Final Thoughts on Skull Merchant – Dead by Daylight



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meh
http://www.twitch.tv/ScottJund

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50 thoughts on “Final Thoughts on Skull Merchant – Dead by Daylight”

  1. Brother your friendly reminder not to judge killers before survivors have learned ways to counter them she's still very new and your quote-unquote 15-second Loop time might be proven very wrong in the future

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  2. Personally I think the mistake was to try and make her power chase-oriented. They should have completed leaned into the "hunter" fantasy and gave her incredible tracking (incorporating the radar more too since it's basically pointless now) instead of giving her damaging or HInder effects. It's fine if a killer lacks lethatlity in chase as long as they can compensate in some other way, like Wraith or Doctor. Forcing the drones to work in chase was not the play. But that's probably never getting changed again so it is what it is.

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  3. I understand why Scott thinks the way he does, but it's just disappointing when the only mindset he has is "must have direct chase element. If the killer doesn't, it's not good". Absolutely, the chase is the most fun part of the game, but trap/area denial killers add a second level of thinking to matches that adds to the fun of normal gameplay, imo. I've had great success so far (literally day one so I don't expect this to last) with placing drones ahead of time, either in tiles or in areas connected to loops. I think it rewards map knowledge of the killer, and you reap those rewards when a chase goes through that area. I think of it like hunting: trap/area of denial killers are like the hunters who set snares to catch animals. It feels so rewarding when your map knowledge, your ability to see trends in a match and in previous matches of how and where people run, pays off in a quicker chase or knowledge on where someone is. That's what makes her so fun, she feels like a true hunter now, tracking her prey.

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  4. She’s actually unplayable now. How are we going to rework a killer to be more chase oriented but at the same time remove the only part of her old kit that was chase oriented (fast vaulting with a tracker broke the pallet. It no longer does) the hinder doesn’t do anything and without the iri addon her MS boost doesn’t last long enough to actually get value. Rarely do I actually get a chase to even get the tracker on someone much less deep wound them because it takes way to long and the drones don’t even deploy instantly anymore. They have some weird downtime that isn’t stated anywhere in the killer power.

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  5. Gonna be honest, I still dislike playing against this killer lol

    I just want to do loops, make this killer actually play loops

    Why are her drones not just Info based like Singularity

    Why make her drones do anything else

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  6. her pick rate was below 2% last time I checked with the highest 3/4K games out of the entire roster. Let that sink in. The only people that will be defending this POS killer are the bots who don't know how to loop, which is how this killer functions. Nobody with a brain or any skill are gonna pick this character.

    Her power is an admission to that imo. Don't need to learn anything, don't have to try at all, just click a button and hold W.

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  7. After playing her I'm also sad to have learned that the 3-gen strat can still kinda-sorta work, at least against SoloQ who can't call out drone locations or coordinate drone hacking (not that it does much since it comes back online in 45 seconds even if she doesn't just recall and redeploy it if she passes by).

    In most maps there's a 3-gen by default (although some are much worse than others) and there's usually some empty space and a couple loops that the Survivors will have to go through if they ever get interrupted.

    During a game in Toba Landing, the Survivors were already in bad shape but only 1 kill at 1 gen remaining (3 on 2nd hook, the 4th one was running all stealth perk and gave up on hook after I got him the first time) and they accidentally 3-genned themselves by only doing the gens in the upper part of the map and main, leaving the last 3 gens on the same side.

    With 6 drones, the new Dull Merchant can cover impressive ground and all I did was set up 4 drones in the 4 loops that were available closest to the gens and the last 2 drones were set up in open spaces between the gens, semi-hidden amongst the clutter. With absolutely no imput from me beyond pressing M2 ages ago I got everybody injured without pressing M1 and most of those injuries were completely out of my sight.

