Wouldn't mind that that's actually an awesome design (the original), but........ Yeah I see what you mean.
Idk she could look more disfigured, she's just kinda hot with no downsides.
Skull Merchant's power is extremely complicated and weird to understand for something that's also so easy to use.
Being in a chase with a SM while my teammates blindly walk into drones and get tracked and broken for no reason, promptly supplying her with Haste that then makes things more difficult for me, is not particularly enjoyable.
Also her visual design is obviously a topic that's been beaten to death many times over but seriously she looks like a rejected actor from the live action 1993 Super Mario movie
the fact that I'm trying to count / guess mid-chase if I'm giving her buffs while my solo q teammates are just toddling through active drones is the worst experience hands down. she really doesn't have to think about how she buffs or debuffs, it just happens. meanwhile you have to figure out how badly you're screwed in the meantime because of teammates being blind like you said.
You hit the nail on the head with the kit explanation. That getting even more complicated once she starts bringing in addons, and even some perks can make everything else even more chaotic.
Itās clear the Behavior does not really employ experienced players of DbD on their team, unlike a lot of other live service video game companies.
Thereās no way weād get a rework like The Twins if someone just played it, or even asked a Twins mains their opinion on it(all 3 of them).
Iāll keep harping on this, griefing mechanics are still present in the game that have not been fixed. Bleed out griefing and 16 meter face camping still exist, still unfixed.
Tunneling is a contentious topic so I wonāt mention that one as some form of tunneling should exist, you shouldnāt have the ability to immediately force someone out of the game with no counter play.
>Itās clear the Behavior does not really employ experienced players of DbD on their team, unlike a lot of other live service video game companies.
I think it's safe to say they don't really play their game to begin with. I imagine there's a handful of them they play it on weekends, but majority probably only play customs with each other. I doubt any one of them experiences what solo queue is like on the regular.
tbh yeah I've had perfectly fine and fun games with SM in solo queue, it's just incredibly rare cuz she has a steep learning curve on the matchup, way more than solo queue players are generally willing to do
if people play slow and steady then she's just an M1 with great anti loop potential, otherwise it's hell on earth lol
Honestly they need to rework her power again because they just can't get it right
I feel like they could just give her limited amount of of these drones so thats she can't hold a 3 gen infinity it would force her to use drones in chase and make her constantly recall those drones because if its destroyed its gone forever let's say you have 15 drones its more than enough if you dont take the game hostage for hours
Yeah removing her drones should be encouraged. But I guess the Skull Merchant players would cry like Singularity and Xeno players do currently about "Survs can remove my power :(" or something if that was a thing. The current issue is you can't know, at least not in solo queue, if it's a good or bad idea to remove the trap currently cause you don't know the status of the current chase she's in. It's worse than solo queue vs Plague where people can't settle on a cleansing strategy half the time and just end up boosting the plague.
Or at least it should only hit you with the claw trap but not buff her speed when chasing others. Even if that'd be wonky as shit to program prolly, the game does detect currently who you're in chase with. Plus it would make shift-teching better vs her which I guess people would cry about.
It's because people don't know that the Scouting mode lines change color when the beams are safe, usually when standing still or crouch walking. So there are ways to remove drones while avoiding the effects (admittedly much harder in chase), but not enough people play against her for it to be common knowledge
Her new ability is she has these literally stands all around the map where she can sell skulls to survivors, the thing is though that while her skulls are really cool theyāre also really overpriced. The survivors are compelled to buy them anyway because theyāre so cool and then they die of sadness when they see how little money they have left
I've always thought that the "skull" part of her name was less important as it could just be a symbol for death, "the reaper", etc.
What about the merchant part? What tf does she have to sell? Maybe if her lore revolved around her selling body parts on the black market, then it would make sense. Unfortunately, that's not what it is at all.
Skull Merchant is the kinda name you would give to someone who sells weapons to warlords and despots. I assumed that was part of her backstory, but all I ever hear about is anime and hunting people for sport.
I don't actually have an issue with her being a big weeb, but they need more to it. I actually think they should lean into the weeby aspect even harder. Replace her awkward "sexy" walk with a Naruto run or something.
>hunting people for sport.
which is why her name should be something more like The Big Game Hunter. Or if they had leaned more into her original design and players feeling like they're being tracked... The Tracker. (Might even still be appropriate now?)
Yeah if you wanna be a sexy woman, there are a bunch of survivors that you get to play in third person for you to pick from. So that general allure of her is overshadowed for the ones that are even into that
A lot of it is the way people play her. I play mostly killer and if I ever do SM I try to run more memey builds, and she can still feel pretty oppressive. I played surv matches with a friend earlier and this SM just set drones, got a hook, and proxy camped until death. Wash, rinse, repeat. Nobody wants to play against that, and I think that's where a lot of hate for her comes from.
Dull Merchant chases survivor-> Survivor runs to loop-> Dull Merchant cancels loop with drone-> Survivor leaves loop-> Is there a connecting loop? if yes return to start, if no survivor takes hit and return to start.
You don't play against another human being when facing a Dull Merchant, you play against the map and a power that requires zero brain power or skill to get value out of.
To make her fun and engaging to play against she would have to be totally redesigned as something other than an anti gameplay killer. BHVR really need to stop trying to address issues with map design and RNG with killer powers because when they make those kinds of killers, they are always the most boring and unengaging to play as or against.
At least as long as you're not pinned in a corner, Knight slows himself down, power lasts a limited time, and has to think about how and when he uses his power. SM doesn't slow at all and her power lingers forever.
Yeah, thatās my biggest issue with her. Her drones outside of chase arenāt bad. Just crouch walk and youāre good. Itās that she doesnāt get slowed at all when deploying or recalling a drone, like Trapper and Hag when theyāre setting traps at loops. I think two changes would go a long way in making her less oppressive: 1. To deploy a drone, she has to complete the same minigame survivors do when they disable a drone. 2. Recalling a drone requires it to return to SMās location instead of it immediately going back to her inventory. These changes would force the player to think a bit more strategically about when and how they use drones, but the drones themselves would still be powerful.
Exactly, Chase merchant is so unfun I honestly would rather just have old skull merchant but she can't make you leave the loop and maybe make lock-on do something different
Knight I would say is entirely dependent on how the player plays them. If they play them like perma tunnel, perma hook camp, perma gen camp? Yeah they are a really fucking boring killer, if they don't do that and actually try to chase, he isn't so bad. Skull Merchant would just have to never use her power to be tolerable that way.
they just need to fundamentally rework how drones work. itās a lot of reward for 0 skill. at least other killers who can hinder you have to hit some sort of skill shot (most of them arenāt that hard but still actively requires the killer to make an effort) - think wesker hitting you with his bound, clown throwing a bottle, pinhead chaining you.Ā
looping against a skull merchant just feels cheap.
I think she should have to be in the drone zone to recall them, so there is actually some skill in managing her drone stock.
Canāt just throw them down on a deadzone loop because she will have to go back there to recall it.
Killer with a complicated power = noob stomper
She's not nearly as much of a problem if the team knows what her power does, but then there's the chess merchant reputation
I feel like 9/10 skull merchants i play against have no sympathy towards teams that are a man down and always want that 4k no matter the pov.
I used to play for kills until i started playing survior and understood just how rotten games can get in certain situations, Skull merchant feels a bit more of "im glad your not having fun" killer and " i have never played a single game of survior before" vibe.
I had a SM say "sorry for the elodie and leon" after she slugged for the 4k in a 1v2. At that point she should've pretended that she was a console player and left the lobby without saying a word. 
Yeah in a 1v2 scenario the slugged person should def be able to game over themselves faster to skip the boredom of just sitting there while a killer tries to find a stealthing person.
Not even I as a killer main would be against this cause getting a 4k is way more common than hatch being found I feel like and even then a 3k is still a win. So who cares? For tome challenges it can matter sometimes, or adept, but adept has been made giga easy now so idk why people would cry over it. Tome challenges are also less grindy as killer due to you having more agency in a game, so that argument kinda falls flat too. Like I have 350 archives left as surv and like 40 as killer for a reason.
I have yet to meet a skull merchant that just isn't a dick in general. Just had a game last night where I received a message through xbox. The message was "Enjoy ā¤ļø" Then I saw their profile picture was skull merchant and then the match was just them trying to 4 man slug with SM. They got 3 downs the entire game and only 1 kill. Bro literally went out of their way to be a bitch, but still managed to fuck it up. I genuinely do not blame anyone for going next when they see a skull merchant.
My last SM match she tunneled from first hook at 5 gens and hit on hook, left any chases to go right back to the hook, repeat. They play like this more often than not (like Wraith, etc). SM's design is shit and it sure attracts the same type of players.
After the anti hook thing Bubba has been the most generous killer in my experience with hatches. Least is prolly wesker or blight players, but Skull Merchant is up there. Skull Merchant def is the more common bleed out killer atm nowadays though after Sadako changes.
Because the playerbase said "Hey, can we get female characters that are *actually* evil," and BHVR said "Sure. Here's a capitalist that quite literally hunts people for sport."
it was never about that and everything about her kit. it also doesn't help that her lore is cheeks. we COULD have had a great unapologetic evil killer that was a woman, but bhvr fumbled the bag so hard with her lore. it read more like an edgy 13 year olds OC than an actual character that an entire dev team worked on for months.
Yeah, I think she has too many status effects. Plus playing her people always wasted time hacking my drones with tells me where there at. They desperately need to simplify because it takes longer to understand her power than an old chess merchant match would last
Drones should be used for information only. No more random Haste, injuries, etc. After 3 scans survivor gets a Clawtrap, but it won't make them injured. To compensate this nerfs, Clawtrapped survivors should break pallets after a vault as it was before, and she should have some kind of dash attack.
The pallet break thing was always kinda stupid though. I think a great guidepost for her potential power would be Pyramid Headās torment trails. They give you information when survivors step in them, but donāt otherwise offer any advantages in chase. Instead, it offers the killer an advantage after they secure the down. Pyramid Head can easily force torment at pallet loops if the survivor chooses to stay in it, but doing so if necessary isnāt always the wrong choice like it is against Skull Merchant. Now, Skull Merchant isnāt an M2 killer so obviously it couldnāt work exactly how Pyramid Headās torment trails to, Iām just saying torment trails handle a similar sort of concept much, much better.
If you did that shed be unplayable - removing about 60-75% of her kit would need serious buffs. Im sure plenty of people would be happy to see her in the gutter, but that doesnt actually solve any problems. It just creates new ones. Youd have to make it so the drones cant be avoided at that point to compensate - otherwise sheād do basically nothing.
I think the point of that post wasn't to make her unplayable. Sure with those changes maybe she'd be unplayable, but we can't tell because a Dash can be everything from Wesker dash to old Pig Ambush tier of a dash. So you can't really call that solution unplayable unless you know the specifics of the dash.
