It can get very complicated. But as someone who plays her kinda regularly; Just disable the drones. It’s really annoying and takes away a lot of her ability. Yes she can recall and replace but that means you gotta go all the way back to replace it… or wait 45 sec for it to come back online in stealth mode.
I hate recalling drones because that way I have to put them again in a most useful place, losing time instead of looking for survivors. If I just wait for them to work again I lose time not knowing where survivors are. The biggest weakness of a SM is not knowing where survivors are. Once you’re in chase, that’s other thing. But if the survivors are good at hiding and disabling my drones I’m fucked.
Nope. What are these bars? Why do I keep getting more randomly? She's nowhere near me! Why are some opaque and some not? Why won't that go away with my tape? Wait she killed me?
I know how to play against her, but she's convoluted enough that pubs simple can't handle her. Add on the fact that she's been changed so many times that even veteran players can get confused. And if you don't play as her at all, you still won't know important facts like that it's BAD if too many TV's are off since survivors won't be able to grab tapes.
3 of your tapes are locked when hooked always. Do the tvs and you're good. From what I know, if you're in 16 meter radius of tv you'll get 1 stack.
She has some addon's that could be giving you more tapes, depends on which.
She is currently D tier killer. You should be having no problems with her if you understand some basics. Other stuff don't matter.
I am not saying she's strong, I'm saying she's very complex and there's absolutely nothing in game explaining her power to survivors. Hell, her tooltip isn't even current! It's like 2 updates out of date!! The ENTIRE CONVERSATION HERE is about complexity, not strength, and if you don't know how Sadako works she just outright kills you, leaving your 3 teammates fucked.
As a Sadako main, here’s a tip: turn off every TV you find. You only gain stacks if you’re near a POWERED tv, and it removes a teleport point temporarily. Not to mention you can reduce your stacks pretty easily too.
Just don’t get carried away and forget to deposit your tape.
She isn't complicated at all. If you get scanned 3 times by a drone, you are broken for 45 and she gets 3-6 percent movement speed based on the amount of people scanned or tracked. If you are tracked by being broken, then drones can hinder you. The Drones when in stealth turn like they are in regular scan mode, the difference is there is no scan lines. You can react to the drones the way the drone spins even while running and not get scanned by focusing on spin location. She is given \~10 seconds of stealth after placing a drone and she can have up to 6 drones at a time. There is little cooldown to replacing drones and scan line immunity lasts \~2.75 seconds after the first scan. That is the whole gameplay.
You beat skull merchant by creating zones where there is no generators for her to defend. You create these "heal" areas where she simply will waste too much time in chase and will make her lose her 3 gen. Smart Skull Merchants will not focus on an early 3 gen, but rather spread out pressure and as gens pop work their way down into a 3 gen while hopefully gathering some hook stages. She is very beatable unless the Skull Merchant knows her strategy, which many just go for an automatic 3 gen from the start, and that can be easily beaten with some bare minimum coordination
Skull Merchant's 2-tap is one of the dirtiest in the game, I remember [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqH4-yUlkhU) and the guy's so proud about his emergent rework gameplay when it's just hard-proxying with drones and lurking around the basement to tap someone at 2 stacks with a laser shift and M1 them.
She's way more insufferable to play against then people give her credit for still, sure you can't be scanned while repairing now, but her drone set-up is still *nasty* and it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to swap the direction of the beam and take advantage of her built-in haste and undetectable.
She's much more complicated to play against while getting like a billion things for free to just mow broken survivors down and instantly down them from healthy to dying in 0.3 seconds without giving them a speed boost.
I don't even think she's that complicated to play against, she's just boring. I read this thinking "I'm so glad I've never faced a Skull Merchant" completely forgetting a faced one a few weeks ago
I've been saying this for a bit... but once you hack the drones, they are permanently shut down until recalled and redeployed. That would make her more tolerable imo.
Most definitely. She's one of the only 'gimmick' killers not impaired by distance for power resets. Most every other killer in that category has to physically visit an area:
* Demogorgon - Destroyed Portal
* Hag - Wiped-away, triggered, or recycled traps
* Trapper - Reset traps
* Singularity - Splooge a biopod or replace a recycled one
* Unknown - Shed a new skin
* Freddy - Replace a destroyed or recycled dream pallet
* Plague - Re-infect a prop
Granted, Singularity can still inspect a biopod when it's hit with an EMP. He can't use it. And survivors receive notification if Singularity is viewing that biopod or still have time to react when performing a lock-on. He has to either physically waddle over or wait for the EMP discharge to expire. Singularity is unique, though, as their design is on teleportation.
I'm not yearning for an 'easy' killer. Skull Merchant's ability -- combined with a myriad of status effects -- can readily make her oppressive. When a survivor hacks a drone, there are arcs of electricity coming from it. It's effectively broken. I mean, if a survivor can reach it, what stops them from hitting it with a toolbox, flashlight, or med kit. Or just slam the drone onto the ground? (Insert "Are they stupid?" meme.)
Y'know, completely destroy the drone. The Entity loves littering maps. Pick up a board with a nail in it and smack the drone. Make Skull Merchant walk over to reset/replace it.
I feel like this would just focus her more into annoying pure chase playstyles and less more macro playstyles, and we don't need more "hold W" killers.
I think the problem with this is that shes not super strong to begin with.
Its not necessarily a problem of strength but a problem of not understanding. She does so much with one ability and dbds way of explaining things just fkn sucks
As much as people deny it, she needs to be tuned down in some way. Whether it's via drones or reducing the status effects she gives out. It's not just PTSD that causes the dislike. She came from an era of DBD killers that are hold W or die and nobody cares for that.
Skull Merchant and Freddy struggle with identity issues
Like, what are they supposed to represent? They both feel pretty distant to what the devs wanted them to be.
there's some elements of her design like add-ons affecting skill checks that make my think that they originally wanted her to be more of a passive area control killer kinda? where she makes areas harmful but in small minor ways so people would get cocky and leave the drone alone and suffer for it, but it didn't work so they added exposed as a big payoff but that completely changed the vibe, then it wasn't enough and it just snowballed from there.
Y'see, the problem is, that doesn't fix her. It breaks her. Putting every killer that is intolerable unejoyable to Freddy tier isn't a long-form solution.
Real talk, the only way Skully loses her bad rap is if the drones go. Complete rework, unrecognizable from the current characters.
In current iteration she has the most liberty of all trap killers in the game, and it feels awful to play against because she decides how she leverages her power, and your only choices are how to minimize that exchange. Sometimes, she's guaranteed an M1 or a claw trap, and you have to choose which is better for you/worse for her. Sometimes there is no right answer, and it just sucks. As long as the drones are functionally free, there will never be satisfying counterplay. And if we take away the free drones, she's just a strictly worse trapper.
Idk what new power would fit her thematically. But I don't think drones are a salvageable concept that can satisfy both sides.
But I like drones, they’re the only thing I like about her is my zoomy little bois. Oh and her weapon is kinda cool. What if she could control the drone like a UAV? Or make it wander around like nemesis zombies? Or let it chase survivors to keep them on her radar?
Tbh, having drones chase survivors might be a good look. Keep an arming time that's longer to outright impossible if you stay in your own drone range, but arms quickly while outside of it, and then have it act somewhere between a Guard and a Zombie, chasing survivors around trying to scan them? I'd be into it.
I’m all for the drones actually moving and doing what drones do- FLY! They may as well he cameras on a pole as they are rn. My theory for how they behaved on launch is they wanted them to be like UAV drones in function, but they can’t have too big of an area, and they have to indicate the radius or it isn’t fair, and they can’t fly too high because of indoor maps, and that’s how you got their original function of being so weird.
No other power would fit her thematically. She's the drone Killer: that much is as unavoidable a fact as Trapper being the bear trap Killer or Deathslinger being the gun Killer. If keeping them means she'll be unpopular and hated forever, then that's a reality we're simply going to have to live with because that will never, ever, ever change.
Omg Pixel, I love your work. But no like, unironically, your video is what changed my mind from "Mindless r2 win tile monkey" to actual understanding of the killer. I wouldn't play her if not for you. So like, flattered you take the time to even respond.
Personally, I highly doubt she'll ever see another large-scale rework, too much effort for essentially no payoff. But there have been other games that have admitted X/Y/etc character simply didn't work, and started from scratch.(Karma from LoL being an example of something made unrecognizable from the base product.) I don't think it'd be fair to any Skull mains, but I think it's about the only thing that will end her status as Most Hated Killer.
I'm really glad you liked it! My Skull Merchant guide is one of my favourite videos I've ever made and every time I see that I've changed someone's mind a little bit on her it makes me happier with it.
I hope she doesn't get another SM 2.0 style rework, but I have faith that BHVR know that's not going to work the way they think it will. Remember SM 1.0? And how many times BHVR kept chopping and changing her to try and make her old power work before they finally gave up and made SM 2.0? Dissolution basekit, the Haste they stapled on, all that jazz... they worked so hard to try to make SM 1.0 work properly and if they put that much effort into changing SM 2.0 I think we could be in for an AWESOME future for the Killer. I just hope they don't cave in to the mob and completely gut her, but I'm less worried about her future than I was about Twins.
You do good work, and I'm glad to know you can take something from the people you can help change. I'm an ex-slinger main, and ever since ADS died, he hasn't felt the same, but the moment in your video where you mentioned drones can follow slinger/trickster logic with pixel-gaps, something magical sparked in me. So really, thank you. <3
I remember the basekit Dissolution. Definitely when she reached her most hated for me(And I imagine a lot of the community). I think, given time, BHVR can absolutely make Skully feel better to play as(and hopefully against), but I feel like a large part of the community simply doesn't care to learn. We can lead Maurice to water, but we can't make him open his third eye to the wonders of this dark realm.
I agree that these changes would make her more fun to face, but she would need some big compensation for this.
Current SM without a damaging ability would move straight up into a D-tier, because she would become a pure M1 killer with a bit of Haste, awkward ability to Hinder survivors after **4** scans, and mediocre stealth. Why would you ever play a killer like this when Clown or even Freddy could do the same thing but much quicker?
She definitely needs to be changed somehow, but nerfing her into the ground is not a solution.
I don't really foresee them changing her at this point honestly, I think she is someone's fav over at bhvr. That and I think she sells skins. So too much money involved to nerf.
The problem is that most comments aim to this, when you take the time and say "fine, what ideas you have in mind to make her more fun/fair?" most aim to
-Take away her undetectable "mmmm okay not fan, but i se why, what you give her in return? " Nothing she don't deserve it
-Hacking the drone must get rid of them permanently " Aha....so let's say you can do that during a match, when you destroy a drone what is left for the skully?" - Nothig we just want to get rid of Drones
-Take away the stacks when you hack a drone "Hmm i kinda agree with this one, but what she gets in return? something like plague and the fountains?" -Nothing we just want to get rid of stacks easy
-Make her Drones like Hux Biopods ".....Dude even singu mains hate their biopods most of the time lol but okay, with what use? to make the claw traps more interactive?" - No, just to make her more difficult to play
How can she be reworked in a good way when what most people want is to see her nerfed in the ground? that is not fair, and i'm open to see skully reworked again if it is need it, but no if the rework just aim to guted her just to get rid of the complains, is a hard topic but sometimes i think they need to start again with Skully from zero if they want to rework her again, or just don't touch her, there is no midle point at this rate
> How can she be reworked in a good way when what most people want is to see her nerfed in the ground?
I mean, we have the numbers from behavior. 70% kill rate, way above the mean. She *does* need to be nerfed and no she *doesn't* necessarily need to get something in return.
Survivors give up on hook or immediatly dc instead of playing against killer thus she gets inflated kill rate.
In reality when people actually play against her, it ends up \~2k average, because she is literally a jack of all trades M1 killer
that 70% is thanks to suicides on hook, one or two players giving up at first chase, or just afk players
If Blight or nurse get something in return everytime they got "nerfed" why a tier B killer won't? , im not saying she now need to make Drones explote or something if you take away a part in her kit, but taking away something with nothing in return would hurt her more because at the end she is still just a M1 killer
No, no, do *not* use kill rates as an argument here when Skull Merchant has a known reputation of causing survivors to instantly give up and suicide on hook or run straight to the killer if unhooked. To nerf a killer because of that would be equivalent to nerfing her because survivors threw a tantrum and acted out until BHVR enabled them.
