snap out of it. That being said they could still decay if Doc was in Punishment mode, just not down a tier.
Also the missing sounds for Trickster seem more like a bug than anything, and even then like half the sounds shown in this wasnt even launch Trickster, it was PTB.
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