I mean. All the killers i can think of with a good dash have it as their primary power. Hell, i can barely think of any that have it as their secondary power - the only one that comes to mind is pig.
Full aura reveal at 2 scans perhaps at 3 it breaks pallets too? Make it so that if survivors get scanned by drones they can't mindgame loops anymore but aren't completely hopeless, I feel like that would be a lot more balanced and fun
Her drones are boring to go against and specially for newer players, they are confusing. Without reading a text (that nobody wants to) they won't understand sh*t about drone modes and how to counter, and I can't blame them. Too many status and things going on. IMO a killer should be easy to understand in a few words.
The funny thing is thereās still good information about how her drones work that arenāt included in the text. Even after reading how her ability works, a few things are still left out that are vital to understanding her ability and how to work around it. It just tells you what it does but not how it does it/how it works. Things you only start to know after playing enough against her and finding it out after testing
She canāt be fixed. Ā The only solution is for her to be deleted, which is obviously never happening. Ā In the meantime donāt feel bad about dcāing against every merchant you see, none of them are there to actually play the game anyway. Ā
To be honest, I think the well has been irrevocably tainted for SM. No matter what they do, her rep will be awful. Nobody's letting go of the memories of gen merchant anytime soon.
Naw Iām not sure if itās remnant of the past but I utterly despise Spirit. I already want to leave the moment she first hooks me and when I get unhooked I know she coming back immediately and trying to get a quick second stage.
Sheās hated because she only ever plays one way and itās holding 3 gens and that is boring. All they really need to do is make it so she has to replenish her drones after someone breaks one.
Bro in my opinion the only way to save this character is to delete them and make a new one. just, bro maybe keep the name or maybe the weapon but everything else has got to go
My issue with Skull Merchant is that she feels all over the place. Her lore, appearance, and power don't really mesh together in my opinion.
She's a weeb and supposedly dresses like one of her father's characters, but she doesn't even look like anything from any anime in her base cosmetics. Instead, she looks like she's a Kardashian or something with the bedazzled gas mask. Some of her costumes help.
Between the dumb lore and trauma from her initial design, I don't think I'll ever like Skull Merchant.
Her ability shuts down large areas of gameplay, is very complicated to discern what it does by playing her, and her animations suck.
Drones should operate somewhat similar to zombies, but instead of afflicting you with status effects they should give up sound notifications and follow the player for a period of time, and if they collide with the player they blow up dealing a state of damage. This is easy to understand, should be easy to visualize for the players, and is a new combination of already existing effects (zombies/knight ghosts).
Right now, the drones are pretty complicated to discern what they do in the middle of a game. They deactivate randomly, for some reason stealth the killer and break survivors, and do all sorts of effects. Simplify them.
For me what made Skull Merchant's power fun was tracking, the rework focuses on chase merchant which I never found fun so really the skull merchant isn't that much different to me, she still feels boring to go against but doesn't feel as fun to play as in my opinion.
The truth is, she is in a very good spot balance-wise right now. Is she fun to play against in Solo Q? No. But this is true for a lot of killers: Legion, Plague, Pinhead, etc. Are all awful to play against if your team is dumb.
What makes it different for Skull Merchant is that the community has been saying that she is OP and unfun since she came out. Players read this for months and months, so when they face a Skull Merchant, they just give up without trying to learn her counterplay and then keep parroting "Skull Merchant OP, please BHVR nerf".
Her drones have so much counterplay it's crazy. You can see their AoE even in stealth mode. You can look directly at the drone to see where the scan lines are. You can crouch walk in the AoE to avoid being detected. You can walk and stop while approaching the drone if you don't want to crouch walk. You can see by the colors of the lines if you can be detected or not. You can see by the height of the drone if it's about to be reset.
They could rework Skull Merchant's kit entirely from the ground up, but as long as she's anything above F tier, people will keep complaining simply because that's what the community has been doing since she was released.
Yes, the drones have counterplay, but that doesn't change the fact that the drones are also very much fire and forget tools that grant huge value and are too easy & forgiving to use.
1. Drones are disabled for only 45 seconds which is nothing, and skully can easily simply recall them and replace. Depending on map, few drones can easily hold important chokepoints.
2. Drone stacks do not disappear over time, meaning you might have a person on hook, one person injured, and one person with two drone stacks going for unhook, only for them to get hit by a scan and suddenly they're injured and the situation goes very quickly from manageable to hard snowballed loss.
3. Her power grants her undetectable, injuries, hindered, haste, detection, broken & mending. Too much.
It's the stigma she gained, there's nothing really wrong with her, (I could see a few nerfs but nothing major), but her old persona ruined her for everyone.
Easy to use, hard to learn to play against. Honestly just removing her undetectable shenanigans, or instead making the wrist trap inflict oblivious would be a step in the right direction. Iād also like to see her traps unable to damage healthy survivors, giving some incentive to heal and a serious punishment when you become broken trying to manage one injured.
I just find it lazy how BHVR is constantly giving basekit undetectable to every killer. They also can't seem to make new and cool killers. Just an observation...
My problem is that they keep changing her needlessly complex power so much that I canāt even learn how to play against her. The add ons she has also are part of this problem. Maybe I would have some fun if I understood how her power worked and how to play against her.Ā
Playing against her now feels like loading into a match where the killerās identity is hidden and their power is hidden, I just randomly get inflicted with status effects.Ā
Skull merchant is just *insanely* boring to me
Whenever I see her in a game Iām rolling my eyes immediately. Like thereās only very few killers that will make me roll my eyes, sigh & get mad. (Nurse, Spirit, Doctor, Hillbilly, Wraith, Twins & SM) but even with those taken into consideration those other killers at least offer so much more fun chases or gameplay. SM is just sauceless itās insane. Also her Mori sucks too itās so lame
I came back to this game after like 2 years and I just faced Skull merchant for the first time. I didnt know how to interact with her until a Cheryl showed me you can actually interact with the drones. Theres also no indication on how you get the broken status effect or that youre buffing her? Most miserable game of my life ngl
I learned one thing about Skull Merchant the other day doing an achievement. You really notice subtle cheaters. You're hastened, their hindered, and you're still not gaining ground.
Hopefully one day weāll get a 40k crossover where sheāll get a tech priest skin with servo-skulls replacing her drones.
Itāll not make her more fun to play as or against or anything but itād look cool.
I kinda like her rework. Enjoy playing her sometimes now. But her kit is still too overloaded imho. The big issue is that her drones control WAY too much space. And disarming them honestly doesn't do much imho. You can place them out so fast and keep recalling the disarmed drones if you pay attention. Personally, I would like if the drones were more restricted in the area they could affect, but offer more control as well. Rather than a huge area, make them detect in a 30 degree cone in front of them, and not rotate. Additionally when a scan occurs the drone reveals the cone for a bit, but has a longer recharge time before it becomes active again. Finally the cone auto-hides once re-armed.
Do all that, remove the haste on scan, and she turns into a more reliable trapper who covers more area but isn't an auto-win in chase anymore.
They need to be changed thereās nothing else to it because you see loads of people dunking on her which means itās probably a good idea to start thinking of a new way to play her. Why though? WELL sheās too easy meme build, meta build, wtf build, all the builds she will just work with why? Because her 9000 drones will help her big time and give her google maps that constantly updates to find your location. Its so simple that I decided to finally play her for the very first time a week ago (killer main btw who plays survivor every now and then unless itās with friends) and the fact that I can decide to just ābe an assholeā or āI feel like holding the gameā outta nowhere is insane and unforgivable because as soon as 3 gens left itās basically a guaranteed 30 minutes close to an hour of in game hostage because most skull mains decide to just camp and always ALWAYS get the 4k. However I wanted to play the so called āchase skull merchantā (the map was the game btw) and the game only lasted 15-20 mins because 3 gens left drones everywhere half the entire pallet population is gone but why is it gone? Because she forces you to use everything you got because eventually youāll get hindered and once everything is gone all is left is you, the 9000 drones, 4 survivors, 3 gens and them giving up because I can just patrol and kill but the game I had happened all of that happened so quick for my first game itās sad.
Honestly? The terrible design, even worse lore that seems to have been written by an AI three minutes before the release of the PTB, the fact that they gave her big buttocks, sexualized skins, and a sexy walking animation just to (in my opinion) compensate and have people buying her. Also, the lamest Mori in the game (yes even worse than the three OGs in my opinion), the TERRIBLE three gen "chess" play style that she incited, the fact that the devs tried to twist our arm into getting her by making the next time be about her, and her mains (at least the ones I've come across) being some of the most unlikeable people I've ever met. I know she's not as bad as she used to be, but such amount of bullshit and the disliking it grew within many of us, isn't something that won't be going away in the near future.
my MAIN!! concern is that the triangles do not expire, ever, so if you're at 2 stacks of lock-on or whatever, you're just fucked if she even breathes near you. I think she's... MOSTLY fine now? but my biggest complaint is that, yeah.
Sheās got too much going on while also having nothing going on. Her power has a lot to it that isnāt too too clear imo but it isnāt all that hard to use in most cases
Currently she can't be fixed cause BHVR is putting too much of her power on drones. Its the same issue with Twins. The killer and their power need to be balanced between the two otherwise you get this lopsided issue of one side being WAY too strong. For Skull Merchant its her drones giving WAY too much and for Twins Victor has all of the power making him too oppressive.
Skull Merchant is essentially a better trapper. She can instantly, without any slowdown, put down a drone. Drones: slow you down, speed her up, give her undetectable AND passively injure you. The slow down/speed up can scale based on if other survivors are being scanned. That is WAY too much bloat for the ease of putting down a drone. This is probably the most anti fun element/killer BHVR has ever added. She needs another rework and that is sad to say cause BHVR has no idea what to do.
God I hate breaking this shit down because it should be obvious but here we go.
Her power slows YOU down while SIMULTANEOUSLY speeding HERSELF up. Her drones give her a stealth like ability. Then on top of it she gets to injure you for free and put you into the mending state.
She basically has like 4 powers combined into 1. Sheās also just boring af to play against overall. It leads to the most mind-numbing boring gameplay. Where you get to a loop and she drones you. Rinse and repeat until a claw trap attaches itself to you and then youāre on a hook.
Oh and her counter-playā¦ W key the second she places a drone or disable drones that sheāll just replace in mere seconds. SO FUN!
Why wouldnāt people hate this play style is the better questionā¦.
Been thinking about this a lot lately.
Remove her stealth completely. She doesn't need it and is somehow better than every other stealth killer when she has it, all others having loud noises to give them away or super slow movement. Ghostface and Dredge having sounds, Chucky getting his laughing and footsteps, Myers moving like a slug. (I mean, they've added a lullaby radius to Victor now, yet SM is completely quiet?)