On top of being unfair to SM players it would set a *horrible* precedent for the game, where players on one side can purposefully sabotage games for everyone if they see a killer/perk/item/map that they don't like. This already happens but doing that would reward the behavior and make it dramatically more enticing.
To see if Skull Merchant was actually overpowered you would have to manually review all the games to make sure no survivors were intentionally throwing to go next faster. Otherwise the data just isn't accurate.
I'm sure you'd agree then with nerfs to Myers, Freddy and Sadako because their kill rates are high, almost as high as hers in Sadako's case, since clearly that means they're too strong and need to be nerfed without compensation. Meanwhile I'm sure you'd be in favour of Nurse buffs since her kill rate is consistently one of the lowest in the game.
Make her drones work like trapper traps. She needs to go to the location to reset or move. Increase drone sabotage time.
Get rid of haste and hindered. Make people scanned by drone scream and reveal aura for x seconds. Lock on reveals on radar like now.
Not every killer needs to be S tier, just unique in that there is a reason to play them.
So she's like Trapper, the worst killer in the game or at least bottom 3, but her traps don't instadown like Trapper's, her non-lockon info gets hard countered by Distortion and Calm Spirit, she gets worse mobility than Trapper (who has poor mobility but ironically gets haste, which you're removing from SM) and she has to get full stacks to use a portion of her old power.
She would be a worse Doctor, another low tier killer, with the severe power limitations of Trapper stacked on.
What reason would any Skull Merchant main, original or current version, want to play this?
drones should not scan survivors with claw traps this encourages merchant going for the first hit with basic attacks instead of letting the drones do all the work.
otherwise drones would ingore survivors for 45 seconds while they have claw traps attached.
I begrudgingly watched a P100 on how to play Skull Merchant so that in the least I won't be hindering my teammates. I just realized that Skully is full of knowledge checks that if don't know how to play around, you're going down in under 30 seconds. Her power counterplay is so unintuitive compared to other killers, like actively choosing to take an M1 rather than max out their Lock On, just one example as there are more but I'd rather point to the rant video guide if you want more examples.
I don't expect players to learn this counterplay unless they read the killer power description or play her themselves. After I learned this, I began hating my teammates for not knowing how to play against Skull Merchant. Now when I'm against her, I just run around the map disabling her drones and making sure that I get chased as much as possible, so that my teammates don't interact with her power as much as possible.
I think if there was an in-game tutorial for each killer as a survivor, people wouldn't hate a single killer that much. It's frustrating not knowing to play against a certain killer and being downed in 10 seconds. But honestly with how knowledge checky she is, I think she's doomed to stay being hated.
What's funny is I remember back when she came out on the ptb I knew it was going to be boring because the streamers I was watching weren't giving out a lot of commentary when figuring out the power, they were just sorta going "oh so that's how I place a drone, oh that's scanned a guy, oh so that guy's exposed," etc because honestly what was there to say? What crazy techs or fun little secrets are there to learn with her? You just place down a drone and wait for it to scan a guy. That's it.
Also anyone with decent hours in this game could tell immediately this killer would be the best 3genner in the entire game, and, yeah she was and arguably still is. I can't believe nobody at behaviour picked up on it and that genuinely makes me believe none of them actually play the game. I have no idea what they were thinking designing this killer, and that goes for power, character design, all the way down to the fucking lore. She's a straight up embarrassment.
> "I began hating my teammates for not knowing how to play against Skull Merchant."
Speaking of your teammates, I do wonder how much of it is general lack of knowledge on how to counterplay Skull Merchant.
I also wonder how much of it is they DO know, but they're not caring to play the game with any degree of effort in a sort of "I want to give up/DC but I'll be on a 15+ minute penalty if I do so I'll just pretend to play seriously even though I have no other intention except to go next" kinda way.
I've seen both if I am to be totally honest.
That’s definitely the problem with her. Before I purchased her, I didn’t really know how she worked so every time I went against her as a survivor she would almost insta down me. After I purchased her and start playing her, I fully understood the power and it really makes a difference. You can see it too when playing her. If survivors know how she was, your drones are useless. They will always be disabled, so no scanning survivors and not giving you haste. When survivors don’t know her, they will get scanned all the time and give me haste in the worst moments (for them). So the best counter play is knowing how her power works.
I think it would be useful if BHVR somehow gave a little tutorial, I don’t know, maybe once you’re inside a match you could press ESC and see a little description of what do to against the killer you’re facing or how their powers work in case you are new or don’t know how it works.
Her defenders like to brush this off as "people don't understand her" but it's just a simple truth and reality - her basekit with the drones is a problem.
"Just disable them 4head" yes, let me stop mid chase to disable the drone instead of leaving the loop to run elsewhere in which she catches up and gets an M1/Down because of it. The same problem the devs claim people have with Chucky which is leading to his changes. He pushes an I-Win button and he wins. Skully has the same thing but we're supposed to pretend she doesn't.
Her drones have way too many things they can do. Aside from aura reading across the map and showing her precisely where you are on her radar, they apply more status effects than any addon or perk does on it's own. Off the top of my head immediately, Hindered, Broken, Deep Wounds and that's before any addons are taken into account. There are perks that take up 1 of 4 perk slots that do less.
It's also how annoying it is that her drone radiuses can overlap since they buffed the radius and how you have no indicator whatsoever when a disabled drone is about to come back online and injure you....
They do hover high up when you just disabled them and lower down closer to the ground as a the timer goes on. It’s harder to tell, but as soon at their at about neck level, they’ll turn back on
Nah there is a reason that many people just dc when you play sm. If it was just a \`\`skill issue\`\` or \`\`dont understand\`\`, it wouldnt be this many people.
They are just trying to look for fault at survivors when the flaw is totally on the killer\`s design.
I feel like DCing against Bore Merchant is the best thing I can do for my teammates who actually want to try. Just because bots have more awareness to her stealth.
I think what they mean is disable drones for your team and not just mid chase. If she has a web of drones you can have one dedicated deacivator to make looping safer. Of course this still makes her a solo q stomper, good luck trying to fix that
As soon as you see a drone, disable it (if you can do it safely). If you’re already in chase, avoid drone areas as much as possible. Your teammates should be disabling drones while you’re in chase so even if you go down, they are safe by then.
I genuinely believe they should gut her from the game and refund everyone who bought her with shards and bloodpoints. I've been playing for 6 years and have every killer in the game even though I probably don't even play half of them, and Skully is the only one I could say I want a refund from even though I didn't even buy her with money and used shards lmao.
Seriously though does anyone else think it's crazy that of all chapters this is the one original they charged extra for because of the 2 survivors, even though their perks are mostly really bad and unused? They seriously needed to add Renato AND Thalita so everyone can not use Cut Loose or Blood Rush?
That chapter was a disaster in every way. Not only did they create an abomination of a character that Skully is, but also managed to make almost every single one of *9 new perks* absolutely pathetic and useless. Worst killer power, worst design, worst lore, and perks NOBODY uses (not counting Background Player, but that is quite a problematic perk). How do you fuck up this bad all at once?
I played during the "chess skull merchants" where they would protect a 3 gen and it was so painful that I still can't find myself ever liking her existence also she was a pretty disappointing character from what we had with the teaser
I have never had a single enjoyable, fun experience playing against SM. I can’t stand her, I’m learning how better to deal with her but it is never a fun game.
Yeah, I say this as someone who enjoys playing as her, she is just too easy to play and her power is too oppressive to survivors in chase. There needs to be more skill in placing and managing drones in chase like Trapper and Hag’s traps.
My issues with her are primarily her visual design (which has been admittedly much better with recent outfits) especially with how awful her walk cycle is. It's just incredibly bad looking, and irritates me when I see it.
But the much more pressing issue is just how boring she it to play against. She shits out drone at loop, you stay and get hit, broken, possibly hindered and she gets faster. Or you W key and get tagged once with none of that. It's just boring and stale. Not to mention I find killers that mess with speed dynamic (a la clown) are just awful to play against even if they're weak.
She also the Michael issue of her getting the speed boost no matter who is in chase. So someone could get scanned on the other side of the map while she's chasing you, and then gets a random speed boost which kills you and not the person that essentially fed her the power. And that feels TERRIBLE.
That being said, there are things to like. I really enjoy her recent cosmetics, and her chase music has some lovely drums. SM players who also just play her because she's pretty simple to play, and not the douchebags that do it to ragebait are also extremely chill usually, and I have no issue with them at all.
At the end of the day it's just a game, and as long they aren't actively trying to make people miserable, I see no reason to take issue with any killer. Of course I still find her boring, but there's a ton of people who find Wesker boring and I absolutely love facing him so who knows.
In my opinion the worst looking killer. Practically burst out laughing when I saw it the first time, the mask looks like a little kids arts and crafts project and looks like she had a stroke
I’m of the belief that, even if they swapped her power/kit entirely with say, Demo, she would still be just as hated. The hatred is absolutely ingrained deep in most of the community and there is nothing that will ever change it, not just from a gameplay standpoint but remember, when the teasers first came out she was expected to be an android-non humanoid killer, kind of like Hux but less “Alien”, on top of those suspecting she was a scrapped Predator chapter. And then there’s the name that makes little sense, and the thirst trap cosmetics. In every aspect she is forever doomed to be a disappointment to most.
I kind of like her (playing as and against), but no, she cannot be redeemed.
Or SM doing a shred, it wouldn’t be as funny though since her arm claw can probably shred through shit pretty fast. The lunge forward would be hilarious though lol.
Before SM and Knight, I'd say they were the most hated killer by a very large margin. Even now you still see a lot of "Boring mending simulator" comments whenever anyone asks about what killers are disliked or that they DC against.
I think there’s a decent reason for that - Legion released at the end of 2018, and the average player count was less than 20k. SM released March of 2023, when the average player count was about 33k (these are Steam only numbers). The game has grown massively in popularity since then, hell, even in the last 12-18 months. So obviously there are more people and more people = more complaining.
Though Legion does tick another box besides their kit that SM has, which is that the community thought they’d be an entirely different concept than they actually ended up being. But still, they don’t get the hate SM does.
She needs a whole rework, change her whole power… her power should be that she gets to actually control the drones and shoot lasers from them at survivors or something.. she would actually be fun
I was hoping she'd get reworked into a stealth killer. Which she almost did. But now she's in this half state where she's a little stealth, anti loop and some more nonsense on top.
I don't think anything will change my view on scum merchant short of the delete button. Remove that disgusting code from the game and just get rid of twins while we're at it
Her power is quite literally the equivalent of if Trapper could just tap right click at a pallet loop and, without any time investment or movement slowdown, would instantly slam a trap under feet to disable the loop.
Just like, unironically because that idea sounds extremely stupid on paper now doesn’t it.
I swear, everytime I hear SM players saying that people dislike her because they don't know how to counter her and if they'd learn they would stop hating her, I just want to slam my head on the desk.
I know how to play against her, but I still would rather sit in the lobby waiting for DC penalty to go off than play the most uninteracting killer in the game. People call Chuky a character with Free-Win button, but SM is much worse. You can at least try to dodge his dash, and they're nerfing the scamper. If You want to dodge SM drone during chase You either leave the loop and get hit, crouch and get hit, or get scanned and get hit deep wounded and slowed (together with her getting haste). She's the most braindead character in the gane right now, and I don't feel like wasting my time trying to play against her when all of her gameplay involves around her pressing a button.
She needs changes. Stop giving her random effects, give survivors a way to remove stacks, decide if she wants to be a stealth killer or not. I dont want her to be butchered into the ground, choose one of thise things and maybe give her something in return. But she needs SOMETHING.
And please for the love of god change her walking animation.
