http://dbd.game/killswitch
SKULL MERCHANT Rework︱Ever More Deadly︱(I hid a cookie in this post)
⸻ WHY REWORK ⁉️
As I was sad to hear that the devs originally dropped plans of reworking Skull Merchant, I am here yet again, to try to do Skull Merchant justice, and turn her into a killer that's both unique, and fun to play as and against.
Problems with the old Skull Merchant (SM)
Why is she so hated you ask? People don't dislike strong killers necessarily, but they do hate killers that get their power for free, like free injures from Ghouls, and for skull merchant, it's the "shitting a drone", where SM's can simply drop a drone and make the lives of survivors more difficult, without the need of SM's to do too much while chasing to get value out of their drones.
In this fix, we're going to address that!
⸻ REWORK: 🔧
Skull merchant's drones no longer scan people to give them 3 stacks to injure a survivor, instead:
SCAN DRONES 🚨
- SM can place a drone which starts scanning like normal, but is white and doesn't give stacks nor injure survivors. Whenever it scans a survivor, show the survivor's aura while they are within the drone's radius and apply a claw trap
RED SCAN ☄️
- SM can grab her device, reducing her speed to 110% from 115%. While aiming at a drone and pressing M1, the drone starts spinning into a different direction and turns red for 1.3 seconds. While the beam is red, any standing survivor (non crouching) will lose a health state. Skull merchant slows down significantly during this 1 second duration, giving survivors who crouched in time the chance to not lose distance in chase.
- SM can only change the direction of a drone once every 1.3 seconds
DEVICE 📱
- While holding her device, she can see the aura of all survivors with a claw trap
- Using your device, you can remove drones like usual
HACKING 💻️
- Claw traps are removed when a survivors hacks the drone that gave them that claw trap or when that drone was removed by SM from the map
- Survivors can hack drones: When hacking a drone, any claw traps it applied are removed from anyone and the drone can no longer detect survivors while white-scanning, unbeknownst to SM. However, 🍪 it can still injure survivors through red-scanning
- Hacking a drone takes 15 uninterrupted seconds while facing continuous skill-checks. Abandoning a hack halfway loses all progress towards the hack and causes the survivor to be scanned and receive a claw trap
UNDETECTABLE 👤
- To claw trapped survivors within the scan range of an unhacked drone SM is undetectable. SM is also undetectable for 8 seconds after placing a drone
⸻ WHY YOU SHOULD LOVE THIS REWORK ❤️
INTUITIVE
Although writing down the nifty details makes her sound more complex than she is; the rework makes her intuitive! She now is a simple killer who has drones that simply scans people to reveal their aura, and has an active ability to make the scan change direction and injure/down survivors for a short duration. You just understood the core part of her power! Makes sense!
ACTIVE SKILL
There is no more passive skill from just "shitting a drone" other than aura reveal. But if you want any chase power, guess what, you now need to interact with her killer power during the match! Learning tricks, anticipating rotation of the drone, planning, and everything that makes SM her playstyle unique!
CONTROL
One of the previous problems of SM was the survivors controlled her power way too much through the previous hacking mechanic. In this rework, survivors just control the scanning part. You still control the chasing part!
MINDGAMES
One of the previous problems with "Shitting a drone" was that SM didn't really sacrifice anything while forcing survivors to crouch to hide from her beams, while survivors had to try hard to play around it. Now, whenever SM wants to use her power, she is making a sacrifice of being slowed down, causing survivors to be rewarded when they accurately anticipate her play, creating the interactive game from killers like huntress, where you have to anticipate whether she's going to pull out her hatchet or not when dropping a pallet, or similarly here, whether Skull Merchant will activate her scan and you have to crouch, or whether she fakes it and slows you down. This creates the interactive gameplay we have all come to love from the most well designed killers!
POWER
One of the previous problems is that SM previously had to put in a massive amount of systemically slow work to even get a survivor to get injured, under the current 3 token system. Where as now, with her ability to scan and injure instantly, she also had a massive snowball potential when playing her right, as well as a "2 tap" potential if a survivor really screws it up, giving her similar snowball to killers like Bubba, as well as potential for global injures using her red-scan.
MACRO
The new hacking mechanic introduces a completely new paradigm for macro play, which the typical forward thinking SM players tend to love, where you can scan survivors and push them far away from the drone that scanned them, so you maximize your game slowdown if survivors want to make it back to the drone that scanned them to get their claw-trap removed. As a true information killer, she is now well equipped with information, and should survivors try to deny it, then she will be rewarded in base-kit game slowdown through the new hacking mechanic
⸻ Did you find the cookie?
Comments
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she sounds terrible buy there's something i want to know
with white scan are survivors claw trapped regardless or is it still crouch to duck?
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Regardless. White scans work on anything. Including when they're working on a generator, until that drone is permanently hacked of course
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Terrible as in weak, strong, etc? Elaborate
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terrible as in weak you got rid of her claw trap health state mechanic but you made it so that she gets punished for using her power in chase. not sure why she has so much counterplay imo if you reworked her from her state now to your version it would be a sidegrade
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Her getting rid of her terrible 3 stage injure is one of the best things to happen to her. Not only did it make her take incredibly long just to get a single injure, any killer like Legion gets it for free and is still weak.
If you think her insta injure/down with her new ability is weak, then I'd urge you to think again. It is incredibly strong and puts a survivor at risk for a hit for every rotation at every loop the drone is rotating in. It gives her an incredible amount of pressure during chase, so if you'd have a chance to play against it, you'd quickly figure out how strong it is, especially once SM's start using planning their drone rotations in more strategic ways, as do experienced SM's0 -
if that's true why did you make her slow down to 110 in chase in your words
>Skull merchant slows down significantly during this 1 second duration, giving survivors who crouched in time the chance to not lose distance in chase
why should they not lose distance in her chase? she is getting punished more from using her power than legion does
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Not quite. The amount of time it costs to crouch for a drone is significant. That means if the killer is anywhere remotely close they will get a hit in chase if the survivor has to crouch. The slowdown simply matches how much time it costs for survivors to run away. However, when a drone is rotating towards a survivor, SM can instantly activate it to hit them, so they might have to crouch even if she doesn't activate it, or she might only activate it later while the laser has slightly passed the survivor, making them crouch twice. It gives her a lot of pressure in chase, especially with good SM's who can make drone rotations and scans less obvious and arrive at unexpected moments.
The slowdown SM gets is comparable to any balanced killer, just like huntress. If huntress didn't lose any distance from pulling up a hatchet at a pallet, survivors would no longer have any counter at the loop, as huntress could still hit them even if they predicted the hatched pull and kept running instead of dropping it. As that perfectly worked for Huntress and made her a well designed killer, so will it work for SM
Proper counter play needs to be built into the killer0