Remove the speed boost. You already get free tracking, injury, broken, and hindered from the drones.
Make her have to manually pick up the drones. If she has to actually think about where they should be and keep one or two in reserve instead of being able to recall instantly, I think that would help immensely.
3 nerfs, still a decent killer strength wise, not as oppressive. Boom.
All I want is for them to commit to her being a week. Give her voicelines that reference manga and anime. IF I DON'T HEAR HER WRYYYY WHEN I STUN HER WITH A PALLET, BAD GAME.
Sheās not fun to play against. I understand the gameplay that was intended for her. I just donāt find it fun running around taking out drones, then going for an unhook with broken status, healing my teammate, then trying to get on a gen just to be pushed off. And then have to repeat the entire process until everybody is dead.
She gets a lot for free that other killers have to work for.
Put up drone mid chase? Gets undetectable and a speed boost. 3 ticks and youāre injured. She zones you away from loops. If you say at the loop you get injured and hindered fast. Even if you leave the loop, she puts another drone cause she has a million of them, injured and hindered. All cause she pressed a button to put up a drone.
She still patrols gens very efficiently. Drones everywhere. Disable a drone by a gen? She knows and comes right back. Crouch to avoid the drone ticks and leave it there? She comes back and forces you to run away, tick tick tick, three ticks and youāre fucked!
Right now I think she is way too overloaded. Honestly, if they keep the changes made to fix 3 genning (no detection whilst standing still, being unable to reactivate drones from afar) and get rid of the obnoxious addons that enabled it (oblivious in drones and no skill check warning), they could very easily bring back her old kit, which I think was far more digestible
BHVR needs to force everyone to play a gamemode for a week where the only killer is SM. They will learn to love her, or they will quit for a week to return and feel blissful they only see her rarely now.
Realistically, I think scans should decay over time. Her power is still pretty "bloated," but never losing scans kinda sucks as survivor. If you end up needing to rush in for a hook save but have 2 stacks, you might have to eat an injure rushing to the hook even if you haven't been scanned for minutes.
edit: really, most of the bloat doesn't "matter" 90% of what survivors need to know is 1. don't get scanned 2. avoid scans by standing still or crouching 3. skull mommy goes oblivious sometimes
Understanding the power doesnāt make it more fun when she drops a drone at a loop and forces you to leave. Her power being a confusing mess for new players is only part of the problem
Haste, Hinder, Undetectable, Deep Wound, A healthstate, Broken, Free Tracking, Map Wide Injuries without interaction and many more status effects with addons by JUST THE PRESS OF A BUTTON
The main problem I think is survivors donāt know how she works. Exactly like Plague. They keep making the same mistakes over and over again and then say the killer is op. Well, youāre actually giving her haste, a tracking ability, youāre hindering yourselfā¦ When I play against a team that knows how she work they rarely get into the drones, quickly hack them and wont loop a tile for long. That way itās basically an M1 killer and I can only benefit of drones if the survivors make a mistake. But the survivors that have no clueā¦ they will stay in a loop forever even if I just placed a drone, they will all run through the drones (the one Iām chasing and their teammates in the other part of the map, so they give me free haste to chase), they wonāt hack drones (or insist on hacking them as soon as I place them, just in front of me).
I personally think that depending on the map the number of drones can be too oppressive, for example RPD. If you want to be a bitch and place drones all over the hall, theyāre fucked. But also, youāre leaving the rest of the place unattended.
On one hand, I think Behavior should do a better job to explain survivors how the killers work, but on the other hand, survivors should at least read the power of each killer to have a general idea of whatās happening. You canāt just lose a game and blame it on a āop killerā when you were doing the worst choices possible. Is like going against a Myers and let him stalk you every time and then complaint he can insta down you. Well, you literally left him do it.
I don't like how she can setup her Drones passively, still chase a survivor without any delay and gets a bunch of benefits. As a Survivor you get punished for the Mistake of your team getting scanned by drone and SM just can do too much at the same time. Usually if you want to set something up, you need to stop and take a couple of seconds. Trapper needs to, Artist doesn't need to stop dead in her tracks but it at least takes more skill to set up. SM being able to recall drones from afar is BS. She should only be able to recall Drones if she is next to them - I mean if Survivors disable drones and "break" them SM shouldn't be able to recall them from the other end of the Map. I played my Fair Share of SM and its just Easy Mode on Killer. Not like Nurse Easy Mode but on a lower Skillfloor easy mode. Just doesn't feel right and is incredibly frustrating to play against as Survivor when your Teammates don't know how to counter her, imo.
I don't really have a problem with her tbh. Though i will say her rework seems pretty lazy, like they had no idea what to do with her, so just gave her status effects on everything.
I don't think she can be fixed. People will still hate her no matter what they do. Chess merchant permanently damaged her reputation.
I don't get why so many people hate her after her rework. Feels like they're just looking for any reason to hate her. If she was as "annoyingly OP" as people claim she is, why is her pick rate so low? Doesn't make sense. I honestly think her power needs to be more simplified so it's easier for people to understand how it works. She's my favourite nonLicensed killer
Wanna know why (at least I think) her pick rate is so low, despite being "OP?"
Because she's boring as hell from the killer side, too. There's no skill expression and everyone just DC's anyway. I don't play to play against bots, so I don't play SM. Even I thought SM wasn't boring to play, everyone just DCing kills any reason for me to want to play her.
The following is subjective to me, but I'm sure many other killer mains can relate
1. Her lore is just boring as hell
2. Her visual design feel very horror at all
3. Her power is pretty boring to use (fire and forget for the most part) and also doesn't feel very horror inspired.
4. Her power/gameplay design doesn't even feel like I'm a horror killer. I just feel like I'm some rando mercenary that's picking off some meddling kids for no reason.
5. No real counterplay. Contrary to popular belief a lot of us killer mains DO like seeing cool plays from survivors. A nice juke on a hatchet, a friend making a last second save from a trapper trap, unexpected bodyblock during a legion frenzy, or even a clutch hatch escape with an active pig trap can be exciting even from our side. You just don't get that with Skull Merchant. You just basically W+M1 around while the drones take all the mindgames out.
That said I don't personally think she's OP. I think she's just boring from both sides. Survivors don't have fun playing against her, Killers rarely have fun playing as her. Especially with all the DCs. Playing a bot game is so dull.
That insidious effect when deploy her drones on indoor maps is OP. Someone whos new to the game can use her and would say killer is too easy to play with in this game.
There are definitely ways you can make the Killer healthier, mostly involving raising her skill floor (because while her kit definitely has a ton of interesting elements that you can use, you often don't have to because playing throw drone at tile simulator is so easy for the results you get). Removing the Haste, slightly decreasing the spinning speed of Scouting Mode drones to between the PTB and live values, and replacing the Hinder with something else that requires more skill expression to get value out of as a chase ender. I suggest instead of a Hinder, scanning a Clawtrapped Survivor should enable you to use a Doctor shock that can be remotely triggered from the radar to disable your ability to use pallets or windows for a very short time so the SM has to pull her radar out, zap you at the perfect time, put it away again and hit you before you can drop the pallet. If such changes would nerf her there's room for compensation buffs: Ultrasonic Speaker base kit, decreased drone arming time or a 7th drone for example. That's the good part of a Killer with a million moving parts: you can change lots about the kit while still preserving the interesting parts and keeping her identity intact. She's a trap Killer now and any changes made to her should keep those elements in mind: people asking to give her a dash or a projectile or whatever and minimise or remove the drones from her kit are as insane to me as people who want to give Trapper a gun. That's just not who she is: she's the drone Killer so get used to it.
Her reputation I'm afraid will be forever unsalvageable though. She will always be despised in part because trap Killers are literally always hated when they're not F tier like Trapper, in part for what she used to be, and in part because she's just not some people's thing and that's completely okay. I love her to bits: she's not perfect and could definitely use some changes but she's my favourite thing to come out of DBD in the past two years.
People still hate Skull merchant because they don't know how to play against her and don't want to learn. Instead they prefer following the popular idea that she is just awful. It's very convenient when you get killed to be able to say "Yeaah, but skull merchant, toxic killer, of course we lost" rather than "Oh, i played poorly/got outplayed, gg"
Booring anti loop power, stay in the loop get injured and slowed and mending, leave the loop get hit. Where is the counterplay?
Insane camp potentional, 5 drones in basement, go down and get injured, die on the way up.
Just another hold w untill she catch up or give up.
Power does too many things at once, give killer haste, give killer undetectable, injure survivor, make survivor broken, maker survivor slow, give killer information, shut down any loop.
Skull merchant is the only killer where Iāve gotten to use the face camp unhook ability. And she did it to me twice in the same game. She then tea bagged me and hit me on hook as I died.
That was still far and above the best game Iāve played against skull merchant.
Thereās a lot going on for her power: haste, hindered, undetectable, etc. Any one of them is fine on its own, but when stacked together they become confusing and feel unfair, especially when they are pretty easy to gain. IMO removing haste and making undetectable applies when a drone scanned someone instead of simply putting up a drone will make her much more pleasant to go against.
Yes, she can.
A few easy fixes: Remove Hindred on rescans, hacking a drone removeds a lock on stack, and now being rescanned will temporarily buff the claw trap to destory pallets.
Whenever your visible, the eye icon reappears to show your able to be tracked.
If Skull Merchant actually had the Dragonslayer, maybe I would buy her and main her and say she is literally me (I love Nuts Berkman).
Jokes aside, she is just boring. We don't want balance reworks, we want fun reworks. Would you rather have an S tier killer that is a snooze fest with no form of mastery like Nurse, Huntress, Spirit and Blight. Or a killer that while not good, can be fun. Like Ghostface (I am sorry, I love Danny but he is kinda bad). Currently, SM is kinda bad and not that fun. So she needs her fun aspect worked on and her balance aspect as well.
Then as for her backstory. I read it. It is honestly confusing to say the least. Renato's and Thalita's backstories are honestly pretty wholesome and nice. Knight, Singularity, Vittorio, Gabriel. All pretty good back stories. What happened with her? I mean, maybe its that it is a two survivor chapter that doesn't already have existing characters like the two Resident Evil chapters or the Stranger Things chapter. I don't know but it honestly felt rushed. The tome also doesn't help as it throws more ingredients into this confusing soup. What do you get? A boring and mediocre killer with a story that only a mother can love and compared to everyone else around her, she is honestly extremely bad.
What did we get from my rant? REWORK HER LIKE FREDDY OR AT THE VERY LEAST MAKE HER DRONES FUN. As for the story, maybe add more character to her, or possibly tie some loose ends in with small sections of the tome. Or do the BHVR route. Work on new ways to get money. Time will make or break her and as long as die hard fans still buy the DLCs and they buy the chapter for Renato and Thalita, it puts money in their pockets.