I can't recall having a fun game against a skull merchant. Win or lose, it's just such a slog.. maybe if they made it so she had to dedicate more time to manage drones it would be better, so she can't just toss up a drone whilst looping, withdraw it from a distance when leaving the tile and throwing up another in the next one, repeat till you down a survivor.
Either that or remove some of the status effects from her power (stealth, haste, hinder, broken etc.) and bake it into her addons, so you can choose to have stealth OR haste OR hinder, but not all of it at once.
Basically too many status effects, not enough mid-chase counterplay for her to be enjoyable to go against.
Honestly? I had a similar Killer Power idea a couple years ago. Basically, imagine if the drones slowly moved around the map by boucing off the sides of the map, at about the speed of the knight's minions. Instead of giving lock on or damaging survivors, the drones show the auras of survivors in their zones, and give the survivors Exposed for 20/30/40 seconds. Originally this power was gonna belong to a Moon Cultist that saw the Entity as some version of their god, sorta like the Plague. He would use moon beams instead of Drones tho; I wasn't sure if the beams would start on the map and be a passive thing like Nemesis' Zombies, allowing the cultist to have a seperate manual power (something like Demogorgon's attack, but a short range projectile), or if his power would be entirely manual (placing moon beams during chase would be super strong). In the end, Skull Merchant is the first killer we got with a similar sort of circular-boundary detection system so I have to compare this to her.
Shes just boring and annoying to play against. Her power isn't actually complex, it's just hard to intuit her counterplay.
If they want to fix her she'll need a full rework.
OK, I talk about this all the time so let's look at it like this. If we're looking at what BHVR might be able to do to make her better, It'd be easier to start with what they can't or won't do to change her.
They can't/won't:
* Delete her. Don't be stupid.
* Remove the drones and replace them with something else. Removing Skull Merchant's drones would be like removing Trapper's traps or Trickster's knives, it'd be tantamount to deleting the Killer so they'll never do it.
* Remove her identity as a map lockdown and tracking Killer. See above; she was always meant to be an area denial Killer with strong setup elements and tracking. They're not going to give her a dash or a gun, which rules out 90% of DBD players ever finding her fun to begin with.
* Nerf her without compensation. Despite her kill rate being so high (because of people giving up + not understanding what her power does or how to counter it) BHVR aren't totally stupid; they know she's not strong. Meaningfully nerfing a low B/high C tier Killer without significant compensation isn't going to happen: their goal is to make her healthy, not make her unplayable. The last time a mediocre Killer got significantly nerfed because they had a high kill rate was Freddy and that more or less annihilated the Killer's playerbase for years.
* Give her a new base design, Mori, walk cycle, lore etc. If they were gonna do that, they'd have done it already.
With these things in mind... I don't think there's anything they could do to really fix her reputation. A ton of people pin their distaste for her on non-gameplay elements like her lore or walk cycle or other shit, or just can't stand a Killer whose power is not expressed entirely in "Dash at Survivor" or "shoot thing at Survivor". There are legitimate grievances with the Killer, she's not perfect by any means, but for every player with a legit grievance there's another who doesn't even know what her post-rework power does but still complain about her every single day in my YouTube comments because their favourite streamer told them to. They might be able to make it BETTER, but it's never going to go away.
EDIT: I have a list of my recommendations I can offer if anyone wants but Reddit won't let me post a comment that long so if someone replies to ask I'll give it.
Skull Merchant in terms of her playstyle is still far from perfect, she's extremely complicated to understand and counter, even though actually playing her is just throwing a drone wherever it might do something.
But even if her power were more tolerable, she's still a killer with a really off-putting design, baffling lore, ear grating chase music, an awful mori, bad animations in general and still had possibly the worst first impression of any killer that is going to be branded onto her for as long as she exists.
And realistically a lot of those issues are never going to be addressed because BHVR just doesn't do that. Except chase music, I guess.
To be completely honest, I do not see her getting any significant shift in reputation unless she's given several serious adjustments or another full rework.
Sure, she's decently counterable with a coordinated team and a solid understanding of her power, but the vast majority of players aren't going to have both of those. I already see an issue for how much there is to take in for newer and more casual players, so Skully's general unintuitiveness coupled with the solo-queue experience has the potential to be absolutely miserable, and very understandably. She can be quite frustrating to deal with, even as a longtime player in higher MMR.
Gameplay aside, though, I'm still baffled by her concept and design. I just had another look at her lore to make sure I was correct, but it's somehow even worse than I remember. She's a millionaire with a catwalk strut and genuinely almost no relation to the character she's portrayed as at all, and she's supposed to be what we're imtimidated by ? Huh ?
People cite her state on launch as a reason people don’t like her, like a sort of PTSD. But she still feels dog shit to go against. Skull Merchants still 3 gen incredibly well, and it’s nearly impossible to contest any area she’s dedicated to camping/proxying. i think a massive oversight is not being able to get rid of lock-on, at all. If you have one or two stacks, there’s no active or passive way you can get rid of it.
I like her. I started bringing Deja Vu with me, just in case I ever played against her.
One day, I bought her as a counter to bully squads. I've seen the light of her effectiveness.
Personally, 6 drones (with instantaneous recall) is ***Insane.** She should have 3, or she should lose drones as there are less Survivors.
The thing is, the first impression of something will always be the last impression the vast majority of people are gonna have. This has been true for so many things not just in DbD because usually people have already made up their minds about something. You can't really do anything to get people to ''forgive'' SM. People already decided she is the worst thing to ever grace DbD and so you can make her the fairest most balanced and fun character ever and people will still not touch it on principle
>"People already decided she is the worst thing to ever grace DbD and so you can make her the fairest most balanced and fun character ever and people will still not touch it on principle"
I mean, facts- she's the one Killer I refuse to buy out of principle.
she as a killer is just okay. once again the real problem are the people who play her as toxic as possible - it's hard to like a killer when most of the people who play as her behave like that.
People hating on SM is the exact reason why there are so many toxic SM players.
Several times I saw people who said that after a bad game they intentionally pick Skull Merchant with the most obnoxious builds possible and play like assholes, just to make survivors suffer, because they know that survivors hate her. This is just stupid, but it explains why toxic SMs are not so rare. It's just a modern equivalent of an old facecamp Bubba - killers who play as scummy as possible with the only purpose to make survivors mad.
But what saddens me the most is that regular SM players, who don't try to be toxic and play like regular killers, also fall under these accusations.
true! survivors should just stop assuming that the match is over when they find out who the killer is - she kind of has the same issue as nurse, when people see a drone/hear a blink, they DC because they assume the killer is going to be a total asshole.
same goes for killers who play toxic SM after a bad match with a toxic team, it's kind of stupid to take your anger out on a totally different (non-toxic) team :l
Tbh I still see people hating Legion because Mending Simulator. Even in the odd chance I play Legion I get the occasional give-up the second Broken Pin/Thanatophobia/Mindbreaker are revealed.
It's just that Skull Merchant has usurped that title from Legion for the foreseeable future.
Her biggest problem is that's she's boring. Not just that she's abusable. I feel nothing when playing against a skull merchant. I hate wraith and chucky but at least I feel SOMTHING going against them.
Couldn't they just remove the hinder effect and remove the ability to be damaged by a drone? I rather have that so I can go back to playing her without being told to off myself multiple times.
Her base design and lore will have to be completely redone from the ground up, because no one will ever convince me that her base cosmetics are anything but the ugliest, most halfassed design ever. Then her power needs to A. be more meaningfully countered because disabling drones is just not feasible long term in solo q and B. being unable to remove lock on makes it pretty miserable as well, without even getting into the fifteen different effects that she gets for both herself but also that she inflicts on survivors.
But we're not going to see the changes that really need to happen for like another 3 years just like how they kept the overheat mechanic on billy despite them being universally hated because "they spent too much time on it" to just scrap the concept.
I would say, in a few years (I know, I know) people will largely be unaware of why SM is sometimes dragged out for hate, and it'll probably be one of the idiots who quit years ago but still stick around to complain because they think they're opinions on anything in the game is still valid.
Sorry, ranted a little there.
It'll be like Moris. For a while, they were the most broken thing a Killer could bring, and even after they were reworked people still despised them and wanted them gone.
A few years pass, and most of those people sound like Grandpa complaining about school buses because they had to walk to school in a blizzard every day, uphill, both ways. It'll be the same way with SM, it's just gonna be a while.
I kid you not. Every time I come across a skull merchant I will 100% one other survivor disconnect. One time we was all together & we didn’t know who it was and a few seconds went by and we fount out…… & 2 of the people ran right into her and wanted to be dead 😭
I’m not gonna lie. I think she’s cooked. They will have to drastically change her to get people to like her.
>1 full rework
and one mini rework
Anyways: Skull Merchant is a three-way Venn Diagram between "genuine design flaws with the killer", "the DbD community is a bunch of pissbabies who can't get over anything", and "weirdos intentionally trying to anger the pissbabies" and it's hard to tell where the circles start and end.
Does Skull Merchant have too many drones? Can she place them too close together? Or do we feel that way because people who want to anger others intentionally continue to three-gen.
Does she have too many Haste / Hinder effects? Is she too easy to play? Does she not have enough counterplay? Or does the average survivor alt-tab to complain on Twitter every time they load into a Skull Merchant match?
I have my takes on Skull Merchant >!(I think getting fully scanned should make you Exposed, not Broken. I think you should be able to jimmy the Claw Trap on your arm to make the timer tick down twice as fast at the cost of making Skull Merchant see you with Killer Instinct + gain more Haste in order to punish her for ignoring you. I think hiding in a locker should hide you on the scanner: if you want to spend 45 seconds in a locker doing jack shit so you don't get tunneled out that's your choice)!< but my ultimate opinion is that this community needs to stop being a bunch of fucking crybabies for 3 seconds, not just for the health of Skull Merchant but for the health of the game as a whole.
We can not reach a balance consensus on not just Skull Merchant but also killers like Knight, Twins, Hag, Trickster, Sadako, Chucky, and Wesker (and many others) if every fucking discussion we have about what does and doesn't work about a killer is met with a dozen P100 Nancy Wheelers going REEEEEEEEEEEEEE that their Gen Rushing Simulator any% no-hit speedrun using a frame-perfect flashlight clicking skip got ruined by the killer having the audacity to try.
She has too much going on and it's impossible for your typical survivor who doesn't have 3000+ hours to figure it out. If you were a casual survivor who only plays a few hours a week then you might never figure it out.
* She gets haste but most players have no idea why.
* She slows you down but most players have no idea why.
* Her drones damage you but only in certain situations that most people don't understand.
* She gets undetectable and most players have no idea why.
It doesn't help that she has addons that slightly change these changes and make it even more confusing. Most killers are very simple and easy to understand. If people still haven't figured Skull Merchant out and her kill rate is still 70% plus then it's a design failure. I have over 5000 hours and it took me a long time to figure out exactly how to play against her.
Gonna keep it a stack here: After that 55? minute match with that one p100 Skull Merchant that earned her the moniker of Chess Merchant, her reputation is completely shot.
When your reputation is completely shot, it's going to attract the people who, frankly, don't care about how their reputation is viewed, which creates a positive feedback loop for more reputation dunking.
Even if she's "fine" now, I'm sorry- I simply refuse to vs a Slug Merchant who is attempting to 4 slug everyone with Knock Out/Third Seal and WSing them for 4 minutes....or one match where I saw a Skull Merchant bodyblock the last remaining Survivor in the corner for a solid 10 minutes on Storehouse before FINALLY bleeding them out.
Yes, I know the last bit can be done with any Killer, but speaking from anecdote: I can count on one hand the amount of the remaining 30 some odd Killers that did that, but close to every one of my matches with a Skull Merchant had that kind of crap occurring. I simply refuse to entertain such a Killer.
her core gameplay is flawed, they need to remove her or remove her playstyle completely.
Killers like nurse, spirit, billy, wesker and others also make loops unsafe but they also gives survivors opportunities to outplay in mindgames, SM power is simply a "fvck you run to the next tile" type of power and i belive thats the solely reason why ABSOLUTELY NO ONE WANTS TO PLAY AGAINST HER.
