http://dbd.game/killswitch
Why lie about making SM less convoluted?
Admittedly the title is unfair— This might be a case of things getting away from the devs somehow, them not realizing how overly complex the power is shaping up to be. But the point stands— Skull Merchant's current power is not inherently too busy. It has too many small effects, but those can reasonably be sanded down. The reworks proposed are fundamentally busy, with a global detection power that just kind of happens, drones that tackle you to damage you and give you a weird status effect that only serves to enable her delayed-blast projectile to down survivors, and drones can for some reason reveal survivors as well. She has a drone that weirdly hovers around her to do this, that is special from the others just because (Why is it not a wrist launcher of some kind, at least? That would make a little more sense.)
BHVR has stated the intent to make Skull Merchant's power easier to understand, but instead of removing the various excessive details that make her current power too hard to understand for new players, like the many small status effects in the power, they've opted to make it more fundamentally complicated. It's much easier to explain that her drones scan you and when they do that enough, they harm you, than to explain her new weird two-hit projectile/dash with complimentary Red Light Green Light system.
If you just wanted to get rid of Skull Merchant, stop pretending you have great reasons for it. If you're giving up at least be transparent.
Comments
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She's not so complex that it takes a scientist to understand her, the old version of the upcoming new one. Saying that she is would be either insulting and patronizing to players, or revealing how low the bar has been set on what players are to understand to play the game. I mean, at that point, Wraith could be considered too complex a killer, like "What? He can only attack or pick up while out of cloak, and uncloaking requires ringing the bell and slowing down? And when he does that, he gets a speed boost/longer lunge? And he can be 'light burned' with a flashlight (old)? What is all this?" It seems like a mouthful spelling it all out, but we all know he's easy to understand. I argue it's the same with Skull Merchant. You just need to understand how her drones and scanning works, and counterplay.
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Honestly I don't even think current SM is that convoluted. You can see the areas her drones are watching and they turn white if you crouch from orange which is a signal they won't detect you. Survivors see they are hindered and they have the potrait UI to show how many stacks they have for the claw trap.
I believe the only reason she's even considered convoluted is that many survivors simply refuse to even try in the first place and changing a killer completely because a bunch of people can't be adults in an M rated game is not a good sign for the future.
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No, it's not a good sign. In fact, I'm surprised the game has lasted this long with that kind of game balance scheme.
There was someone I argued with a while back, with me explaining that Skull Merchant isn't so crazy complicated, and them arguing that she's the only killer in the game whose design was super cryptic. Strange, coming from someone who seemed experienced at the game. But it just goes to show that their voice was pretty much the only experienced one agreeing that she was too complicated to understand. Nobody who puts even the bare minimum into learning about her is confused about her design. You'd have more information to process trying to learn Sadako, or Singularity, or Pinhead. It's literally just playing as her, playing against her, reading her power description, or looking up gameplay of her. Any one of those things will tell you what she's about. When the new Skull Merchant gets here, we'll be able to do the same thing.
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To be fair, I don't think the takeaway here is supposed to be "New Skull Merchant would be impossible to understand".
The point is, what's in the design preview is objectively more complicated than current Skull Merchant, when the goal was to try and make her less complicated. Sure, you'd be able to figure her out with a little attention and patience if this new version hit live (though there'd be myriads of other problems because the design preview is kind of a nightmare), but that's a failure state as far as BHVR's stated goals go.
You and I may agree she isn't actually that complicated right now, but the fact remains that BHVR said they wanted her to be easier to understand and the design preview goes in the opposite direction.
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"Scan is bad don't touch it" THIS is literally the entire description of SM's power for survivors, it's something on the level of don't step into Trapper's trap, this not too hard understand
I dont know why SM is "difficult to understand", technically Dracula is a much more difficult killer to understand countermeasures due to multiple abilities and understanding hellfire hitboxes2 -
The #1 goal of the rework is to remove the “unfair hits” that survivors complained about.
All this talk of “making her less complicated” is just a distraction, to secretly hide the actual purpose of the rework.
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I don't go for conspiracy brain thinking if I can help it. I'd rather take the devs at their word and assume they're making mistakes.
Obviously, they're not going to be front and centre with saying "this rework is only happening because of an irrational hate train", but that's about as far as I'm willing to go assuming something the devs aren't actively saying.