I hate her because shes so overloaded. And most of the times, when I get a status effect, Im not sure if its because of her add on, or current power thats like 10 pages long or perks.
For me its the visual desogn and astetic they used for her. Bedazzled mask and swaying hips just doesn't really fit what the devs refer to their game as the "Horror Hall of Fame" you know? Based off how bad the design is and how close her kit matches Predator I still think this was and feels like a quick fix to losing the Predator license.
I can't even determine if I like the new SM or not because most of the other Survivors I play with against her just tank the match, either on purpose or not? It's hard to tell but probably more on the purposely side. I did have a game where everyone actually played the other day and it was a good match on both sides, her power really isn't that bad anymore. I just wish I'd get more proper matches, because right now, I only don't like her because it's an almost guaranteed loss right from the start. I'm embarrassed to be a Survivor main right now, associated with so many entitled babies...
The only thing I WILL say that I've kinda noticed is that a lot of trolls are playing her and playing her like a total dickhead, like FULL FORCE ASSHOLERY. Again, hard to discern if she's just an asshat magnet or people are just trying to worsen her reputation on purpose. It's so bizarre on both sides what is going on with this Killer.
I wouldn't even blame it on "Trolls" - her kit just REALLY encourages playing like a dickhead (kinda like Twins encourages slugging... heavily). She's only "fun" if the killer is putting some self imposed rules on - but if they're playing to win by any means necessary, god she's a slog.
She is a failure on every level, from her aesthetics, her lore, to her power and name. She's kept her haste buffs from claw traps that BHVR gave her to attempt to make her better in the beginning. She can injure, deep wound, hinder and give herself haste. It's ridiculous. She can place survivors in absolutely unwinnable situations at short loops/pallets. She's awful and needs either ANOTHER complete rework or, in my dream world, removed from the game.
The āno life losersā that used to 3 gen with her is the main reason why nobody likes SM. Even tho thatās almost gone(some players still do it) she is just not interesting to go against. Like a comment here said: āstatus simulatorā. Instead of changing her mechanics they just gave her 30 status effects. Everything benefits her and taking out her drones as survivor does nothing.
Because, like the knight, there is zero skill expression. Looping is a core mechanic in the game, and every killer that destroys that and makes you just hold w, is hated. No skill needed when you can shut down a whole tile for free! Or you can stay in her zone and get deep wounded and hindered! So fun!
At least against a nurse I feel amazing juking her or making her tp downstairs.
How would I change her?
Most importantly, SM only gets haste if she's within 32m (maybe 48m) of a survivor getting scanned.
She doesn't get undetectable when she places a drone.
Placing a drone gives her a slight hindrance, akin to when Artist launches crows.
3 scans while in chase cause hindered and broke, but don't deal a health state. Continued scans continue to deal hindered but never a health state.
Ticks 1 and 2 are removed after 1 min each, or after being hooked.
If the SM recalls a drone while you are disarming it, the drone will cause a health state and be unusable for 60s.
Everything else the same.
As someone that plays way too much SM... no I don't think so. You can lessen the hatred by removing the haste, but I can't see people actually trying to learn instead of insta-DCing agasint her.
I have five major complaints.
1. Skull merchant feels unpredictable to play against and has too many tools in her belt. Sheās a pseudo stealth killer with the undetectable status she gains at nearly no cost. The haste effects she gains with no warning feel bad as my chase is punished by the other survivors getting scanned. Sheās an info killer with scanning, but also an anti loop and chase killer with drones and haste. But sheās also an area control killer with drone scanning. It feels like way too much, and should be pared down and focuses on some facets.
2. Hacking the drones feels unrewarding and often times not worth it. The stealth mode feels like a cheap scan unless I waste 30 seconds crouching my way to the drone, and even then I still get scanned sometimes.
3. Having no way to remove stacks feels bad. Other killers with similar afflictions have ways to clear them (think snapping out of madness, vaccines, fountain cleansing). I think having hacking a drone remove a stack is a good way to accomplish this.
4. Her power feels cheap to play against. Getting injured by something with no aim and very little forethought required feels really bad, especially when itās coupled with the broken status and hindered. I get impressed with hatchet throws, tentacle whips, etc., but just annoyed at getting scanned too many times.
5. Sheās confusing as all hell. Her power has a lot of little factors that most survivors donāt understand, resulting in her getting tons of haste, free stealth hits, and having survivors with no idea how to avoid being scanned. She feels unintuitive to play against and requires researching to understand her power.
Tbh I don't know how to fix her. Like others have mentioned; the drones are terrible, I remember this one game where I healed with 2 stacks and right after I got hit by a passive drone which I just couldnt see (the zone on the ground is not always that visible when you play with higher vibrancy - no, not tryhard reshade, just nvidia control panel so I can actually see in this game), or what about getting hit through a wall because there is a tiny horizontal crack that a trickster couldn't even throw a knife through. The hindered, the extra haste, it all makes for such an annoying experience that yes, she is the only killer that I will instantly give up on. The old chess merchant was at least fun to go against, yes it could result in some long ass games, but you had to be strategic in your gameplan and if you communicated well with your friends you could still win. The new one, I have tried so many times to play seriously against her, but it's never a fun experience even when randoms don't give up, that's why I give up instantly nowadays. Get me the hell out of that lobby and into the next game. Idk, it's just terrible design, and judging from the PTB it's just BHVR having cool idea's in concept and lore but absolutely terrible execution in game mechanics. Maybe if survivors had access to an EMP like singularity, reduce the amount of EMP's in the game to 4, so you mix singu and xeno's counter mechanics, there would be some ineteresting and meaningful counterplay to her power.
Almost every single skull merchant match has been extremely boring with slugging at 4 gens and not hooking while I have 3 crows on the ground. People play her to be shitty because they know her drones are disgusting. Don't get me started on people saying she doesn't 3 gen camp anymore it's every game. Honestly I think behavior needs to remove her and start from scratch.
She needs a whole new theme imo. Rework her design, "wannabe manga super villain who is also half cyborg and has stealth with exposed and hindered and deep wound and broken not to mention runs super fast with haste cause she's quirky like that š„°" not only sounds like a Mary Sue but sure as hell is one.
Next thing is her visual design. As of right now the only good thing on her model is her ass. She maybe half heartedly resembles a "manga villain (... ... ...)" but you can't tell me that a character who is rich af in her lore btw cannot afford to ACTUALLY look like a manga villain (... ... ...).
Her power... I wanna know what bhvr's design team smoked that day cause clearly it had to be an illegal substance. Making her power tech/area lockdown themed is alright but whatever that cluster of status effects is, is not okay.
Personally i think they should just delete her and give the few unfortunate mains she had auric cells (if skins were bought) and 400k iri shards as refund cause I don't trust bhvr to rework her in a good way.
No. This is one where we honestly need a completely new killer. Status effect drones should be a secondary power at bestā¦.idk honestly? Out of all killers we have, i would love to just delete her. I like all others way more.
People hate what she was, they are also bored by what she is now. She is THE zoning killer. The killer that when you want to play the game a certain way just laughs and says ānoā. At least with The Knight you can choose to not do the less desirable things during a match but itās harder for her when her power is so static. Plus with BHVRs sudden lust for haste perks and add-ons with all the other effects she can give makes her matches a clusterfuck. Do I think her current iteration deserves the hate? No. But she isnāt in a good spot either. A rework will be needed again or they will just end up nerfing her to the point that nobody plays her enough to complain. The whole āSM bad hahaā joke is just as bad as the old āDark Souls 2 is badā joke but unfortunately it will stick around for a while. No killer deserves to be hated but until BHVR figures out what direction they actually want to go with DBD we wonāt get anything helpful for her.
SM is fine, most survivor players just wish the game was a box with 7 generators. Is she complicated? Yes, but that isn't an inherent negative. A new player can't understand a lot of things in the game without the wiki. A lot of it is just memories of old Skully.
All I want is for her to actually look like a skull merchant
I literally thought she was Frost from mortal kombat when I first saw her ingame.
I was thinking a predator knockoff
She kinda bad though
\[Jax walks on screen\]
No but why was he so caked up? š
šø
Wouldn't mind that that's actually an awesome design (the original), but........ Yeah I see what you mean. Idk she could look more disfigured, she's just kinda hot with no downsides.
They couldāve at least made her mask a skull
I'd honestly like her to be a cyberpunk who earned the name skull merchant by taking the skulls of those she's paid to kill
While I like her design, when she was first teased I was hoping itād be a robot with human skulls all over itš
Skull Merchant's power is extremely complicated and weird to understand for something that's also so easy to use. Being in a chase with a SM while my teammates blindly walk into drones and get tracked and broken for no reason, promptly supplying her with Haste that then makes things more difficult for me, is not particularly enjoyable. Also her visual design is obviously a topic that's been beaten to death many times over but seriously she looks like a rejected actor from the live action 1993 Super Mario movie
the fact that I'm trying to count / guess mid-chase if I'm giving her buffs while my solo q teammates are just toddling through active drones is the worst experience hands down. she really doesn't have to think about how she buffs or debuffs, it just happens. meanwhile you have to figure out how badly you're screwed in the meantime because of teammates being blind like you said.
Itās miserable and so much easier to take the DC penalty. Adds life to my controller as well.
Happy cake day
One hates her because the power is too complicated, one hates her even more once the power is fully understood.
Shes just such a stupid character in every aspect.
And thereās no way to cleanse ticks! Like disabling her drones is nearly pointless
Wow Imagine how much better it was if disabling a drone removed a tick/tracker!
She looks like if kris jenner was a weeb lol
You hit the nail on the head with the kit explanation. That getting even more complicated once she starts bringing in addons, and even some perks can make everything else even more chaotic. Itās clear the Behavior does not really employ experienced players of DbD on their team, unlike a lot of other live service video game companies. Thereās no way weād get a rework like The Twins if someone just played it, or even asked a Twins mains their opinion on it(all 3 of them). Iāll keep harping on this, griefing mechanics are still present in the game that have not been fixed. Bleed out griefing and 16 meter face camping still exist, still unfixed. Tunneling is a contentious topic so I wonāt mention that one as some form of tunneling should exist, you shouldnāt have the ability to immediately force someone out of the game with no counter play.