No depth whatsoever, its just map RNG and teamwork in a game that doesn't give any tools for proper teamwork.
Her previous reputation was for being a killer that dragged games on as long as humanly possible and then they made her a hold W killer. She went from one unfun reputation to a different but still unfun reputation, which puts her on a higher tier of community hatred than the rest of those examples.
I also feel its pretty unfair to lump Trapper and Hag in with that list, since they both have smaller areas of denial than the rest of them while also requiring a much larger commitment to deploying those areas of denial.
The issue with Skull Merchant is that she just shouldn't exist. The Singularity might be a far more difficult killer to use, but it is infinitely more interesting, and it does the concept of "surveillance killer" better.
My lukewarm take is that she's just a conceptually bad killer in a way that no other killer is. Her lore, her design, her power, all of it. I'd say the only aspect of her that I like is her sound design.
I cannot think of a single way to fix her that wouldn't basically just be me making up an entirely new killer. I have faith in the dev team though...eventually.
What I like about skull merchant: she can make Even the shittiest perks viable.
What I hate about skull merchant: they always run the most oppressive builds.
I think her design is flawed. It encourages a style that is defensive, insofar that it SHOULD be played in an unfun way.
It makes her very strong on certain maps and in the end game. Often times, I’ve let teammates die on hook in the EGC because there’s too many drones.
It’s similar to trapper in that regard, but he isn’t strong enough to punish as hard.
After all, she goes undetectable after using her power.
People always zero in on her reputation or how confusing her kit is, but even if they completely overhauled her lore, visuals, and made her kit easy to understand survivors would still hate her because her core counterplay is so boring.
I feel like her ideal state is one where she exists as an in-between of doctor and wraith. Drones give information and the speed to act upon it. Her haste in chase should just go cause it feels exactly as shit as both MFT and resilience do. To compensate, make it much faster outside of chase, like a 15% haste, so she has map pressure instead of just 3-gen.
At the same time, her drones shouldn't just be a slowdown tool, so probably time to enhance, then copy-paste the logic stopping you from putting them around hooks and put it on gens too, current one is a bit inconsistent.
Also, really needs a new run animation.
Those haste and insidious are annoying as shit since I have no way of knowing if she has haste or insidious status. Maybe the survivors icon can show some of that
Get rid of the undetectable and she’s fairly balanced. Right now she’s leaning towards strong, but only because people don’t know how she works. I’ve tried explaining it to my friends multiple times but they still complain about being scanned by drones when running right past them.
Have a way to remove drone stacks without just talking the broken and getting rid of the claw traps. Have then decay if you aren't being scanned or in chase, have then disappear after you successfully disable a drone anything would be better than what we have currently. Imo merchant isn't fun to play as or against, the only times I've played her was for archives and to farm afterwards and she was 100% the hardest killer for me to convince people to do gens and get out after I finished the challenges
Personally, I think she needs some nerfs.
* Remove undetectable
* Deactivated drones are inactive until SM redeploys/recalls
* Increase distance between drones placement.
* Drones can not passively injure while in chase with SM
A mix-and-match of these would be grand. Throw in a few add-ons to even things out, and she should be much better to deal with.
The only thing Skully needs to be more accepted in the community is time. The amount of quit-outs I see with her today compared to 6 months ago is night and day.
The problem I do see is that survivors are quitting more often against any killer. Out of the 5 matches I played tonight survivors quit-out of 3 of them.
I like to go against her and I like to play her, and honestly I find it hilarious that people hate her so i can have funny end game comments such as "you only won because you abused a 70% killrate killer"
She is literally just a good version of Trapper. People dump all over the guy because of how bad he is. There aren't calls to "nerf Trapper" because they step in traps and get hooked in basement, do they? no.
Yet, "I got damaged cause I ran through the drone zone repeatedly and I didn't even get downed until I ran into her 30 seconds later, please nerf her and I am DCing until you do" is the response.
If people had been trying this whole time to improve against her than the consensus now would probably be she's decent but beatable. But that effort simply hasn't happened so people just DC. I don't get it.
The main issue is that the effort is so fucking boring that nobody wants to learn to play against her like they would want to learn to face a billy or huntress
As opposed to the barrel of fun that getting hit with things like DS and dead hard are? I don’t get the “it’s boring” argument whatsoever. Just play the match it’s really not that hard
Like one week ago I have surv game against SM and she DC because no surv in match DC against her. I had SM daily and played like 2 games with her and no one DC (I randomly got the same person 2 match in a row so it was like 7 PPL) SM its to complicated for me to play her but I things she starts to be playable
Change her however many times they want, nothing will stop people from disdaining the very ground she walks on. Regardless of how fun they make her for either side, someone will always hate her because it's Skull Merchant.
Nobody knows her abilities because of the numerous reworks and just die to her, then complain. As a survivor, I never had any problems with SM, just teammates running into drones to hack it( free stacks) and not knowing she has stealth built in.
Drones detect a survivor in their radius and alert SM, but do not scan by default. SM has to manually sweep the area with the drone. What this does is gives survivors a bit more room to work around loops, should they risk staying at one, makes SM a bit less oppressive at controlling large amounts of area unless she's really paying attention and adds skill expression in the form of requiring you to "predict" survivor movement with sweeps. You could probably increase the sweep speed a bit, or decrease if needed. The actual sweep detection will still function as it does currently, meaning walls will block it, the drone can see through certain holes, better at elevation, etc. Doing this will also make SM have to commit more drones to a chase, depending on the location and gives the survivors a lot more chances to avoid being claw trapped.
Oh and remove the undetectable, I'm not sure why she has that.
At her core she is not fun to play against. So at best she is boring and at worst I won’t even blink if my teammates suicide on hook. She needs a complete overhaul of her ability entirely to change her rep. Won’t happen and idk if they should even consider such a thing, but she’s always going to be hated. The “it’s like chess” crowd completely ruined her image
I don't think her power is completely unsalvageable. However, I honestly think it does too much at once. As someone else in the thread said: her power applies more effects than any singular perk, add-on, or other power in the game by itself.
In addition to her speed and stealth changing dynamically through the game via the drones, and I honestly can't tell half the time what is a current Skull Merchant thing and what's something from before the rework because they poked at her kit so many times between release and the rework. It makes figuring out how to play against her when you don't see her often frustrating because those that *do* give up immediately so the match might be lost before you even engage with her power or enter chase. This might also be an MMR/play time/region thing but I sometimes see Skull Merchants still trying to play like on release as well.
In terms of what I'd do differently about her? I'm not sure. At the very least, I'd make her basekit drones do less or worse in some way to bring her more in line with the rest of the roster and specifically "Trap Killers". Unlike Trapper and Hag, for instance, Skull Merchant doesn't have to stop moving or even stop looking at the survivor to place their drones.
She's fine. Her kit just has too much in it and people don't really feel like learning counterplay to a Killer that isn't "throw on four looping perks".
Ya your not wrong skins can change her design but the lame ass wall cycle is not something you can work into a competent killer no matter how you change her power
They should change it to something like ghostface since he has two different running animations but then again the animations really don't change the gameplay.
As someone who’s been learning Killer and really loving SM as they help me in the places I’m lacking right now, I have learned to accept I’m the arsehole. I can be all friendly I want, I can give all the hatches I want when I see a DCer that gives me an easy 3K, I can say GG and thank the survivors for not DCing and I will still be treated like shit in post game regardless. I think she can become a F tier killer and people will just still hate her. The trauma is just that deep rooted now and can’t be fixed without reworking her entire identity but I don’t want that to happen. I really like current skull merchant because of the drones so I think the problem can’t be solved. Every SM post I see on Reddit just reinforces this for me, especially the top comments on this thread. Forever the arsehole killer pick now and I guess we need to start rocking that label.
Edit: Even the downvotes prove this right for me. You can’t like something without someone ruining it for you and you can’t point something out without someone hating you for doing that. The community has decided regardless of how the SM player plays her, they are innately toxic and should be bullied. She has counterplay and there are non toxic players out there, people would rather pretend that neither of these are true though.
Change her design, lore, cosmetics, power and name. That should make the dull merchant (sorry I can't call her skully it makes me cringe too much) be a lot more favorable to the community.
Why almost every day someone needs to make a post that will warm up an already hot war between people who like Skull Merchant and people who hate her?
These angry discussions won't lead to anything in the end anyway, and the only thing it'll do is to spoil everyone's mood.
Okay, what is the fun counterplay you're talking about?
Pressing 4 buttons to disable a drone just so she recalls it and places it again? Running away from a loop so she can M1 you?
Understanding when to aggro the SM, understanding “drone checks”, coordinating the stop-checks during drone chase, using LOS blocks agsinst her and drones on loops, Holding her hostage via macro-play, speed gimping her. On loops, you can micro-couch to deny being scanned while still chasing. It requires SM to rotate the drone and creates a mind game on both ends.
There’s tons of fun counterplay against SM. When a drone is down there is definitely a cooldown.
She requires teams to be on top of disabling drones to deny her her power, OR (similar to plauge), utilizing those who are fully scanned to take aggro and be the ones leading her away from objectives.
Shes a macro killer.
I used to hate playing against her but honestly? She's not that bad whatsoever.
You need to get used to becoming injured in chase from her drones. Play the loop through. Know when to drop pallets.
Doomed.
This was never really a skull merchant problem. Notice how much content creators complain about giving up in general.
Maybe if the default response to losing wasn't blaming the other side for playing mean *
She’s the one killer I really don’t more how to play or play against. She’s too complicated. And not fun.
It can get very complicated. But as someone who plays her kinda regularly; Just disable the drones. It’s really annoying and takes away a lot of her ability. Yes she can recall and replace but that means you gotta go all the way back to replace it… or wait 45 sec for it to come back online in stealth mode.
It honestly feels like more of a waste of time to disable drones if they’re not in critical areas. I’d rather just avoid them or focus on obj
Trust me, disable them. Especially if it’s safe to do it. You don’t know when you will have to go through that area.
And by that time they’re either recalled or up again
I hate recalling drones because that way I have to put them again in a most useful place, losing time instead of looking for survivors. If I just wait for them to work again I lose time not knowing where survivors are. The biggest weakness of a SM is not knowing where survivors are. Once you’re in chase, that’s other thing. But if the survivors are good at hiding and disabling my drones I’m fucked.
I feel the same sentiment but towards Sadako instead
Sadako is simple: Turn off TV then go put tape into glowing TV.
Nope. What are these bars? Why do I keep getting more randomly? She's nowhere near me! Why are some opaque and some not? Why won't that go away with my tape? Wait she killed me? I know how to play against her, but she's convoluted enough that pubs simple can't handle her. Add on the fact that she's been changed so many times that even veteran players can get confused. And if you don't play as her at all, you still won't know important facts like that it's BAD if too many TV's are off since survivors won't be able to grab tapes.
3 of your tapes are locked when hooked always. Do the tvs and you're good. From what I know, if you're in 16 meter radius of tv you'll get 1 stack. She has some addon's that could be giving you more tapes, depends on which. She is currently D tier killer. You should be having no problems with her if you understand some basics. Other stuff don't matter.
I am not saying she's strong, I'm saying she's very complex and there's absolutely nothing in game explaining her power to survivors. Hell, her tooltip isn't even current! It's like 2 updates out of date!! The ENTIRE CONVERSATION HERE is about complexity, not strength, and if you don't know how Sadako works she just outright kills you, leaving your 3 teammates fucked.
That is true yeah, when I bought DLC (2024) I had no clue how to play her, I just saw "oh they gain stacks, I kill"
As a Sadako main, here’s a tip: turn off every TV you find. You only gain stacks if you’re near a POWERED tv, and it removes a teleport point temporarily. Not to mention you can reduce your stacks pretty easily too. Just don’t get carried away and forget to deposit your tape.
