Skull Merchant Feedback: Drone Control Idea, The Energy Beam, More Clawtrap Ideas

Hello everyone,

As said yesterday, if the situation would evolve during these hours I would come back on my feedback to add more ideas and feelings.

After seeing many concerns at how drones would become "5 Mini Victors" and "Too Many Dash Killers", or about how anti-thematic is a drone jumping on a survivor, I though of… The Energy Beam.

How does it work? Energy Beam is a charged laser (hitboxes like Deathslinger Harpoon) that can hit the survivors. The energy required for its activation is so draining that the whole drone deactivates after shooting it. While controlling a drone, this will move at 4.4 m/s (ranged killers speed), the Energy Beam cannot be instashot (or quickscoped), but it has to be charged for a bit and then released before the drone deactivates itself once it's at full charge. While charging the Beam the drone would slow down accordingly to numbers that go accordingly to balancement.

I thought of many ways to implement Energy Beam, accordingly to different kind of players.

1) Just allow the beam to injure directly once in control
2) Reintroducing Clawtraps x 3 times scanning and keeping drones rotation: Instead of directly injuring, the Clawtrap only allows to use the Energy Beam to injure a survivor. Clawtraps can be removed only by a survivor after 45 seconds and after doing the skillchecks of OG Skull Merchant.

How to reintroduce Drone Rotation after your suggested changes?

A) Drones will track once again in an area way as OG Skull Merchant: With the removal of Lock On Exposed the threat of being seen is not so big against a 4.6 m/s killer. Also survivors now know if someone else is hacking another drone thanks to HUD changes (but other mechanics can be implemented) to allow coordinated hacking moves even in SoloQ.
B) Drones beam rotation is ONLY for applying the Clawtraps: Clawtraps will still grant visibility on Radar.

Benefits of this proposed change:
1) Keeping Skull Merchant identity in a mix between OG Merchant (Area based tracking) and 2.0 (Beam Rotation), adding lethality based on a more active mechanic (the Energy Beam)
2) By making the drones lethal only with an applied clawtrap and dealing only one health state, the power wouldn't allow an obnoxious threegening strategy. The time to apply a Clawtrap and making the Energy Beam working on Clawtraps would make the Skull Merchant benefit from committing a chase on Clawtrapped survivors.
3) Area Tracking Drones Look Easier to Balance and less Overwhelming of "Red Light/Green Light" and I'm sure it's more than enough for OG Skull Merchant players.

The projectile can be even a bit more original if resources allow for it with something that maybe moves forward and then it's detonated on command, but it can be too complex to code into the game, so I let you be creative eventually, but in the most simple scenario a sort of "Minimum charge necessary, but don't Overheat if hold for too long" should do its job.

Of course it's just an idea of Day 2 Skull Merchant Design Preview, but I think that by getting the main mechanics of the two iterations without making these obnoxious and introducing a new mechanic that promotes a more active and direct approach, we can have an interesting killer that will not alienate her OG player base (with me dropping her after that she lost the macro aspect of her power), nor the 2.0 one and can finally reach new players and be more interesting to face for survivor players.

This is just an idea, it's not gonna be perfect, but it shows the direction I would like to achieve with my feedback <3

This is how I imagine a Drone 3.0 seen from the sky, to help with visual Feedback.