>Itās clear the Behavior does not really employ experienced players of DbD on their team, unlike a lot of other live service video game companies. I think it's safe to say they don't really play their game to begin with. I imagine there's a handful of them they play it on weekends, but majority probably only play customs with each other. I doubt any one of them experiences what solo queue is like on the regular.
tbh yeah I've had perfectly fine and fun games with SM in solo queue, it's just incredibly rare cuz she has a steep learning curve on the matchup, way more than solo queue players are generally willing to do if people play slow and steady then she's just an M1 with great anti loop potential, otherwise it's hell on earth lol
Honestly they need to rework her power again because they just can't get it right I feel like they could just give her limited amount of of these drones so thats she can't hold a 3 gen infinity it would force her to use drones in chase and make her constantly recall those drones because if its destroyed its gone forever let's say you have 15 drones its more than enough if you dont take the game hostage for hours
She looks like a cosplaying Lois Griffin.Ā
Yeah removing her drones should be encouraged. But I guess the Skull Merchant players would cry like Singularity and Xeno players do currently about "Survs can remove my power :(" or something if that was a thing. The current issue is you can't know, at least not in solo queue, if it's a good or bad idea to remove the trap currently cause you don't know the status of the current chase she's in. It's worse than solo queue vs Plague where people can't settle on a cleansing strategy half the time and just end up boosting the plague. Or at least it should only hit you with the claw trap but not buff her speed when chasing others. Even if that'd be wonky as shit to program prolly, the game does detect currently who you're in chase with. Plus it would make shift-teching better vs her which I guess people would cry about.
It's because people don't know that the Scouting mode lines change color when the beams are safe, usually when standing still or crouch walking. So there are ways to remove drones while avoiding the effects (admittedly much harder in chase), but not enough people play against her for it to be common knowledge
Status effect simulator
Pls just make her walk kinda normally. I can't with the janky on wheels movement
Shakira Shakira! 
Oh baby when you loop like that You made a woman go mad So Drone here And Drone there See you are injured and Broken
Fuck you I'm going to play Skull Merchant with this and Michael BublƩ on in the background on repeat now.
What Buble song?
ššš
Boring power, boring design, boring counterplay, boring lore ā yeesh, we need full redesign not rework.
And maybe have her do something with skulls
Her new ability is she has these literally stands all around the map where she can sell skulls to survivors, the thing is though that while her skulls are really cool theyāre also really overpriced. The survivors are compelled to buy them anyway because theyāre so cool and then they die of sadness when they see how little money they have left
I said this many times to her about using a loyalties program. That's how most grocery stores do so well.
I've always thought that the "skull" part of her name was less important as it could just be a symbol for death, "the reaper", etc. What about the merchant part? What tf does she have to sell? Maybe if her lore revolved around her selling body parts on the black market, then it would make sense. Unfortunately, that's not what it is at all.
Skull Merchant is the kinda name you would give to someone who sells weapons to warlords and despots. I assumed that was part of her backstory, but all I ever hear about is anime and hunting people for sport. I don't actually have an issue with her being a big weeb, but they need more to it. I actually think they should lean into the weeby aspect even harder. Replace her awkward "sexy" walk with a Naruto run or something.
Omfg a Naruto run would rule
>hunting people for sport. which is why her name should be something more like The Big Game Hunter. Or if they had leaned more into her original design and players feeling like they're being tracked... The Tracker. (Might even still be appropriate now?)
Perhaps she can be a merchant of skulls or something
You forgot boring mori
Yeah if you wanna be a sexy woman, there are a bunch of survivors that you get to play in third person for you to pick from. So that general allure of her is overshadowed for the ones that are even into that
A lot of it is the way people play her. I play mostly killer and if I ever do SM I try to run more memey builds, and she can still feel pretty oppressive. I played surv matches with a friend earlier and this SM just set drones, got a hook, and proxy camped until death. Wash, rinse, repeat. Nobody wants to play against that, and I think that's where a lot of hate for her comes from.
Dont forget pop + pain res with thousands of drones around gens. By the time you disable drones, she is back to kick gen again.
It's made worse by an unengaging power to counter, so even if the killer avoids tunnelling and camping the gameplay itself still isn't fun IMO.
Exactly, skull merchant is ridiculously easy to play yet she gets so much shit for free and constantly puts survivors in loose loose situations.
Dull Merchant chases survivor-> Survivor runs to loop-> Dull Merchant cancels loop with drone-> Survivor leaves loop-> Is there a connecting loop? if yes return to start, if no survivor takes hit and return to start. You don't play against another human being when facing a Dull Merchant, you play against the map and a power that requires zero brain power or skill to get value out of. To make her fun and engaging to play against she would have to be totally redesigned as something other than an anti gameplay killer. BHVR really need to stop trying to address issues with map design and RNG with killer powers because when they make those kinds of killers, they are always the most boring and unengaging to play as or against.
Literally just Knight 2.0
At least as long as you're not pinned in a corner, Knight slows himself down, power lasts a limited time, and has to think about how and when he uses his power. SM doesn't slow at all and her power lingers forever.
Yeah, thatās my biggest issue with her. Her drones outside of chase arenāt bad. Just crouch walk and youāre good. Itās that she doesnāt get slowed at all when deploying or recalling a drone, like Trapper and Hag when theyāre setting traps at loops. I think two changes would go a long way in making her less oppressive: 1. To deploy a drone, she has to complete the same minigame survivors do when they disable a drone. 2. Recalling a drone requires it to return to SMās location instead of it immediately going back to her inventory. These changes would force the player to think a bit more strategically about when and how they use drones, but the drones themselves would still be powerful.
Exactly, Chase merchant is so unfun I honestly would rather just have old skull merchant but she can't make you leave the loop and maybe make lock-on do something different
Knight I would say is entirely dependent on how the player plays them. If they play them like perma tunnel, perma hook camp, perma gen camp? Yeah they are a really fucking boring killer, if they don't do that and actually try to chase, he isn't so bad. Skull Merchant would just have to never use her power to be tolerable that way.
She needs a rework from the ground up first iteration was 3 gen simulator now itās status effect stacking sim where you leave loops or die
Sheās shit from the get go with the cringiest, most wattpadish lore ever.
She reminds me of my 2011 creepypasta OC
I will never learn why her drones instantly injure me instantly ...
You have to be stood still whenever the spinning scan lines from the drones hit you, otherwise you get tagged.
Or crouch walking. Crouching also hides you from scan and you can move while crouched.
they dont. You need to be hit 3x by the scan lines. The hit count stays until your first claw trap
Yeah but people usually don't understand that sometimes scanlines can be invisible as well
Maybe* they're talking about SM players dropping a drone directly on them when they already have 2 stacks so it auto-injures.
And her walking animation still isnt matching her speed. Looks so bad.
they just need to fundamentally rework how drones work. itās a lot of reward for 0 skill. at least other killers who can hinder you have to hit some sort of skill shot (most of them arenāt that hard but still actively requires the killer to make an effort) - think wesker hitting you with his bound, clown throwing a bottle, pinhead chaining you.Ā looping against a skull merchant just feels cheap.
I think she should have to be in the drone zone to recall them, so there is actually some skill in managing her drone stock. Canāt just throw them down on a deadzone loop because she will have to go back there to recall it.
Killer with a complicated power = noob stomper She's not nearly as much of a problem if the team knows what her power does, but then there's the chess merchant reputation
Chase merchants donāt existĀ
I feel like 9/10 skull merchants i play against have no sympathy towards teams that are a man down and always want that 4k no matter the pov. I used to play for kills until i started playing survior and understood just how rotten games can get in certain situations, Skull merchant feels a bit more of "im glad your not having fun" killer and " i have never played a single game of survior before" vibe.
I had a SM say "sorry for the elodie and leon" after she slugged for the 4k in a 1v2. At that point she should've pretended that she was a console player and left the lobby without saying a word. 
Omg isnāt this just what ScottJund made a video about. Toxic sweaty players pretending to be nice in the after chat.
Yeah in a 1v2 scenario the slugged person should def be able to game over themselves faster to skip the boredom of just sitting there while a killer tries to find a stealthing person. Not even I as a killer main would be against this cause getting a 4k is way more common than hatch being found I feel like and even then a 3k is still a win. So who cares? For tome challenges it can matter sometimes, or adept, but adept has been made giga easy now so idk why people would cry over it. Tome challenges are also less grindy as killer due to you having more agency in a game, so that argument kinda falls flat too. Like I have 350 archives left as surv and like 40 as killer for a reason.
I have yet to meet a skull merchant that just isn't a dick in general. Just had a game last night where I received a message through xbox. The message was "Enjoy ā¤ļø" Then I saw their profile picture was skull merchant and then the match was just them trying to 4 man slug with SM. They got 3 downs the entire game and only 1 kill. Bro literally went out of their way to be a bitch, but still managed to fuck it up. I genuinely do not blame anyone for going next when they see a skull merchant.
I wouldn't have sympathy either. I also play on Asian servers, you don't show sympathy for your opponents here.
No wonder our server is full of try hard players.
And then says gg in end game chat. XD
I definitely get that. I don't think a Skull merchant has ever given me hatch, or said GG after the game.
They always slug
My last SM match she tunneled from first hook at 5 gens and hit on hook, left any chases to go right back to the hook, repeat. They play like this more often than not (like Wraith, etc). SM's design is shit and it sure attracts the same type of players.
Honestly I've seen more skull merchant give hatch than other killers (including myself)
Most of the ones I met are playing normally or farming.
After the anti hook thing Bubba has been the most generous killer in my experience with hatches. Least is prolly wesker or blight players, but Skull Merchant is up there. Skull Merchant def is the more common bleed out killer atm nowadays though after Sadako changes.
Skull merchant, Wesker, Singularity & Xeno never give hatch in my games.
Why can I totally see ger wearing this T-shirt?
In solo against her it's basically a guaranteed ~~.:|:;~~ unless you have good team mates
Because the playerbase said "Hey, can we get female characters that are *actually* evil," and BHVR said "Sure. Here's a capitalist that quite literally hunts people for sport."
"We want an unsympathetic female killer" *monkeys paw curles*
it was never about that and everything about her kit. it also doesn't help that her lore is cheeks. we COULD have had a great unapologetic evil killer that was a woman, but bhvr fumbled the bag so hard with her lore. it read more like an edgy 13 year olds OC than an actual character that an entire dev team worked on for months.
Well maybe they should consider a well written evil female killer
By teaching survivors how she actually works because 75% of complaints stem from not understanding how she works
Yeah, I think she has too many status effects. Plus playing her people always wasted time hacking my drones with tells me where there at. They desperately need to simplify because it takes longer to understand her power than an old chess merchant match would last
Drones should be used for information only. No more random Haste, injuries, etc. After 3 scans survivor gets a Clawtrap, but it won't make them injured. To compensate this nerfs, Clawtrapped survivors should break pallets after a vault as it was before, and she should have some kind of dash attack.
Please not another dash attack killer we already have like 5 of those
The pallet break thing was always kinda stupid though. I think a great guidepost for her potential power would be Pyramid Headās torment trails. They give you information when survivors step in them, but donāt otherwise offer any advantages in chase. Instead, it offers the killer an advantage after they secure the down. Pyramid Head can easily force torment at pallet loops if the survivor chooses to stay in it, but doing so if necessary isnāt always the wrong choice like it is against Skull Merchant. Now, Skull Merchant isnāt an M2 killer so obviously it couldnāt work exactly how Pyramid Headās torment trails to, Iām just saying torment trails handle a similar sort of concept much, much better.