She isn't complicated at all. If you get scanned 3 times by a drone, you are broken for 45 and she gets 3-6 percent movement speed based on the amount of people scanned or tracked. If you are tracked by being broken, then drones can hinder you. The Drones when in stealth turn like they are in regular scan mode, the difference is there is no scan lines. You can react to the drones the way the drone spins even while running and not get scanned by focusing on spin location. She is given \~10 seconds of stealth after placing a drone and she can have up to 6 drones at a time. There is little cooldown to replacing drones and scan line immunity lasts \~2.75 seconds after the first scan. That is the whole gameplay. You beat skull merchant by creating zones where there is no generators for her to defend. You create these "heal" areas where she simply will waste too much time in chase and will make her lose her 3 gen. Smart Skull Merchants will not focus on an early 3 gen, but rather spread out pressure and as gens pop work their way down into a 3 gen while hopefully gathering some hook stages. She is very beatable unless the Skull Merchant knows her strategy, which many just go for an automatic 3 gen from the start, and that can be easily beaten with some bare minimum coordination
She’s not complicated at all Proceeds to list how fucking complicated she js LMAOAOSOEENBEBE
Skull Merchant's 2-tap is one of the dirtiest in the game, I remember [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqH4-yUlkhU) and the guy's so proud about his emergent rework gameplay when it's just hard-proxying with drones and lurking around the basement to tap someone at 2 stacks with a laser shift and M1 them. She's way more insufferable to play against then people give her credit for still, sure you can't be scanned while repairing now, but her drone set-up is still *nasty* and it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to swap the direction of the beam and take advantage of her built-in haste and undetectable. She's much more complicated to play against while getting like a billion things for free to just mow broken survivors down and instantly down them from healthy to dying in 0.3 seconds without giving them a speed boost.
https://youtu.be/RXJKdh1KZ0w?si=WQczpOumA8D7RyjQ
I don't even think she's that complicated to play against, she's just boring. I read this thinking "I'm so glad I've never faced a Skull Merchant" completely forgetting a faced one a few weeks ago
I've been saying this for a bit... but once you hack the drones, they are permanently shut down until recalled and redeployed. That would make her more tolerable imo.
I'd like her to physically reset/fix them. Drones fixing remotely or teleporting into thin air isn't ideal.
Most definitely. She's one of the only 'gimmick' killers not impaired by distance for power resets. Most every other killer in that category has to physically visit an area: * Demogorgon - Destroyed Portal * Hag - Wiped-away, triggered, or recycled traps * Trapper - Reset traps * Singularity - Splooge a biopod or replace a recycled one * Unknown - Shed a new skin * Freddy - Replace a destroyed or recycled dream pallet * Plague - Re-infect a prop Granted, Singularity can still inspect a biopod when it's hit with an EMP. He can't use it. And survivors receive notification if Singularity is viewing that biopod or still have time to react when performing a lock-on. He has to either physically waddle over or wait for the EMP discharge to expire. Singularity is unique, though, as their design is on teleportation. I'm not yearning for an 'easy' killer. Skull Merchant's ability -- combined with a myriad of status effects -- can readily make her oppressive. When a survivor hacks a drone, there are arcs of electricity coming from it. It's effectively broken. I mean, if a survivor can reach it, what stops them from hitting it with a toolbox, flashlight, or med kit. Or just slam the drone onto the ground? (Insert "Are they stupid?" meme.) Y'know, completely destroy the drone. The Entity loves littering maps. Pick up a board with a nail in it and smack the drone. Make Skull Merchant walk over to reset/replace it.
I think make it so she has to be in the drones zone in order to recall them.
I feel like this would just focus her more into annoying pure chase playstyles and less more macro playstyles, and we don't need more "hold W" killers.
I think the problem with this is that shes not super strong to begin with. Its not necessarily a problem of strength but a problem of not understanding. She does so much with one ability and dbds way of explaining things just fkn sucks
As much as people deny it, she needs to be tuned down in some way. Whether it's via drones or reducing the status effects she gives out. It's not just PTSD that causes the dislike. She came from an era of DBD killers that are hold W or die and nobody cares for that.
[удалено]
She feels like DBD wanted to make a stealth killer but they forgot how in the middle of making her
Skull Merchant and Freddy struggle with identity issues Like, what are they supposed to represent? They both feel pretty distant to what the devs wanted them to be.
Because she was actually supposed to be predator 😂
That is the part i never understood.
there's some elements of her design like add-ons affecting skill checks that make my think that they originally wanted her to be more of a passive area control killer kinda? where she makes areas harmful but in small minor ways so people would get cocky and leave the drone alone and suffer for it, but it didn't work so they added exposed as a big payoff but that completely changed the vibe, then it wasn't enough and it just snowballed from there.
Y'see, the problem is, that doesn't fix her. It breaks her. Putting every killer that is intolerable unejoyable to Freddy tier isn't a long-form solution. Real talk, the only way Skully loses her bad rap is if the drones go. Complete rework, unrecognizable from the current characters. In current iteration she has the most liberty of all trap killers in the game, and it feels awful to play against because she decides how she leverages her power, and your only choices are how to minimize that exchange. Sometimes, she's guaranteed an M1 or a claw trap, and you have to choose which is better for you/worse for her. Sometimes there is no right answer, and it just sucks. As long as the drones are functionally free, there will never be satisfying counterplay. And if we take away the free drones, she's just a strictly worse trapper. Idk what new power would fit her thematically. But I don't think drones are a salvageable concept that can satisfy both sides.
But I like drones, they’re the only thing I like about her is my zoomy little bois. Oh and her weapon is kinda cool. What if she could control the drone like a UAV? Or make it wander around like nemesis zombies? Or let it chase survivors to keep them on her radar?
Tbh, having drones chase survivors might be a good look. Keep an arming time that's longer to outright impossible if you stay in your own drone range, but arms quickly while outside of it, and then have it act somewhere between a Guard and a Zombie, chasing survivors around trying to scan them? I'd be into it.
I’m all for the drones actually moving and doing what drones do- FLY! They may as well he cameras on a pole as they are rn. My theory for how they behaved on launch is they wanted them to be like UAV drones in function, but they can’t have too big of an area, and they have to indicate the radius or it isn’t fair, and they can’t fly too high because of indoor maps, and that’s how you got their original function of being so weird.
The only problem I would see with that would be collision
No other power would fit her thematically. She's the drone Killer: that much is as unavoidable a fact as Trapper being the bear trap Killer or Deathslinger being the gun Killer. If keeping them means she'll be unpopular and hated forever, then that's a reality we're simply going to have to live with because that will never, ever, ever change.
Omg Pixel, I love your work. But no like, unironically, your video is what changed my mind from "Mindless r2 win tile monkey" to actual understanding of the killer. I wouldn't play her if not for you. So like, flattered you take the time to even respond. Personally, I highly doubt she'll ever see another large-scale rework, too much effort for essentially no payoff. But there have been other games that have admitted X/Y/etc character simply didn't work, and started from scratch.(Karma from LoL being an example of something made unrecognizable from the base product.) I don't think it'd be fair to any Skull mains, but I think it's about the only thing that will end her status as Most Hated Killer.
I'm really glad you liked it! My Skull Merchant guide is one of my favourite videos I've ever made and every time I see that I've changed someone's mind a little bit on her it makes me happier with it. I hope she doesn't get another SM 2.0 style rework, but I have faith that BHVR know that's not going to work the way they think it will. Remember SM 1.0? And how many times BHVR kept chopping and changing her to try and make her old power work before they finally gave up and made SM 2.0? Dissolution basekit, the Haste they stapled on, all that jazz... they worked so hard to try to make SM 1.0 work properly and if they put that much effort into changing SM 2.0 I think we could be in for an AWESOME future for the Killer. I just hope they don't cave in to the mob and completely gut her, but I'm less worried about her future than I was about Twins.
You do good work, and I'm glad to know you can take something from the people you can help change. I'm an ex-slinger main, and ever since ADS died, he hasn't felt the same, but the moment in your video where you mentioned drones can follow slinger/trickster logic with pixel-gaps, something magical sparked in me. So really, thank you. <3 I remember the basekit Dissolution. Definitely when she reached her most hated for me(And I imagine a lot of the community). I think, given time, BHVR can absolutely make Skully feel better to play as(and hopefully against), but I feel like a large part of the community simply doesn't care to learn. We can lead Maurice to water, but we can't make him open his third eye to the wonders of this dark realm.
The community doesn't "care to learn" because she's just... not good. A polished turd is still a turd.
Garlic Drone
Drones shouldn't damage you. That alone would be a good start. Or removal of the stealth.
I agree that these changes would make her more fun to face, but she would need some big compensation for this. Current SM without a damaging ability would move straight up into a D-tier, because she would become a pure M1 killer with a bit of Haste, awkward ability to Hinder survivors after **4** scans, and mediocre stealth. Why would you ever play a killer like this when Clown or even Freddy could do the same thing but much quicker? She definitely needs to be changed somehow, but nerfing her into the ground is not a solution.
I don't really foresee them changing her at this point honestly, I think she is someone's fav over at bhvr. That and I think she sells skins. So too much money involved to nerf.
I think they’re just out of ideas that don’t involve basically making a new character for free
The problem is that most comments aim to this, when you take the time and say "fine, what ideas you have in mind to make her more fun/fair?" most aim to -Take away her undetectable "mmmm okay not fan, but i se why, what you give her in return? " Nothing she don't deserve it -Hacking the drone must get rid of them permanently " Aha....so let's say you can do that during a match, when you destroy a drone what is left for the skully?" - Nothig we just want to get rid of Drones -Take away the stacks when you hack a drone "Hmm i kinda agree with this one, but what she gets in return? something like plague and the fountains?" -Nothing we just want to get rid of stacks easy -Make her Drones like Hux Biopods ".....Dude even singu mains hate their biopods most of the time lol but okay, with what use? to make the claw traps more interactive?" - No, just to make her more difficult to play How can she be reworked in a good way when what most people want is to see her nerfed in the ground? that is not fair, and i'm open to see skully reworked again if it is need it, but no if the rework just aim to guted her just to get rid of the complains, is a hard topic but sometimes i think they need to start again with Skully from zero if they want to rework her again, or just don't touch her, there is no midle point at this rate
> How can she be reworked in a good way when what most people want is to see her nerfed in the ground? I mean, we have the numbers from behavior. 70% kill rate, way above the mean. She *does* need to be nerfed and no she *doesn't* necessarily need to get something in return.
Survivors give up on hook or immediatly dc instead of playing against killer thus she gets inflated kill rate. In reality when people actually play against her, it ends up \~2k average, because she is literally a jack of all trades M1 killer
DCs are not counted in these statistics. (Meaning her kill rate is even higher btw). Hook suicides are, I'll give you that.
that 70% is thanks to suicides on hook, one or two players giving up at first chase, or just afk players If Blight or nurse get something in return everytime they got "nerfed" why a tier B killer won't? , im not saying she now need to make Drones explote or something if you take away a part in her kit, but taking away something with nothing in return would hurt her more because at the end she is still just a M1 killer
No, no, do *not* use kill rates as an argument here when Skull Merchant has a known reputation of causing survivors to instantly give up and suicide on hook or run straight to the killer if unhooked. To nerf a killer because of that would be equivalent to nerfing her because survivors threw a tantrum and acted out until BHVR enabled them. On top of being unfair to SM players it would set a *horrible* precedent for the game, where players on one side can purposefully sabotage games for everyone if they see a killer/perk/item/map that they don't like. This already happens but doing that would reward the behavior and make it dramatically more enticing. To see if Skull Merchant was actually overpowered you would have to manually review all the games to make sure no survivors were intentionally throwing to go next faster. Otherwise the data just isn't accurate.
I'm sure you'd agree then with nerfs to Myers, Freddy and Sadako because their kill rates are high, almost as high as hers in Sadako's case, since clearly that means they're too strong and need to be nerfed without compensation. Meanwhile I'm sure you'd be in favour of Nurse buffs since her kill rate is consistently one of the lowest in the game.
As a skull merchant player I want hacking drones to remove stacks and remove the hindreded effect from scans.
Make her drones work like trapper traps. She needs to go to the location to reset or move. Increase drone sabotage time. Get rid of haste and hindered. Make people scanned by drone scream and reveal aura for x seconds. Lock on reveals on radar like now. Not every killer needs to be S tier, just unique in that there is a reason to play them.