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To be fair, the design preview is way way easier for survivors to understand the counterplay, than previous Skull Merchant.
Most survivors never figured out how to do the “run, crawl for like 0.3 seconds, run” counterplay for scan lines, and they also never figured out you can run directly under the drone to avoid both scan lines.
And the entire “maybe survivors shouldn’t just run around corners without checking for drones” counterplay was just way too complicated, which is why people kept complaining about “unfair hits from across the map”.
….But it doesnt matter how complex the design preview is, the entire thing is “survivors only get hit by a drone dash or dart projectile” and “if survivors get a reveal warning, they should stop running or walking if they want to stay hidden”
It’s also extremely likely the survivors will get a warning when Skull Merchant switches view to a drone (like Twins or Houndmaster), which means survivors don’t even need to worry at all about drone dashes unless they get the global warning sound.
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Which, she didn't get any. What unfair hits? Because she's stealthed sometimes, and had Haste sometimes, similar to Bloodlust I? I thought people's biggest problem was with her 3-genning (an issue that solves itself, because of the gen kick limit)? But you're right, that we don't know how this rework is going to be, or who it's made for.
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I don't like the rework at all. However, that being said I believe BHVR had genuine intentions to keep her simplified and easy to understand. I think the problem was is that they quickly realized how much of a nightmare she was going to be to balance in her first iteration, the proposed second iteration fixes a lot of the problems of the first but they've kinda circled the wagon and gone back to making her have too many moving parts again. Frankly I don't even know what the solution is going forward with the rework. What we're gonna get is what we'll get because to me at least it's starting to get to the point where it'll be a situation where nobody will be happy with the rework.
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The only workable solution involves scrapping Drone Propulsion, imo.
Presumably, because this is a preview and not a PTB, they're early enough along to do that. They really do just need to go back to the drawing board, Drone Propulsion is not going to work out the way they want it to.
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ya know I read through it and it does not seem that hard to understand what to do as survivor.
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When a survivor gets a claw trap, while the killer was far away, it’s considered an “unfair hit”, or a “hit out of nowhere”, because the claw trap injures them, but the “killer didn’t do anything to deserve it”.
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I don't necessarily think it is that hard to understand, but it is objectively more complex, and looking at it from a new survivor's perspective, all the things that you have to do against the current proposal are far less intuitive than "Just don't get scanned by the drones." If the intent is to make it more intuitive, they have failed and made it worse. If the drones are weak enough that knowing the counterplay isn't necessary anyway, then that's not actually a good thing.
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I don’t play SM so I have no real input on performance, I don’t feel like it’s my place. I’m just saying as someone that mostly plays survivor it doesn’t seem that complicated to understand counterplay duck walk, don’t move during alarm, and try to dodge drone in chase. Go into injured but not downed unless the drone is powered up on you if you got got, also mend from drone attack when you can. To me it does not seem that complicated to understand counterplay. If someone doesn’t take the time to read because they play solo, or people are grouping and not sharing the information they know it seems like a game knowledge issue, and not a “this killer is too complicated issue” they’ve got fog whispers that can spread this information.
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That's still not the point. It is more complicated than it was, when one of the stated goals for the rework is to make the power more intuitive to understand. They are adding a bunch of different layers that can add a different point of confusion for new players. Do I think it would be that hard to understand as a long time player? No. I understand it. But new players will have no IDEA what anything is. All of that is way more complicated than "Don't get scanned by the drone." And you can't really blame them for being ignorant— Nobody just looks up what every killer does when they start the game, it's not a thing people do.
But people will look at a skull that shines a light around and say "Oh, I probably shouldn't let that see me." People won't go "Oh, that might start flying at me and tackle me, oh, I have a trap on me I need to take off, I'm being chased and now have to juke a delayed-blast projectile that relies on me having this weird thing that drone put on me." That's way more to figure out.
Edit, because I forgot about the Global Detection power:That's also another random layer of stuff survivors just, have to guess at? They suddenly have an eye on their screen. They probably won't even know they've been detected by it, just that it… Happened. Suddenly the killer goes over to them. Maybe. How are they supposed to know how to crouch or stand still? They're not gonna, probably not even if the indicator is colored. It's all a bunch of different places new survivors can fail to understand, compared to "Drones can scan you if you don't stand still or crouch while they look in your direction. Don't let them do that."