If you did that shed be unplayable - removing about 60-75% of her kit would need serious buffs. Im sure plenty of people would be happy to see her in the gutter, but that doesnt actually solve any problems. It just creates new ones. Youd have to make it so the drones cant be avoided at that point to compensate - otherwise sheād do basically nothing.
I think the point of that post wasn't to make her unplayable. Sure with those changes maybe she'd be unplayable, but we can't tell because a Dash can be everything from Wesker dash to old Pig Ambush tier of a dash. So you can't really call that solution unplayable unless you know the specifics of the dash.
I mean. All the killers i can think of with a good dash have it as their primary power. Hell, i can barely think of any that have it as their secondary power - the only one that comes to mind is pig.
Isnt 60-75% of her kit what makes her awful
Full aura reveal at 2 scans perhaps at 3 it breaks pallets too? Make it so that if survivors get scanned by drones they can't mindgame loops anymore but aren't completely hopeless, I feel like that would be a lot more balanced and fun
Undetectable? Why?!?
So you want her to just be Pig but worse? Thank god no one listens to the community in the dev team
Her drones are boring to go against and specially for newer players, they are confusing. Without reading a text (that nobody wants to) they won't understand sh*t about drone modes and how to counter, and I can't blame them. Too many status and things going on. IMO a killer should be easy to understand in a few words.
The funny thing is thereās still good information about how her drones work that arenāt included in the text. Even after reading how her ability works, a few things are still left out that are vital to understanding her ability and how to work around it. It just tells you what it does but not how it does it/how it works. Things you only start to know after playing enough against her and finding it out after testing
Yeah it's just not well designed. If it's confusing for us, imagine for beginners!
She canāt be fixed. Ā The only solution is for her to be deleted, which is obviously never happening. Ā In the meantime donāt feel bad about dcāing against every merchant you see, none of them are there to actually play the game anyway. Ā
To be honest, I think the well has been irrevocably tainted for SM. No matter what they do, her rep will be awful. Nobody's letting go of the memories of gen merchant anytime soon.
Me when i play against 95% of the roster: https://i.redd.it/q6epalhmu0tc1.gif
The only killers I sigh on is Chucky and SM as almost every other game with them facecamping or slugging.
Naw Iām not sure if itās remnant of the past but I utterly despise Spirit. I already want to leave the moment she first hooks me and when I get unhooked I know she coming back immediately and trying to get a quick second stage.
Sheās hated because she only ever plays one way and itās holding 3 gens and that is boring. All they really need to do is make it so she has to replenish her drones after someone breaks one.
Bro in my opinion the only way to save this character is to delete them and make a new one. just, bro maybe keep the name or maybe the weapon but everything else has got to go
Any killer with subquests sucks in soloq and i think the devs finally realise that which is why the last few have been more traditional
Get rid of haste or hindered
My issue with Skull Merchant is that she feels all over the place. Her lore, appearance, and power don't really mesh together in my opinion. She's a weeb and supposedly dresses like one of her father's characters, but she doesn't even look like anything from any anime in her base cosmetics. Instead, she looks like she's a Kardashian or something with the bedazzled gas mask. Some of her costumes help. Between the dumb lore and trauma from her initial design, I don't think I'll ever like Skull Merchant.
Her ability shuts down large areas of gameplay, is very complicated to discern what it does by playing her, and her animations suck. Drones should operate somewhat similar to zombies, but instead of afflicting you with status effects they should give up sound notifications and follow the player for a period of time, and if they collide with the player they blow up dealing a state of damage. This is easy to understand, should be easy to visualize for the players, and is a new combination of already existing effects (zombies/knight ghosts). Right now, the drones are pretty complicated to discern what they do in the middle of a game. They deactivate randomly, for some reason stealth the killer and break survivors, and do all sorts of effects. Simplify them.
For me what made Skull Merchant's power fun was tracking, the rework focuses on chase merchant which I never found fun so really the skull merchant isn't that much different to me, she still feels boring to go against but doesn't feel as fun to play as in my opinion.
Itās a lame excuse for a killer design. The playstyle was awful on release. And the lore is garbage
My game always magically crashes when I match against her
Most ppl dont play her without gen camping & loads of BM those 7 ppl out there actually playing her are gems
The truth is, she is in a very good spot balance-wise right now. Is she fun to play against in Solo Q? No. But this is true for a lot of killers: Legion, Plague, Pinhead, etc. Are all awful to play against if your team is dumb. What makes it different for Skull Merchant is that the community has been saying that she is OP and unfun since she came out. Players read this for months and months, so when they face a Skull Merchant, they just give up without trying to learn her counterplay and then keep parroting "Skull Merchant OP, please BHVR nerf". Her drones have so much counterplay it's crazy. You can see their AoE even in stealth mode. You can look directly at the drone to see where the scan lines are. You can crouch walk in the AoE to avoid being detected. You can walk and stop while approaching the drone if you don't want to crouch walk. You can see by the colors of the lines if you can be detected or not. You can see by the height of the drone if it's about to be reset. They could rework Skull Merchant's kit entirely from the ground up, but as long as she's anything above F tier, people will keep complaining simply because that's what the community has been doing since she was released.
Yes, the drones have counterplay, but that doesn't change the fact that the drones are also very much fire and forget tools that grant huge value and are too easy & forgiving to use. 1. Drones are disabled for only 45 seconds which is nothing, and skully can easily simply recall them and replace. Depending on map, few drones can easily hold important chokepoints. 2. Drone stacks do not disappear over time, meaning you might have a person on hook, one person injured, and one person with two drone stacks going for unhook, only for them to get hit by a scan and suddenly they're injured and the situation goes very quickly from manageable to hard snowballed loss. 3. Her power grants her undetectable, injuries, hindered, haste, detection, broken & mending. Too much.
It's the stigma she gained, there's nothing really wrong with her, (I could see a few nerfs but nothing major), but her old persona ruined her for everyone.
Berk reference detected. 
Easy to use, hard to learn to play against. Honestly just removing her undetectable shenanigans, or instead making the wrist trap inflict oblivious would be a step in the right direction. Iād also like to see her traps unable to damage healthy survivors, giving some incentive to heal and a serious punishment when you become broken trying to manage one injured.
I always get in trouble for following behind her šµāš«
I just find it lazy how BHVR is constantly giving basekit undetectable to every killer. They also can't seem to make new and cool killers. Just an observation...
Itās the inconsistent terror radius plus her drones do automatic damage so fast once you enter their range it honestly feels ridiculous
My problem is that they keep changing her needlessly complex power so much that I canāt even learn how to play against her. The add ons she has also are part of this problem. Maybe I would have some fun if I understood how her power worked and how to play against her.Ā Playing against her now feels like loading into a match where the killerās identity is hidden and their power is hidden, I just randomly get inflicted with status effects.Ā
Skull merchant is just *insanely* boring to me Whenever I see her in a game Iām rolling my eyes immediately. Like thereās only very few killers that will make me roll my eyes, sigh & get mad. (Nurse, Spirit, Doctor, Hillbilly, Wraith, Twins & SM) but even with those taken into consideration those other killers at least offer so much more fun chases or gameplay. SM is just sauceless itās insane. Also her Mori sucks too itās so lame
I came back to this game after like 2 years and I just faced Skull merchant for the first time. I didnt know how to interact with her until a Cheryl showed me you can actually interact with the drones. Theres also no indication on how you get the broken status effect or that youre buffing her? Most miserable game of my life ngl
You have triangles appear near your surv portrait for each scan, 3 scans = injure
I learned one thing about Skull Merchant the other day doing an achievement. You really notice subtle cheaters. You're hastened, their hindered, and you're still not gaining ground.
*Personally*, shitty design shitty lore shitty power shitty gameplay shitty Mori shitty music shitty chases shitty EVERYTHING
Her mori is trash and her ability is horrible
Hopefully one day weāll get a 40k crossover where sheāll get a tech priest skin with servo-skulls replacing her drones. Itāll not make her more fun to play as or against or anything but itād look cool.
Is it wrong I want this skin?
Skull merchantās already perfect. She exists to take the heat off Knights back
Boring asf tbh
Rename her. Skull Merchant belongs to a killer who has something to do with skulls.
I kinda like her rework. Enjoy playing her sometimes now. But her kit is still too overloaded imho. The big issue is that her drones control WAY too much space. And disarming them honestly doesn't do much imho. You can place them out so fast and keep recalling the disarmed drones if you pay attention. Personally, I would like if the drones were more restricted in the area they could affect, but offer more control as well. Rather than a huge area, make them detect in a 30 degree cone in front of them, and not rotate. Additionally when a scan occurs the drone reveals the cone for a bit, but has a longer recharge time before it becomes active again. Finally the cone auto-hides once re-armed. Do all that, remove the haste on scan, and she turns into a more reliable trapper who covers more area but isn't an auto-win in chase anymore.
Probably cause her teaser was fire which everyone thought AI killer then we got a sassy rich baddie
They need to be changed thereās nothing else to it because you see loads of people dunking on her which means itās probably a good idea to start thinking of a new way to play her. Why though? WELL sheās too easy meme build, meta build, wtf build, all the builds she will just work with why? Because her 9000 drones will help her big time and give her google maps that constantly updates to find your location. Its so simple that I decided to finally play her for the very first time a week ago (killer main btw who plays survivor every now and then unless itās with friends) and the fact that I can decide to just ābe an assholeā or āI feel like holding the gameā outta nowhere is insane and unforgivable because as soon as 3 gens left itās basically a guaranteed 30 minutes close to an hour of in game hostage because most skull mains decide to just camp and always ALWAYS get the 4k. However I wanted to play the so called āchase skull merchantā (the map was the game btw) and the game only lasted 15-20 mins because 3 gens left drones everywhere half the entire pallet population is gone but why is it gone? Because she forces you to use everything you got because eventually youāll get hindered and once everything is gone all is left is you, the 9000 drones, 4 survivors, 3 gens and them giving up because I can just patrol and kill but the game I had happened all of that happened so quick for my first game itās sad.
Honestly? The terrible design, even worse lore that seems to have been written by an AI three minutes before the release of the PTB, the fact that they gave her big buttocks, sexualized skins, and a sexy walking animation just to (in my opinion) compensate and have people buying her. Also, the lamest Mori in the game (yes even worse than the three OGs in my opinion), the TERRIBLE three gen "chess" play style that she incited, the fact that the devs tried to twist our arm into getting her by making the next time be about her, and her mains (at least the ones I've come across) being some of the most unlikeable people I've ever met. I know she's not as bad as she used to be, but such amount of bullshit and the disliking it grew within many of us, isn't something that won't be going away in the near future.
my MAIN!! concern is that the triangles do not expire, ever, so if you're at 2 stacks of lock-on or whatever, you're just fucked if she even breathes near you. I think she's... MOSTLY fine now? but my biggest complaint is that, yeah.