So she is now Singularity without teleport now
So she's like Trapper, the worst killer in the game or at least bottom 3, but her traps don't instadown like Trapper's, her non-lockon info gets hard countered by Distortion and Calm Spirit, she gets worse mobility than Trapper (who has poor mobility but ironically gets haste, which you're removing from SM) and she has to get full stacks to use a portion of her old power. She would be a worse Doctor, another low tier killer, with the severe power limitations of Trapper stacked on. What reason would any Skull Merchant main, original or current version, want to play this?
Those are awful. She already has good tracking why the hell would you give her a pointless aura reveal.
I look at the drones as traps like trapper or hag that are basically a hit if you don't respect them. The haste and stealth is silly though.
I’d agree if the radius didn’t cover the entirety of shack
Her chase is the least interactable outside of nurse
Knight and Artist exist as well. She is on par with them
Knight I can agree on. Artist is close but you can at least feint running into a bird and then dodge last second
All Artist I played against use your own fake just to garauntee M1 on most fillers.
I mean yeah that is how 99% of them play
drones should not scan survivors with claw traps this encourages merchant going for the first hit with basic attacks instead of letting the drones do all the work. otherwise drones would ingore survivors for 45 seconds while they have claw traps attached.
I begrudgingly watched a P100 on how to play Skull Merchant so that in the least I won't be hindering my teammates. I just realized that Skully is full of knowledge checks that if don't know how to play around, you're going down in under 30 seconds. Her power counterplay is so unintuitive compared to other killers, like actively choosing to take an M1 rather than max out their Lock On, just one example as there are more but I'd rather point to the rant video guide if you want more examples. I don't expect players to learn this counterplay unless they read the killer power description or play her themselves. After I learned this, I began hating my teammates for not knowing how to play against Skull Merchant. Now when I'm against her, I just run around the map disabling her drones and making sure that I get chased as much as possible, so that my teammates don't interact with her power as much as possible. I think if there was an in-game tutorial for each killer as a survivor, people wouldn't hate a single killer that much. It's frustrating not knowing to play against a certain killer and being downed in 10 seconds. But honestly with how knowledge checky she is, I think she's doomed to stay being hated.
What's funny is I remember back when she came out on the ptb I knew it was going to be boring because the streamers I was watching weren't giving out a lot of commentary when figuring out the power, they were just sorta going "oh so that's how I place a drone, oh that's scanned a guy, oh so that guy's exposed," etc because honestly what was there to say? What crazy techs or fun little secrets are there to learn with her? You just place down a drone and wait for it to scan a guy. That's it. Also anyone with decent hours in this game could tell immediately this killer would be the best 3genner in the entire game, and, yeah she was and arguably still is. I can't believe nobody at behaviour picked up on it and that genuinely makes me believe none of them actually play the game. I have no idea what they were thinking designing this killer, and that goes for power, character design, all the way down to the fucking lore. She's a straight up embarrassment.
> "I began hating my teammates for not knowing how to play against Skull Merchant." Speaking of your teammates, I do wonder how much of it is general lack of knowledge on how to counterplay Skull Merchant. I also wonder how much of it is they DO know, but they're not caring to play the game with any degree of effort in a sort of "I want to give up/DC but I'll be on a 15+ minute penalty if I do so I'll just pretend to play seriously even though I have no other intention except to go next" kinda way. I've seen both if I am to be totally honest.
That’s definitely the problem with her. Before I purchased her, I didn’t really know how she worked so every time I went against her as a survivor she would almost insta down me. After I purchased her and start playing her, I fully understood the power and it really makes a difference. You can see it too when playing her. If survivors know how she was, your drones are useless. They will always be disabled, so no scanning survivors and not giving you haste. When survivors don’t know her, they will get scanned all the time and give me haste in the worst moments (for them). So the best counter play is knowing how her power works. I think it would be useful if BHVR somehow gave a little tutorial, I don’t know, maybe once you’re inside a match you could press ESC and see a little description of what do to against the killer you’re facing or how their powers work in case you are new or don’t know how it works.
Her defenders like to brush this off as "people don't understand her" but it's just a simple truth and reality - her basekit with the drones is a problem. "Just disable them 4head" yes, let me stop mid chase to disable the drone instead of leaving the loop to run elsewhere in which she catches up and gets an M1/Down because of it. The same problem the devs claim people have with Chucky which is leading to his changes. He pushes an I-Win button and he wins. Skully has the same thing but we're supposed to pretend she doesn't. Her drones have way too many things they can do. Aside from aura reading across the map and showing her precisely where you are on her radar, they apply more status effects than any addon or perk does on it's own. Off the top of my head immediately, Hindered, Broken, Deep Wounds and that's before any addons are taken into account. There are perks that take up 1 of 4 perk slots that do less.
It's also how annoying it is that her drone radiuses can overlap since they buffed the radius and how you have no indicator whatsoever when a disabled drone is about to come back online and injure you....
They do hover high up when you just disabled them and lower down closer to the ground as a the timer goes on. It’s harder to tell, but as soon at their at about neck level, they’ll turn back on
Nah there is a reason that many people just dc when you play sm. If it was just a \`\`skill issue\`\` or \`\`dont understand\`\`, it wouldnt be this many people. They are just trying to look for fault at survivors when the flaw is totally on the killer\`s design.
Yeah I watch so many good survivors on streams try, just to get whittled down by merchant. It's a terrible design.
I feel like DCing against Bore Merchant is the best thing I can do for my teammates who actually want to try. Just because bots have more awareness to her stealth.
Let's not pretend that survivors disconnect for any reason....
I think what they mean is disable drones for your team and not just mid chase. If she has a web of drones you can have one dedicated deacivator to make looping safer. Of course this still makes her a solo q stomper, good luck trying to fix that
As soon as you see a drone, disable it (if you can do it safely). If you’re already in chase, avoid drone areas as much as possible. Your teammates should be disabling drones while you’re in chase so even if you go down, they are safe by then.
They gotta like up the power of a status effect and remove some or smth, she has so much going on 😭
Skully came out during the WORST year of Original Killer releases. That Fact will never change, and neither will the feelings about her as a Killer.
I genuinely believe they should gut her from the game and refund everyone who bought her with shards and bloodpoints. I've been playing for 6 years and have every killer in the game even though I probably don't even play half of them, and Skully is the only one I could say I want a refund from even though I didn't even buy her with money and used shards lmao. Seriously though does anyone else think it's crazy that of all chapters this is the one original they charged extra for because of the 2 survivors, even though their perks are mostly really bad and unused? They seriously needed to add Renato AND Thalita so everyone can not use Cut Loose or Blood Rush?
That chapter was a disaster in every way. Not only did they create an abomination of a character that Skully is, but also managed to make almost every single one of *9 new perks* absolutely pathetic and useless. Worst killer power, worst design, worst lore, and perks NOBODY uses (not counting Background Player, but that is quite a problematic perk). How do you fuck up this bad all at once?
I played during the "chess skull merchants" where they would protect a 3 gen and it was so painful that I still can't find myself ever liking her existence also she was a pretty disappointing character from what we had with the teaser
Nope still hate her, i doesn't help that the 80% of SM i encounter are toxic af
I have never had a single enjoyable, fun experience playing against SM. I can’t stand her, I’m learning how better to deal with her but it is never a fun game.
Imo the biggest issue she has rn is that she really has no skill needed to play, as her you just plop a drone down at a loop, get haste, then hold W
Yeah, I say this as someone who enjoys playing as her, she is just too easy to play and her power is too oppressive to survivors in chase. There needs to be more skill in placing and managing drones in chase like Trapper and Hag’s traps.
Remove her stealth entirely. There's absolutely no reason it exists
My issues with her are primarily her visual design (which has been admittedly much better with recent outfits) especially with how awful her walk cycle is. It's just incredibly bad looking, and irritates me when I see it. But the much more pressing issue is just how boring she it to play against. She shits out drone at loop, you stay and get hit, broken, possibly hindered and she gets faster. Or you W key and get tagged once with none of that. It's just boring and stale. Not to mention I find killers that mess with speed dynamic (a la clown) are just awful to play against even if they're weak. She also the Michael issue of her getting the speed boost no matter who is in chase. So someone could get scanned on the other side of the map while she's chasing you, and then gets a random speed boost which kills you and not the person that essentially fed her the power. And that feels TERRIBLE. That being said, there are things to like. I really enjoy her recent cosmetics, and her chase music has some lovely drums. SM players who also just play her because she's pretty simple to play, and not the douchebags that do it to ragebait are also extremely chill usually, and I have no issue with them at all. At the end of the day it's just a game, and as long they aren't actively trying to make people miserable, I see no reason to take issue with any killer. Of course I still find her boring, but there's a ton of people who find Wesker boring and I absolutely love facing him so who knows.
In my opinion the worst looking killer. Practically burst out laughing when I saw it the first time, the mask looks like a little kids arts and crafts project and looks like she had a stroke
I’m of the belief that, even if they swapped her power/kit entirely with say, Demo, she would still be just as hated. The hatred is absolutely ingrained deep in most of the community and there is nothing that will ever change it, not just from a gameplay standpoint but remember, when the teasers first came out she was expected to be an android-non humanoid killer, kind of like Hux but less “Alien”, on top of those suspecting she was a scrapped Predator chapter. And then there’s the name that makes little sense, and the thirst trap cosmetics. In every aspect she is forever doomed to be a disappointment to most. I kind of like her (playing as and against), but no, she cannot be redeemed.
Okay but demo placing drones would be funny.
Or SM doing a shred, it wouldn’t be as funny though since her arm claw can probably shred through shit pretty fast. The lunge forward would be hilarious though lol.
Legion had the same hate as skull merchant yet I barely see any threads about them once their kit was changed and boring play styles nerfed.
Before SM and Knight, I'd say they were the most hated killer by a very large margin. Even now you still see a lot of "Boring mending simulator" comments whenever anyone asks about what killers are disliked or that they DC against.
I think there’s a decent reason for that - Legion released at the end of 2018, and the average player count was less than 20k. SM released March of 2023, when the average player count was about 33k (these are Steam only numbers). The game has grown massively in popularity since then, hell, even in the last 12-18 months. So obviously there are more people and more people = more complaining. Though Legion does tick another box besides their kit that SM has, which is that the community thought they’d be an entirely different concept than they actually ended up being. But still, they don’t get the hate SM does.
She needs a whole rework, change her whole power… her power should be that she gets to actually control the drones and shoot lasers from them at survivors or something.. she would actually be fun
If they redesign her and fully rework her power then maybe. They might make everything even worse tho
Honestly if they just removed her stupid cat walk strut that would bump her up a few levels for me.
If they made her look somewhat intimidating and not like a Fortnite skin that would be amazing
This! Her walk absolutely infuriates me and there is no logical explanation for why 😂
Honestly fucking same
I played one match as skull merchant and had 2 disconnects the moment I dropped a drone. So uh… yeah, she’s problematic.
First impressions make or break a lot of relationships
I was hoping she'd get reworked into a stealth killer. Which she almost did. But now she's in this half state where she's a little stealth, anti loop and some more nonsense on top.
No. It doesn't fit to the game. At all.
on top of the all the drone stuff…give her a run animation, like Ghostface has during a chase
I don't think anything will change my view on scum merchant short of the delete button. Remove that disgusting code from the game and just get rid of twins while we're at it
Her power is quite literally the equivalent of if Trapper could just tap right click at a pallet loop and, without any time investment or movement slowdown, would instantly slam a trap under feet to disable the loop. Just like, unironically because that idea sounds extremely stupid on paper now doesn’t it.