    Every time I chased away Survivors from gens, they would run to the closest loop or MFT away in open space, both of which had a drone in it. I didn't even mean for it to turn into a war of attrition but eventually they just gave up and I let them go because I felt bad XD

    If the map is small enough/the 3-gen is tight enough, SM can still stall with little imput, the rework was arguably a massive buff to her overall power but it just turned her into a more obnoxious Knight with even less skill required.

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  8. Dropping a pallet within the radius of a drone that had been placed within the last 20 seconds will automatically disable the drone as if it had been hacked.

    If you, as a survivor, predrop a pallet, the merchant can punish you by her drone… But if she drops her drone first, you can punish by disabling it and getting away or looping at that loop for 45 seconds without fear of the drone. Also, make it so if the merchant can't recall a disabled drone. That way, they don't just recall it and throw it back down

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  9. After further tests I agree with him about the hindrance. As a p42 merchant it disgust me too.😂
    But when the hindrance do hit it does have a long hindrance and that just basekit. Paired with addon its nasty especially against bad survivors. They probably should decrease the hindrance time to force killers to use hindrance addons if they want value. Maybe 3s hindrance. Since it can be applied so much and easily they probably should reduce it or make it where deep wound survivors can't be hindrance.

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  10. Hey Scott, I just played a game as skull merchant where there were these two megs that were abnormally fast while healthy and injured (fast to the point where if they were any decent at the game I simply would not have been able to catch them with even tier 3 bloodlust). After the game ends, neither of them ended up having made for this or any movement speed perk besides only one of them having hope. They were both on pc (I play xbox) and one of them was private profile, the other's name was Itachi. Do you think this is a new glitch or were they cheating.

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  11. If this Killer is worse at getting kills (maybe even objectively worse), as a concerned survivor, why do you care? You're statistically getting the W.
    I'd understand all this if Merchant killed at a rate similar to Nurse/Blight/Spirit. But she's worse at killing. I have a suspicion her kill rates are going to be bottom half of the roster.
    You're a survivor, survive.

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  12. So many problems with this game would be solved if they'd just stop screwing around with movement speed. Increasing it or decreasing it, killer or survivor, almost every time they touch movement speed it makes everything worse.

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  13. If BHVR weren't lazy they'd put more effort in making her drones more interactable on both sides. SM could control them in a similar way to the Cenobite's chain, survivors could dodge projectiles that track/injure/deep-wound you… But no. They stick to the "place down drone, let drone do its thing (mostly), chase until you get free m1". As long as she has basically no interactability with her own drones besides placing them down, removing them, and now changing the scan direction, she'll be a boring killer regardless of how strong or weak she is.

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  14. I also hate how her walk cycle does not match her movement speed like gaddayum behaviour we know you love to bait the coomers out of their money but please this just looks fucking awful

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  15. Yeah, what Scott was saying really highlighted how the issue is that her Drones don’t take any mechanical skill to set up. And I’m not sure there’s a way to really add that. That aspect might not be entirely necessary, as people don’t need to play Skull Merchant unless they like setting up a web of drones.
    However, the more significant issue is how to make dodging drones fun for survivors. I wonder if they could have some kind of flash grenade type weapon that could stun the drone. This could then allow the survivor to decide which drone they should stun while in chase (and maybe the drones could still be manually disabled through the hacking mini game. This would allow healthy survivors to delay the damage and the hindered, and allow injured survivors to delay the hindered. And if she sets up a drone at a strong loop, maybe you don’t need to save a drone stun grenade, and can save it for medium strength loop.

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  16. The issue with her, is that she is so, god, awfully, boring. And when most of the community, both survivors and killers, agree that she is boring, that’s not subjective, she is just straight up boring.

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  17. What people mean about her 3-gen is gone? It just changed. That's all.
    You play more like Hag and put traps around your 3-gen (or other are you pick), but you can't leave.
    Games will end faster with her 3-gen, but chase merchant is worse than before.

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  18. what a surprise, they couldn't make shart merchant an actually engaging killer. don't worry Scott, I'm sure they'll come up with a rework for the rework in 2028.

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