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there’s also the loading screen that gives you hints when facing killers when you’re loading in, that’s something to consider as well. New players are new players, they don’t know much of anything anyways knowledge comes with time, information sharing, and research.
I once got my bum handed to me repeatedly playing Nioh fighting Umi Bozu, then I looked up how to fight umi bozu, only to find out I hadn’t been lighting bon fires that debuff them, and made the fight easier. They’ll either search for information or they won’t to get better. Some people beat their head against a wall until they learn or don’t, and others outsource for help. That’s just how people are.
Post edited by HeroLives on0 -
So are trappers traps unfair because you ran into them on the other side of the map and you're now injured? What you basically just described is:
"Survivors fail to act appropriately against a killers power and get punished for it".
Survivor's running around blindly with zero sense of caution and triggering things isn't "unfair" on them. It isnt about if the killer "deserved" it, its about if the survivor deserved it for poor and reckless gameplay (and they did).
I guess trapper doesn't ever deserve his trap injuries by this logic.
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Arguably those hits are considered undeserved too.
But people tolerate it because that’s his entire power. And his traps have extremely limited value during chases, if the survivors are in an area with 0 set traps.
Meanwhile, Skull Merchant has a bunch of other stuff besides traps that can injure, and she can drop traps while moving, which means they have a lot of value during chases.
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What 'other stuff' does Skull Merchant really have? She has drones, which are traps that reveal your location to her, and eventually injure you. That's kind of it. Sure, there's some small status effects in the kit but not really anything that goes beyond "Her traps put you in danger."
Post edited by arcaneGospel on2 -
- She gets stealth when she drops a trap, and she's so quiet that she can actually sneak up on people.
- She has a radar, and when a survivor triggers a trap she gets location reveal for a while, which the survivor can't block. And when a survivor get a claw trap, she gets location reveal for a long time.
- She doesn't need to manually retrieve traps (unlike Trapper).
- She can drop traps while moving, so it useful to do in chase (unlike Trapper).
- Her trap range is decently large (unlike Trapper), which means that if she drops traps near generators, the survivors can't just step around them.
- She gets a stacking haste buff from her traps, which is way better than the mostly useless haste buff Trapper gets when he sets a trap.
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Why is BHVR putting so much effort into a survivor who refuses to understand the killer and just whines and screams?
I would say it is a waste of time.
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1 and 6 fall under just having status effects as part of her power, I'd say. Not that they're IRRELEVANT, but they're still part of drones' functionality. The rest is also just the details of how drones do their basic function of spotting and eventually injuring you. I won't argue that she doesn't have all those things as part of her drones, though, but I think you could reasonably argue Trapper is just an incomplete killer who hasn't been designed to account for his intrinsic weaknesses in the way someone like Skerchant has been. She definitely has a smoother way of trapping, but I wouldn't call it a lot more stuff than Trapper. She also needs to scan you three times to get the injury, whereas Trapper only needs to get you once— and if he's close, that one trap will often be a complete down. He can also actually shut down a loop. Skull Merchant doesn't have MORE stuff, just a smoother way of using her one thing.
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I think you are severely underestimating how good her stealth is. She can attack directly out of stealth, she moves at full speed in stealth, she can't get knocked out of stealth by being revealed, she makes way less noise than the other stealth killers, she doesn't have a lullaby, and her stealth doesn't give survivors a global announcement that it has been activated. It's arguably the best stealth in the game.
And it is way more than Trapper, because her traps are actually useful in chase, if survivors are in an area that currently has zero traps. Seriously, try chasing survivors as Trapper, when survivors are in an area with zero traps, and let me know just how useful his trap ability is in chase.
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Oh, don't get me wrong— Pre-nerf Skerchant was objectively better in every way. Trapper's abysmal in comparison…
But I think that's just 'cause Trapper sucks. None of the trap killers are really allowed to… Work? Skerchant included, evidently, she has been intentionally unusable for a while now. I just think saying Skerchant has a lot more stuff is wrong— Her stuff just has any functionality. She's better, but still not good.
Anyway, it's like, I don't think either killer is getting actually UNDESERVED hits. They set up their traps properly and you fell for it— That's on the survivor. Skull Merchant is triply so earning it, because it has to happen three times. Even using drones in chase, that takes a while, and often requires major misplays on the survivor's part!
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