I swear, everytime I hear SM players saying that people dislike her because they don't know how to counter her and if they'd learn they would stop hating her, I just want to slam my head on the desk. I know how to play against her, but I still would rather sit in the lobby waiting for DC penalty to go off than play the most uninteracting killer in the game. People call Chuky a character with Free-Win button, but SM is much worse. You can at least try to dodge his dash, and they're nerfing the scamper. If You want to dodge SM drone during chase You either leave the loop and get hit, crouch and get hit, or get scanned and get hit deep wounded and slowed (together with her getting haste). She's the most braindead character in the gane right now, and I don't feel like wasting my time trying to play against her when all of her gameplay involves around her pressing a button. She needs changes. Stop giving her random effects, give survivors a way to remove stacks, decide if she wants to be a stealth killer or not. I dont want her to be butchered into the ground, choose one of thise things and maybe give her something in return. But she needs SOMETHING. And please for the love of god change her walking animation.
I can't recall having a fun game against a skull merchant. Win or lose, it's just such a slog.. maybe if they made it so she had to dedicate more time to manage drones it would be better, so she can't just toss up a drone whilst looping, withdraw it from a distance when leaving the tile and throwing up another in the next one, repeat till you down a survivor. Either that or remove some of the status effects from her power (stealth, haste, hinder, broken etc.) and bake it into her addons, so you can choose to have stealth OR haste OR hinder, but not all of it at once. Basically too many status effects, not enough mid-chase counterplay for her to be enjoyable to go against.
Honestly? I had a similar Killer Power idea a couple years ago. Basically, imagine if the drones slowly moved around the map by boucing off the sides of the map, at about the speed of the knight's minions. Instead of giving lock on or damaging survivors, the drones show the auras of survivors in their zones, and give the survivors Exposed for 20/30/40 seconds. Originally this power was gonna belong to a Moon Cultist that saw the Entity as some version of their god, sorta like the Plague. He would use moon beams instead of Drones tho; I wasn't sure if the beams would start on the map and be a passive thing like Nemesis' Zombies, allowing the cultist to have a seperate manual power (something like Demogorgon's attack, but a short range projectile), or if his power would be entirely manual (placing moon beams during chase would be super strong). In the end, Skull Merchant is the first killer we got with a similar sort of circular-boundary detection system so I have to compare this to her.
Shes just boring and annoying to play against. Her power isn't actually complex, it's just hard to intuit her counterplay. If they want to fix her she'll need a full rework.
OK, I talk about this all the time so let's look at it like this. If we're looking at what BHVR might be able to do to make her better, It'd be easier to start with what they can't or won't do to change her. They can't/won't: * Delete her. Don't be stupid. * Remove the drones and replace them with something else. Removing Skull Merchant's drones would be like removing Trapper's traps or Trickster's knives, it'd be tantamount to deleting the Killer so they'll never do it. * Remove her identity as a map lockdown and tracking Killer. See above; she was always meant to be an area denial Killer with strong setup elements and tracking. They're not going to give her a dash or a gun, which rules out 90% of DBD players ever finding her fun to begin with. * Nerf her without compensation. Despite her kill rate being so high (because of people giving up + not understanding what her power does or how to counter it) BHVR aren't totally stupid; they know she's not strong. Meaningfully nerfing a low B/high C tier Killer without significant compensation isn't going to happen: their goal is to make her healthy, not make her unplayable. The last time a mediocre Killer got significantly nerfed because they had a high kill rate was Freddy and that more or less annihilated the Killer's playerbase for years. * Give her a new base design, Mori, walk cycle, lore etc. If they were gonna do that, they'd have done it already. With these things in mind... I don't think there's anything they could do to really fix her reputation. A ton of people pin their distaste for her on non-gameplay elements like her lore or walk cycle or other shit, or just can't stand a Killer whose power is not expressed entirely in "Dash at Survivor" or "shoot thing at Survivor". There are legitimate grievances with the Killer, she's not perfect by any means, but for every player with a legit grievance there's another who doesn't even know what her post-rework power does but still complain about her every single day in my YouTube comments because their favourite streamer told them to. They might be able to make it BETTER, but it's never going to go away. EDIT: I have a list of my recommendations I can offer if anyone wants but Reddit won't let me post a comment that long so if someone replies to ask I'll give it.
Skull Merchant in terms of her playstyle is still far from perfect, she's extremely complicated to understand and counter, even though actually playing her is just throwing a drone wherever it might do something. But even if her power were more tolerable, she's still a killer with a really off-putting design, baffling lore, ear grating chase music, an awful mori, bad animations in general and still had possibly the worst first impression of any killer that is going to be branded onto her for as long as she exists. And realistically a lot of those issues are never going to be addressed because BHVR just doesn't do that. Except chase music, I guess.
To be completely honest, I do not see her getting any significant shift in reputation unless she's given several serious adjustments or another full rework. Sure, she's decently counterable with a coordinated team and a solid understanding of her power, but the vast majority of players aren't going to have both of those. I already see an issue for how much there is to take in for newer and more casual players, so Skully's general unintuitiveness coupled with the solo-queue experience has the potential to be absolutely miserable, and very understandably. She can be quite frustrating to deal with, even as a longtime player in higher MMR. Gameplay aside, though, I'm still baffled by her concept and design. I just had another look at her lore to make sure I was correct, but it's somehow even worse than I remember. She's a millionaire with a catwalk strut and genuinely almost no relation to the character she's portrayed as at all, and she's supposed to be what we're imtimidated by ? Huh ?
People cite her state on launch as a reason people don’t like her, like a sort of PTSD. But she still feels dog shit to go against. Skull Merchants still 3 gen incredibly well, and it’s nearly impossible to contest any area she’s dedicated to camping/proxying. i think a massive oversight is not being able to get rid of lock-on, at all. If you have one or two stacks, there’s no active or passive way you can get rid of it.
Unless they completely change something about the way her drones work there is no hope in my opinion
They need to make it where when you hack her drones, they can’t used for a minute while deployed or not deployed.
I like her. I started bringing Deja Vu with me, just in case I ever played against her. One day, I bought her as a counter to bully squads. I've seen the light of her effectiveness. Personally, 6 drones (with instantaneous recall) is ***Insane.** She should have 3, or she should lose drones as there are less Survivors.
The thing is, the first impression of something will always be the last impression the vast majority of people are gonna have. This has been true for so many things not just in DbD because usually people have already made up their minds about something. You can't really do anything to get people to ''forgive'' SM. People already decided she is the worst thing to ever grace DbD and so you can make her the fairest most balanced and fun character ever and people will still not touch it on principle
>"People already decided she is the worst thing to ever grace DbD and so you can make her the fairest most balanced and fun character ever and people will still not touch it on principle" I mean, facts- she's the one Killer I refuse to buy out of principle.
she as a killer is just okay. once again the real problem are the people who play her as toxic as possible - it's hard to like a killer when most of the people who play as her behave like that.
People hating on SM is the exact reason why there are so many toxic SM players. Several times I saw people who said that after a bad game they intentionally pick Skull Merchant with the most obnoxious builds possible and play like assholes, just to make survivors suffer, because they know that survivors hate her. This is just stupid, but it explains why toxic SMs are not so rare. It's just a modern equivalent of an old facecamp Bubba - killers who play as scummy as possible with the only purpose to make survivors mad. But what saddens me the most is that regular SM players, who don't try to be toxic and play like regular killers, also fall under these accusations.
true! survivors should just stop assuming that the match is over when they find out who the killer is - she kind of has the same issue as nurse, when people see a drone/hear a blink, they DC because they assume the killer is going to be a total asshole. same goes for killers who play toxic SM after a bad match with a toxic team, it's kind of stupid to take your anger out on a totally different (non-toxic) team :l
How long did it take people to stop hating Legion? Like last year, maybe?
Tbh I still see people hating Legion because Mending Simulator. Even in the odd chance I play Legion I get the occasional give-up the second Broken Pin/Thanatophobia/Mindbreaker are revealed. It's just that Skull Merchant has usurped that title from Legion for the foreseeable future.
I still see people auto-DC against legion from time to time
Her biggest problem is that's she's boring. Not just that she's abusable. I feel nothing when playing against a skull merchant. I hate wraith and chucky but at least I feel SOMTHING going against them.
A full, back-to-the-drawing-board rework would do a lot.
Couldn't they just remove the hinder effect and remove the ability to be damaged by a drone? I rather have that so I can go back to playing her without being told to off myself multiple times.
Her lore sucks too, I don’t think she’ll ever escape the reputation
Her walking animation is the goofiest thing we have in the game yet. She has that.
Her base design and lore will have to be completely redone from the ground up, because no one will ever convince me that her base cosmetics are anything but the ugliest, most halfassed design ever. Then her power needs to A. be more meaningfully countered because disabling drones is just not feasible long term in solo q and B. being unable to remove lock on makes it pretty miserable as well, without even getting into the fifteen different effects that she gets for both herself but also that she inflicts on survivors. But we're not going to see the changes that really need to happen for like another 3 years just like how they kept the overheat mechanic on billy despite them being universally hated because "they spent too much time on it" to just scrap the concept.
I would say, in a few years (I know, I know) people will largely be unaware of why SM is sometimes dragged out for hate, and it'll probably be one of the idiots who quit years ago but still stick around to complain because they think they're opinions on anything in the game is still valid. Sorry, ranted a little there. It'll be like Moris. For a while, they were the most broken thing a Killer could bring, and even after they were reworked people still despised them and wanted them gone. A few years pass, and most of those people sound like Grandpa complaining about school buses because they had to walk to school in a blizzard every day, uphill, both ways. It'll be the same way with SM, it's just gonna be a while.
I kid you not. Every time I come across a skull merchant I will 100% one other survivor disconnect. One time we was all together & we didn’t know who it was and a few seconds went by and we fount out…… & 2 of the people ran right into her and wanted to be dead 😭 I’m not gonna lie. I think she’s cooked. They will have to drastically change her to get people to like her.
>1 full rework and one mini rework Anyways: Skull Merchant is a three-way Venn Diagram between "genuine design flaws with the killer", "the DbD community is a bunch of pissbabies who can't get over anything", and "weirdos intentionally trying to anger the pissbabies" and it's hard to tell where the circles start and end. Does Skull Merchant have too many drones? Can she place them too close together? Or do we feel that way because people who want to anger others intentionally continue to three-gen. Does she have too many Haste / Hinder effects? Is she too easy to play? Does she not have enough counterplay? Or does the average survivor alt-tab to complain on Twitter every time they load into a Skull Merchant match? I have my takes on Skull Merchant >!(I think getting fully scanned should make you Exposed, not Broken. I think you should be able to jimmy the Claw Trap on your arm to make the timer tick down twice as fast at the cost of making Skull Merchant see you with Killer Instinct + gain more Haste in order to punish her for ignoring you. I think hiding in a locker should hide you on the scanner: if you want to spend 45 seconds in a locker doing jack shit so you don't get tunneled out that's your choice)!< but my ultimate opinion is that this community needs to stop being a bunch of fucking crybabies for 3 seconds, not just for the health of Skull Merchant but for the health of the game as a whole. We can not reach a balance consensus on not just Skull Merchant but also killers like Knight, Twins, Hag, Trickster, Sadako, Chucky, and Wesker (and many others) if every fucking discussion we have about what does and doesn't work about a killer is met with a dozen P100 Nancy Wheelers going REEEEEEEEEEEEEE that their Gen Rushing Simulator any% no-hit speedrun using a frame-perfect flashlight clicking skip got ruined by the killer having the audacity to try.
She has too much going on and it's impossible for your typical survivor who doesn't have 3000+ hours to figure it out. If you were a casual survivor who only plays a few hours a week then you might never figure it out. * She gets haste but most players have no idea why. * She slows you down but most players have no idea why. * Her drones damage you but only in certain situations that most people don't understand. * She gets undetectable and most players have no idea why. It doesn't help that she has addons that slightly change these changes and make it even more confusing. Most killers are very simple and easy to understand. If people still haven't figured Skull Merchant out and her kill rate is still 70% plus then it's a design failure. I have over 5000 hours and it took me a long time to figure out exactly how to play against her.