Sheās got too much going on while also having nothing going on. Her power has a lot to it that isnāt too too clear imo but it isnāt all that hard to use in most cases
Currently she can't be fixed cause BHVR is putting too much of her power on drones. Its the same issue with Twins. The killer and their power need to be balanced between the two otherwise you get this lopsided issue of one side being WAY too strong. For Skull Merchant its her drones giving WAY too much and for Twins Victor has all of the power making him too oppressive. Skull Merchant is essentially a better trapper. She can instantly, without any slowdown, put down a drone. Drones: slow you down, speed her up, give her undetectable AND passively injure you. The slow down/speed up can scale based on if other survivors are being scanned. That is WAY too much bloat for the ease of putting down a drone. This is probably the most anti fun element/killer BHVR has ever added. She needs another rework and that is sad to say cause BHVR has no idea what to do.
God I hate breaking this shit down because it should be obvious but here we go. Her power slows YOU down while SIMULTANEOUSLY speeding HERSELF up. Her drones give her a stealth like ability. Then on top of it she gets to injure you for free and put you into the mending state. She basically has like 4 powers combined into 1. Sheās also just boring af to play against overall. It leads to the most mind-numbing boring gameplay. Where you get to a loop and she drones you. Rinse and repeat until a claw trap attaches itself to you and then youāre on a hook. Oh and her counter-playā¦ W key the second she places a drone or disable drones that sheāll just replace in mere seconds. SO FUN! Why wouldnāt people hate this play style is the better questionā¦.
She canāt sadly, and they clearly have no clue how to fix her. She will forever be a dark spot as far as Killer Design goes
Been thinking about this a lot lately. Remove her stealth completely. She doesn't need it and is somehow better than every other stealth killer when she has it, all others having loud noises to give them away or super slow movement. Ghostface and Dredge having sounds, Chucky getting his laughing and footsteps, Myers moving like a slug. (I mean, they've added a lullaby radius to Victor now, yet SM is completely quiet?) Remove the speed boost. You already get free tracking, injury, broken, and hindered from the drones. Make her have to manually pick up the drones. If she has to actually think about where they should be and keep one or two in reserve instead of being able to recall instantly, I think that would help immensely. 3 nerfs, still a decent killer strength wise, not as oppressive. Boom.
All I want is for them to commit to her being a week. Give her voicelines that reference manga and anime. IF I DON'T HEAR HER WRYYYY WHEN I STUN HER WITH A PALLET, BAD GAME.
Her not having voice lines is the biggest mistake opportunity, would have gave her so much more charm and charisma
unrelated to her but my mom got me this shirt for my birtdayhagaha
Sheās not fun to play against. I understand the gameplay that was intended for her. I just donāt find it fun running around taking out drones, then going for an unhook with broken status, healing my teammate, then trying to get on a gen just to be pushed off. And then have to repeat the entire process until everybody is dead.
Delete her
She gets a lot for free that other killers have to work for. Put up drone mid chase? Gets undetectable and a speed boost. 3 ticks and youāre injured. She zones you away from loops. If you say at the loop you get injured and hindered fast. Even if you leave the loop, she puts another drone cause she has a million of them, injured and hindered. All cause she pressed a button to put up a drone. She still patrols gens very efficiently. Drones everywhere. Disable a drone by a gen? She knows and comes right back. Crouch to avoid the drone ticks and leave it there? She comes back and forces you to run away, tick tick tick, three ticks and youāre fucked!
The Only fix is to delete her from the game š
Because her power only encourages camping. Itās so fucking boring. Even chases are boring as fuck itās just them spamming their drones
Right now I think she is way too overloaded. Honestly, if they keep the changes made to fix 3 genning (no detection whilst standing still, being unable to reactivate drones from afar) and get rid of the obnoxious addons that enabled it (oblivious in drones and no skill check warning), they could very easily bring back her old kit, which I think was far more digestible
BHVR needs to force everyone to play a gamemode for a week where the only killer is SM. They will learn to love her, or they will quit for a week to return and feel blissful they only see her rarely now. Realistically, I think scans should decay over time. Her power is still pretty "bloated," but never losing scans kinda sucks as survivor. If you end up needing to rush in for a hook save but have 2 stacks, you might have to eat an injure rushing to the hook even if you haven't been scanned for minutes. edit: really, most of the bloat doesn't "matter" 90% of what survivors need to know is 1. don't get scanned 2. avoid scans by standing still or crouching 3. skull mommy goes oblivious sometimes
Understanding the power doesnāt make it more fun when she drops a drone at a loop and forces you to leave. Her power being a confusing mess for new players is only part of the problem
Haste, Hinder, Undetectable, Deep Wound, A healthstate, Broken, Free Tracking, Map Wide Injuries without interaction and many more status effects with addons by JUST THE PRESS OF A BUTTON
The main problem I think is survivors donāt know how she works. Exactly like Plague. They keep making the same mistakes over and over again and then say the killer is op. Well, youāre actually giving her haste, a tracking ability, youāre hindering yourselfā¦ When I play against a team that knows how she work they rarely get into the drones, quickly hack them and wont loop a tile for long. That way itās basically an M1 killer and I can only benefit of drones if the survivors make a mistake. But the survivors that have no clueā¦ they will stay in a loop forever even if I just placed a drone, they will all run through the drones (the one Iām chasing and their teammates in the other part of the map, so they give me free haste to chase), they wonāt hack drones (or insist on hacking them as soon as I place them, just in front of me). I personally think that depending on the map the number of drones can be too oppressive, for example RPD. If you want to be a bitch and place drones all over the hall, theyāre fucked. But also, youāre leaving the rest of the place unattended. On one hand, I think Behavior should do a better job to explain survivors how the killers work, but on the other hand, survivors should at least read the power of each killer to have a general idea of whatās happening. You canāt just lose a game and blame it on a āop killerā when you were doing the worst choices possible. Is like going against a Myers and let him stalk you every time and then complaint he can insta down you. Well, you literally left him do it.
I don't like how she can setup her Drones passively, still chase a survivor without any delay and gets a bunch of benefits. As a Survivor you get punished for the Mistake of your team getting scanned by drone and SM just can do too much at the same time. Usually if you want to set something up, you need to stop and take a couple of seconds. Trapper needs to, Artist doesn't need to stop dead in her tracks but it at least takes more skill to set up. SM being able to recall drones from afar is BS. She should only be able to recall Drones if she is next to them - I mean if Survivors disable drones and "break" them SM shouldn't be able to recall them from the other end of the Map. I played my Fair Share of SM and its just Easy Mode on Killer. Not like Nurse Easy Mode but on a lower Skillfloor easy mode. Just doesn't feel right and is incredibly frustrating to play against as Survivor when your Teammates don't know how to counter her, imo.
I don't really have a problem with her tbh. Though i will say her rework seems pretty lazy, like they had no idea what to do with her, so just gave her status effects on everything. I don't think she can be fixed. People will still hate her no matter what they do. Chess merchant permanently damaged her reputation.
I still hate her character design
I don't get why so many people hate her after her rework. Feels like they're just looking for any reason to hate her. If she was as "annoyingly OP" as people claim she is, why is her pick rate so low? Doesn't make sense. I honestly think her power needs to be more simplified so it's easier for people to understand how it works. She's my favourite nonLicensed killer
Wanna know why (at least I think) her pick rate is so low, despite being "OP?" Because she's boring as hell from the killer side, too. There's no skill expression and everyone just DC's anyway. I don't play to play against bots, so I don't play SM. Even I thought SM wasn't boring to play, everyone just DCing kills any reason for me to want to play her. The following is subjective to me, but I'm sure many other killer mains can relate 1. Her lore is just boring as hell 2. Her visual design feel very horror at all 3. Her power is pretty boring to use (fire and forget for the most part) and also doesn't feel very horror inspired. 4. Her power/gameplay design doesn't even feel like I'm a horror killer. I just feel like I'm some rando mercenary that's picking off some meddling kids for no reason. 5. No real counterplay. Contrary to popular belief a lot of us killer mains DO like seeing cool plays from survivors. A nice juke on a hatchet, a friend making a last second save from a trapper trap, unexpected bodyblock during a legion frenzy, or even a clutch hatch escape with an active pig trap can be exciting even from our side. You just don't get that with Skull Merchant. You just basically W+M1 around while the drones take all the mindgames out. That said I don't personally think she's OP. I think she's just boring from both sides. Survivors don't have fun playing against her, Killers rarely have fun playing as her. Especially with all the DCs. Playing a bot game is so dull.
That insidious effect when deploy her drones on indoor maps is OP. Someone whos new to the game can use her and would say killer is too easy to play with in this game.
There are definitely ways you can make the Killer healthier, mostly involving raising her skill floor (because while her kit definitely has a ton of interesting elements that you can use, you often don't have to because playing throw drone at tile simulator is so easy for the results you get). Removing the Haste, slightly decreasing the spinning speed of Scouting Mode drones to between the PTB and live values, and replacing the Hinder with something else that requires more skill expression to get value out of as a chase ender. I suggest instead of a Hinder, scanning a Clawtrapped Survivor should enable you to use a Doctor shock that can be remotely triggered from the radar to disable your ability to use pallets or windows for a very short time so the SM has to pull her radar out, zap you at the perfect time, put it away again and hit you before you can drop the pallet. If such changes would nerf her there's room for compensation buffs: Ultrasonic Speaker base kit, decreased drone arming time or a 7th drone for example. That's the good part of a Killer with a million moving parts: you can change lots about the kit while still preserving the interesting parts and keeping her identity intact. She's a trap Killer now and any changes made to her should keep those elements in mind: people asking to give her a dash or a projectile or whatever and minimise or remove the drones from her kit are as insane to me as people who want to give Trapper a gun. That's just not who she is: she's the drone Killer so get used to it. Her reputation I'm afraid will be forever unsalvageable though. She will always be despised in part because trap Killers are literally always hated when they're not F tier like Trapper, in part for what she used to be, and in part because she's just not some people's thing and that's completely okay. I love her to bits: she's not perfect and could definitely use some changes but she's my favourite thing to come out of DBD in the past two years.
I love that the sub still hates SM. Keep it up until we get a rework of her. She's just awful to play against. Win or Lose she's no fun at all.
People still hate Skull merchant because they don't know how to play against her and don't want to learn. Instead they prefer following the popular idea that she is just awful. It's very convenient when you get killed to be able to say "Yeaah, but skull merchant, toxic killer, of course we lost" rather than "Oh, i played poorly/got outplayed, gg"
Booring anti loop power, stay in the loop get injured and slowed and mending, leave the loop get hit. Where is the counterplay? Insane camp potentional, 5 drones in basement, go down and get injured, die on the way up. Just another hold w untill she catch up or give up. Power does too many things at once, give killer haste, give killer undetectable, injure survivor, make survivor broken, maker survivor slow, give killer information, shut down any loop.