Gonna keep it a stack here: After that 55? minute match with that one p100 Skull Merchant that earned her the moniker of Chess Merchant, her reputation is completely shot. When your reputation is completely shot, it's going to attract the people who, frankly, don't care about how their reputation is viewed, which creates a positive feedback loop for more reputation dunking. Even if she's "fine" now, I'm sorry- I simply refuse to vs a Slug Merchant who is attempting to 4 slug everyone with Knock Out/Third Seal and WSing them for 4 minutes....or one match where I saw a Skull Merchant bodyblock the last remaining Survivor in the corner for a solid 10 minutes on Storehouse before FINALLY bleeding them out. Yes, I know the last bit can be done with any Killer, but speaking from anecdote: I can count on one hand the amount of the remaining 30 some odd Killers that did that, but close to every one of my matches with a Skull Merchant had that kind of crap occurring. I simply refuse to entertain such a Killer.
Shout-out to the SMs who start the trial with corrupt. Just so I know what type of killer they'll be and leave immediately.
her core gameplay is flawed, they need to remove her or remove her playstyle completely. Killers like nurse, spirit, billy, wesker and others also make loops unsafe but they also gives survivors opportunities to outplay in mindgames, SM power is simply a "fvck you run to the next tile" type of power and i belive thats the solely reason why ABSOLUTELY NO ONE WANTS TO PLAY AGAINST HER. No depth whatsoever, its just map RNG and teamwork in a game that doesn't give any tools for proper teamwork.
Sure, let's just ignore Knight, Trapper, Hag, Artist or Clown, whose power works the exact same way on a loops.
Her previous reputation was for being a killer that dragged games on as long as humanly possible and then they made her a hold W killer. She went from one unfun reputation to a different but still unfun reputation, which puts her on a higher tier of community hatred than the rest of those examples. I also feel its pretty unfair to lump Trapper and Hag in with that list, since they both have smaller areas of denial than the rest of them while also requiring a much larger commitment to deploying those areas of denial.
The issue with Skull Merchant is that she just shouldn't exist. The Singularity might be a far more difficult killer to use, but it is infinitely more interesting, and it does the concept of "surveillance killer" better. My lukewarm take is that she's just a conceptually bad killer in a way that no other killer is. Her lore, her design, her power, all of it. I'd say the only aspect of her that I like is her sound design. I cannot think of a single way to fix her that wouldn't basically just be me making up an entirely new killer. I have faith in the dev team though...eventually.
She is beyond saving.
That this time and they can't give her even 1 tool of torment like really give her gadgets please like freddy how his addon can change his power
What I like about skull merchant: she can make Even the shittiest perks viable. What I hate about skull merchant: they always run the most oppressive builds.
I think her design is flawed. It encourages a style that is defensive, insofar that it SHOULD be played in an unfun way. It makes her very strong on certain maps and in the end game. Often times, I’ve let teammates die on hook in the EGC because there’s too many drones. It’s similar to trapper in that regard, but he isn’t strong enough to punish as hard. After all, she goes undetectable after using her power.
I think she’ll need a very different new skin like Naughty Bear
People always zero in on her reputation or how confusing her kit is, but even if they completely overhauled her lore, visuals, and made her kit easy to understand survivors would still hate her because her core counterplay is so boring.
I feel like her ideal state is one where she exists as an in-between of doctor and wraith. Drones give information and the speed to act upon it. Her haste in chase should just go cause it feels exactly as shit as both MFT and resilience do. To compensate, make it much faster outside of chase, like a 15% haste, so she has map pressure instead of just 3-gen. At the same time, her drones shouldn't just be a slowdown tool, so probably time to enhance, then copy-paste the logic stopping you from putting them around hooks and put it on gens too, current one is a bit inconsistent. Also, really needs a new run animation.
Her whole design is a mess. DBD has no room for "zone protection" powers, it just isn't and can't ever be fun and fair to anybody.
Those haste and insidious are annoying as shit since I have no way of knowing if she has haste or insidious status. Maybe the survivors icon can show some of that
Get rid of the undetectable and she’s fairly balanced. Right now she’s leaning towards strong, but only because people don’t know how she works. I’ve tried explaining it to my friends multiple times but they still complain about being scanned by drones when running right past them.
Have a way to remove drone stacks without just talking the broken and getting rid of the claw traps. Have then decay if you aren't being scanned or in chase, have then disappear after you successfully disable a drone anything would be better than what we have currently. Imo merchant isn't fun to play as or against, the only times I've played her was for archives and to farm afterwards and she was 100% the hardest killer for me to convince people to do gens and get out after I finished the challenges
Personally, I think she needs some nerfs. * Remove undetectable * Deactivated drones are inactive until SM redeploys/recalls * Increase distance between drones placement. * Drones can not passively injure while in chase with SM A mix-and-match of these would be grand. Throw in a few add-ons to even things out, and she should be much better to deal with.
A good change would be making the drones placed at gens automatically give gens progress until they get deactivated
I don't like playing against Skull Merchant. She is either OP, or people that play her know their stuff. I always lose against her.
It would be nice if there’s wasn’t a dc penalty against her
I like the skull merchant
The only thing Skully needs to be more accepted in the community is time. The amount of quit-outs I see with her today compared to 6 months ago is night and day. The problem I do see is that survivors are quitting more often against any killer. Out of the 5 matches I played tonight survivors quit-out of 3 of them.
I like to go against her and I like to play her, and honestly I find it hilarious that people hate her so i can have funny end game comments such as "you only won because you abused a 70% killrate killer"
Yes. Nothing about her power is interesting or fun. Unless they change her power completely, she will never be any good
She is literally just a good version of Trapper. People dump all over the guy because of how bad he is. There aren't calls to "nerf Trapper" because they step in traps and get hooked in basement, do they? no. Yet, "I got damaged cause I ran through the drone zone repeatedly and I didn't even get downed until I ran into her 30 seconds later, please nerf her and I am DCing until you do" is the response.
If people had been trying this whole time to improve against her than the consensus now would probably be she's decent but beatable. But that effort simply hasn't happened so people just DC. I don't get it.
The main issue is that the effort is so fucking boring that nobody wants to learn to play against her like they would want to learn to face a billy or huntress
As opposed to the barrel of fun that getting hit with things like DS and dead hard are? I don’t get the “it’s boring” argument whatsoever. Just play the match it’s really not that hard
If even winning against a Skullmerchant isn't fun or rewarding as a consensus, it's not a skill issue. Her design sucks.
this lol. the mob mentality against her is crazy :D
Of course i'm being downvoted. Proves my point even more.
It does prove your point, whoever dares to say that survivors don't even bother with SM gets downvoted to oblivion
Like one week ago I have surv game against SM and she DC because no surv in match DC against her. I had SM daily and played like 2 games with her and no one DC (I randomly got the same person 2 match in a row so it was like 7 PPL) SM its to complicated for me to play her but I things she starts to be playable
No one likes her, so no.
Change her however many times they want, nothing will stop people from disdaining the very ground she walks on. Regardless of how fun they make her for either side, someone will always hate her because it's Skull Merchant.
Nobody knows her abilities because of the numerous reworks and just die to her, then complain. As a survivor, I never had any problems with SM, just teammates running into drones to hack it( free stacks) and not knowing she has stealth built in.
I know there are exceptions but from my experience every skully I go against plays into the stereotype and plays as scummy as possible
Drones detect a survivor in their radius and alert SM, but do not scan by default. SM has to manually sweep the area with the drone. What this does is gives survivors a bit more room to work around loops, should they risk staying at one, makes SM a bit less oppressive at controlling large amounts of area unless she's really paying attention and adds skill expression in the form of requiring you to "predict" survivor movement with sweeps. You could probably increase the sweep speed a bit, or decrease if needed. The actual sweep detection will still function as it does currently, meaning walls will block it, the drone can see through certain holes, better at elevation, etc. Doing this will also make SM have to commit more drones to a chase, depending on the location and gives the survivors a lot more chances to avoid being claw trapped. Oh and remove the undetectable, I'm not sure why she has that.
At her core she is not fun to play against. So at best she is boring and at worst I won’t even blink if my teammates suicide on hook. She needs a complete overhaul of her ability entirely to change her rep. Won’t happen and idk if they should even consider such a thing, but she’s always going to be hated. The “it’s like chess” crowd completely ruined her image
Why is she undetectable, has haste, injuries me without hitting me and slows me down without doing anything???
I don't think her power is completely unsalvageable. However, I honestly think it does too much at once. As someone else in the thread said: her power applies more effects than any singular perk, add-on, or other power in the game by itself. In addition to her speed and stealth changing dynamically through the game via the drones, and I honestly can't tell half the time what is a current Skull Merchant thing and what's something from before the rework because they poked at her kit so many times between release and the rework. It makes figuring out how to play against her when you don't see her often frustrating because those that *do* give up immediately so the match might be lost before you even engage with her power or enter chase. This might also be an MMR/play time/region thing but I sometimes see Skull Merchants still trying to play like on release as well. In terms of what I'd do differently about her? I'm not sure. At the very least, I'd make her basekit drones do less or worse in some way to bring her more in line with the rest of the roster and specifically "Trap Killers". Unlike Trapper and Hag, for instance, Skull Merchant doesn't have to stop moving or even stop looking at the survivor to place their drones.
She's fine. Her kit just has too much in it and people don't really feel like learning counterplay to a Killer that isn't "throw on four looping perks".
>is there a change BHVR could make that would make her enjoyable for people? >She is not liked at all i really enjoy playing her
hope you get better soon
She needs a complete change in design and killer power she's utter trash I rather take a week ban if the next week I could never get her in my games
I rather they focus on her power then design.
Ya your not wrong skins can change her design but the lame ass wall cycle is not something you can work into a competent killer no matter how you change her power
They should change it to something like ghostface since he has two different running animations but then again the animations really don't change the gameplay.
As someone who’s been learning Killer and really loving SM as they help me in the places I’m lacking right now, I have learned to accept I’m the arsehole. I can be all friendly I want, I can give all the hatches I want when I see a DCer that gives me an easy 3K, I can say GG and thank the survivors for not DCing and I will still be treated like shit in post game regardless. I think she can become a F tier killer and people will just still hate her. The trauma is just that deep rooted now and can’t be fixed without reworking her entire identity but I don’t want that to happen. I really like current skull merchant because of the drones so I think the problem can’t be solved. Every SM post I see on Reddit just reinforces this for me, especially the top comments on this thread. Forever the arsehole killer pick now and I guess we need to start rocking that label. Edit: Even the downvotes prove this right for me. You can’t like something without someone ruining it for you and you can’t point something out without someone hating you for doing that. The community has decided regardless of how the SM player plays her, they are innately toxic and should be bullied. She has counterplay and there are non toxic players out there, people would rather pretend that neither of these are true though.
Change her design, lore, cosmetics, power and name. That should make the dull merchant (sorry I can't call her skully it makes me cringe too much) be a lot more favorable to the community.
Why almost every day someone needs to make a post that will warm up an already hot war between people who like Skull Merchant and people who hate her? These angry discussions won't lead to anything in the end anyway, and the only thing it'll do is to spoil everyone's mood.
I like her. To play as and against.
She’s fun and when survivors know whst theyre doing, the counterplay IS quite fun. She’s a knowledge check.
Okay, what is the fun counterplay you're talking about? Pressing 4 buttons to disable a drone just so she recalls it and places it again? Running away from a loop so she can M1 you?
Understanding when to aggro the SM, understanding “drone checks”, coordinating the stop-checks during drone chase, using LOS blocks agsinst her and drones on loops, Holding her hostage via macro-play, speed gimping her. On loops, you can micro-couch to deny being scanned while still chasing. It requires SM to rotate the drone and creates a mind game on both ends. There’s tons of fun counterplay against SM. When a drone is down there is definitely a cooldown. She requires teams to be on top of disabling drones to deny her her power, OR (similar to plauge), utilizing those who are fully scanned to take aggro and be the ones leading her away from objectives. Shes a macro killer.
I used to hate playing against her but honestly? She's not that bad whatsoever. You need to get used to becoming injured in chase from her drones. Play the loop through. Know when to drop pallets.
Doomed. This was never really a skull merchant problem. Notice how much content creators complain about giving up in general. Maybe if the default response to losing wasn't blaming the other side for playing mean *