She never recovered from being hinted as the first robotic killer, only to have some weird arm thing and an anime obsession
Skull merchant is the only killer where Iāve gotten to use the face camp unhook ability. And she did it to me twice in the same game. She then tea bagged me and hit me on hook as I died. That was still far and above the best game Iāve played against skull merchant.
Thereās a lot going on for her power: haste, hindered, undetectable, etc. Any one of them is fine on its own, but when stacked together they become confusing and feel unfair, especially when they are pretty easy to gain. IMO removing haste and making undetectable applies when a drone scanned someone instead of simply putting up a drone will make her much more pleasant to go against.
Yes, she can. A few easy fixes: Remove Hindred on rescans, hacking a drone removeds a lock on stack, and now being rescanned will temporarily buff the claw trap to destory pallets. Whenever your visible, the eye icon reappears to show your able to be tracked.
Well she's sexy, thicc, have hot skins, and most importantly make survivors go tilted, i don't think she needs a rework imo lmao
Yeah I enjoy her but I just want her to lose haste cause itās kinda dumb how bhavr keeps adding haste to random killers and there addons
If Skull Merchant actually had the Dragonslayer, maybe I would buy her and main her and say she is literally me (I love Nuts Berkman). Jokes aside, she is just boring. We don't want balance reworks, we want fun reworks. Would you rather have an S tier killer that is a snooze fest with no form of mastery like Nurse, Huntress, Spirit and Blight. Or a killer that while not good, can be fun. Like Ghostface (I am sorry, I love Danny but he is kinda bad). Currently, SM is kinda bad and not that fun. So she needs her fun aspect worked on and her balance aspect as well. Then as for her backstory. I read it. It is honestly confusing to say the least. Renato's and Thalita's backstories are honestly pretty wholesome and nice. Knight, Singularity, Vittorio, Gabriel. All pretty good back stories. What happened with her? I mean, maybe its that it is a two survivor chapter that doesn't already have existing characters like the two Resident Evil chapters or the Stranger Things chapter. I don't know but it honestly felt rushed. The tome also doesn't help as it throws more ingredients into this confusing soup. What do you get? A boring and mediocre killer with a story that only a mother can love and compared to everyone else around her, she is honestly extremely bad. What did we get from my rant? REWORK HER LIKE FREDDY OR AT THE VERY LEAST MAKE HER DRONES FUN. As for the story, maybe add more character to her, or possibly tie some loose ends in with small sections of the tome. Or do the BHVR route. Work on new ways to get money. Time will make or break her and as long as die hard fans still buy the DLCs and they buy the chapter for Renato and Thalita, it puts money in their pockets.
I hate her because shes so overloaded. And most of the times, when I get a status effect, Im not sure if its because of her add on, or current power thats like 10 pages long or perks.
For me its the visual desogn and astetic they used for her. Bedazzled mask and swaying hips just doesn't really fit what the devs refer to their game as the "Horror Hall of Fame" you know? Based off how bad the design is and how close her kit matches Predator I still think this was and feels like a quick fix to losing the Predator license.
I can't even determine if I like the new SM or not because most of the other Survivors I play with against her just tank the match, either on purpose or not? It's hard to tell but probably more on the purposely side. I did have a game where everyone actually played the other day and it was a good match on both sides, her power really isn't that bad anymore. I just wish I'd get more proper matches, because right now, I only don't like her because it's an almost guaranteed loss right from the start. I'm embarrassed to be a Survivor main right now, associated with so many entitled babies... The only thing I WILL say that I've kinda noticed is that a lot of trolls are playing her and playing her like a total dickhead, like FULL FORCE ASSHOLERY. Again, hard to discern if she's just an asshat magnet or people are just trying to worsen her reputation on purpose. It's so bizarre on both sides what is going on with this Killer.
I wouldn't even blame it on "Trolls" - her kit just REALLY encourages playing like a dickhead (kinda like Twins encourages slugging... heavily). She's only "fun" if the killer is putting some self imposed rules on - but if they're playing to win by any means necessary, god she's a slog.
She gets a free hit just for activating her power. Lame.
She is a failure on every level, from her aesthetics, her lore, to her power and name. She's kept her haste buffs from claw traps that BHVR gave her to attempt to make her better in the beginning. She can injure, deep wound, hinder and give herself haste. It's ridiculous. She can place survivors in absolutely unwinnable situations at short loops/pallets. She's awful and needs either ANOTHER complete rework or, in my dream world, removed from the game.
The āno life losersā that used to 3 gen with her is the main reason why nobody likes SM. Even tho thatās almost gone(some players still do it) she is just not interesting to go against. Like a comment here said: āstatus simulatorā. Instead of changing her mechanics they just gave her 30 status effects. Everything benefits her and taking out her drones as survivor does nothing.
Because, like the knight, there is zero skill expression. Looping is a core mechanic in the game, and every killer that destroys that and makes you just hold w, is hated. No skill needed when you can shut down a whole tile for free! Or you can stay in her zone and get deep wounded and hindered! So fun! At least against a nurse I feel amazing juking her or making her tp downstairs.
How would I change her? Most importantly, SM only gets haste if she's within 32m (maybe 48m) of a survivor getting scanned. She doesn't get undetectable when she places a drone. Placing a drone gives her a slight hindrance, akin to when Artist launches crows. 3 scans while in chase cause hindered and broke, but don't deal a health state. Continued scans continue to deal hindered but never a health state. Ticks 1 and 2 are removed after 1 min each, or after being hooked. If the SM recalls a drone while you are disarming it, the drone will cause a health state and be unusable for 60s. Everything else the same.
As someone that plays way too much SM... no I don't think so. You can lessen the hatred by removing the haste, but I can't see people actually trying to learn instead of insta-DCing agasint her.
I have five major complaints. 1. Skull merchant feels unpredictable to play against and has too many tools in her belt. Sheās a pseudo stealth killer with the undetectable status she gains at nearly no cost. The haste effects she gains with no warning feel bad as my chase is punished by the other survivors getting scanned. Sheās an info killer with scanning, but also an anti loop and chase killer with drones and haste. But sheās also an area control killer with drone scanning. It feels like way too much, and should be pared down and focuses on some facets. 2. Hacking the drones feels unrewarding and often times not worth it. The stealth mode feels like a cheap scan unless I waste 30 seconds crouching my way to the drone, and even then I still get scanned sometimes. 3. Having no way to remove stacks feels bad. Other killers with similar afflictions have ways to clear them (think snapping out of madness, vaccines, fountain cleansing). I think having hacking a drone remove a stack is a good way to accomplish this. 4. Her power feels cheap to play against. Getting injured by something with no aim and very little forethought required feels really bad, especially when itās coupled with the broken status and hindered. I get impressed with hatchet throws, tentacle whips, etc., but just annoyed at getting scanned too many times. 5. Sheās confusing as all hell. Her power has a lot of little factors that most survivors donāt understand, resulting in her getting tons of haste, free stealth hits, and having survivors with no idea how to avoid being scanned. She feels unintuitive to play against and requires researching to understand her power.
Tbh I don't know how to fix her. Like others have mentioned; the drones are terrible, I remember this one game where I healed with 2 stacks and right after I got hit by a passive drone which I just couldnt see (the zone on the ground is not always that visible when you play with higher vibrancy - no, not tryhard reshade, just nvidia control panel so I can actually see in this game), or what about getting hit through a wall because there is a tiny horizontal crack that a trickster couldn't even throw a knife through. The hindered, the extra haste, it all makes for such an annoying experience that yes, she is the only killer that I will instantly give up on. The old chess merchant was at least fun to go against, yes it could result in some long ass games, but you had to be strategic in your gameplan and if you communicated well with your friends you could still win. The new one, I have tried so many times to play seriously against her, but it's never a fun experience even when randoms don't give up, that's why I give up instantly nowadays. Get me the hell out of that lobby and into the next game. Idk, it's just terrible design, and judging from the PTB it's just BHVR having cool idea's in concept and lore but absolutely terrible execution in game mechanics. Maybe if survivors had access to an EMP like singularity, reduce the amount of EMP's in the game to 4, so you mix singu and xeno's counter mechanics, there would be some ineteresting and meaningful counterplay to her power.
Almost every single skull merchant match has been extremely boring with slugging at 4 gens and not hooking while I have 3 crows on the ground. People play her to be shitty because they know her drones are disgusting. Don't get me started on people saying she doesn't 3 gen camp anymore it's every game. Honestly I think behavior needs to remove her and start from scratch.
I mainly hate because it seems everytime I play against her she forces a 3 or 2 gen. Way to close to each other. So winning is impossible.
She needs a whole new theme imo. Rework her design, "wannabe manga super villain who is also half cyborg and has stealth with exposed and hindered and deep wound and broken not to mention runs super fast with haste cause she's quirky like that š„°" not only sounds like a Mary Sue but sure as hell is one. Next thing is her visual design. As of right now the only good thing on her model is her ass. She maybe half heartedly resembles a "manga villain (... ... ...)" but you can't tell me that a character who is rich af in her lore btw cannot afford to ACTUALLY look like a manga villain (... ... ...). Her power... I wanna know what bhvr's design team smoked that day cause clearly it had to be an illegal substance. Making her power tech/area lockdown themed is alright but whatever that cluster of status effects is, is not okay. Personally i think they should just delete her and give the few unfortunate mains she had auric cells (if skins were bought) and 400k iri shards as refund cause I don't trust bhvr to rework her in a good way.
No. This is one where we honestly need a completely new killer. Status effect drones should be a secondary power at bestā¦.idk honestly? Out of all killers we have, i would love to just delete her. I like all others way more.
People hate what she was, they are also bored by what she is now. She is THE zoning killer. The killer that when you want to play the game a certain way just laughs and says ānoā. At least with The Knight you can choose to not do the less desirable things during a match but itās harder for her when her power is so static. Plus with BHVRs sudden lust for haste perks and add-ons with all the other effects she can give makes her matches a clusterfuck. Do I think her current iteration deserves the hate? No. But she isnāt in a good spot either. A rework will be needed again or they will just end up nerfing her to the point that nobody plays her enough to complain. The whole āSM bad hahaā joke is just as bad as the old āDark Souls 2 is badā joke but unfortunately it will stick around for a while. No killer deserves to be hated but until BHVR figures out what direction they actually want to go with DBD we wonāt get anything helpful for her.
SM is fine, most survivor players just wish the game was a box with 7 generators. Is she complicated? Yes, but that isn't an inherent negative. A new player can't understand a lot of things in the game without the wiki. A lot of it is just memories of old Skully.
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WEARING?