Skull Merchant Discussion Lasting as Long as a Skull Merchant Match – Dead by Daylight

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Read more Dead by Daylight ➜ https://deadbydaylight.mgn.gg

Pixel’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98mgJ0OMvUY
http://www.twitch.tv/ScottJund

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24 thoughts on “Skull Merchant Discussion Lasting as Long as a Skull Merchant Match – Dead by Daylight”

  4. To me this killer feels like a weird rebalanced Plague. You're basically guarantied an injure / the first hit in a chase, but afterwards you're just an M1 killer with a bit of hinderance + game slowdown with the broken status effect. Idk I don't really mind losing a health state no matter what because… I already play against plague, against legion, and hell I'll take an m1 killer with a guarenteed injure over another hug tech blight of 180 flick oni anyday of the week.

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  7. This is literally the exact same thing that happened with old spirit: She has no counterplay "Yes she does" Shows examples that are either the spirit fucking up or so specific that it wouldn't apply to a normal match, OR a "comp" player showing examples.

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  8. Here's my 2 cents, Scott: Dead By Daylight is designed around the killer eventually getting a hit, and killer powers are typically used as a way to get that hit earlier by either forcing the survivor to make a mistake or skillfully outplaying them. I think the main point I could gather here is that you simply don't find Skull Merchant's gameplay loop FUN (which I agree with) because it doesn't take a lot of mechanical skill* to get right.

    (*What I mean by "mechanical skill" is having to actually aim like a Huntress, know where to bounce like Blight, know how long is your lunge like Wesker, etc. Her drones are not really an ability you can "miss".)

    But to play devil's advocate here (the devil being pixel) I don't think this is very far from how other killers are designed in general. Generally speaking, killers that take more skill are more lethal (Huntress, Nurse, Blight, Hillbilly, even Trapper, etc.) because they require you to actually understand how to use the power. It's a high-risk high-reward thing. On the other hand, there are killers that are much easier to play and don't require huge reflexes or deep knowledge to perform adequately, and thus are less lethal, but they can eventually secure a hit.

    The best way to showcase this is to compare Huntress with Trickster. Both are killers that play similarly by throwing a projectile that can damage survivors, but Huntress is harder to use — her windup is slower, you slow down while charging the hatchet, you have to lead your shot for longer ranges, and she has a massive terror radius/lullaby to content with, which makes her hard to play in indoor maps. She also has the high skill ceiling of cross map shots, but that's very map dependant. Trickster does almost the same thing, but he sacrifices range and lethality by having a power that's much easier to hit because you throw like 60 projectiles at the survivor, meaning you can miss a lot and eventually get a health state. His windup is faster, his projectiles are faster, and that makes him easier to use… and less lethal.

    Skull Merchant is very in line with this idea. She has a mix of stealth and traps, but she has compromises and advantages compared to similar killers. For example, she can't go full on invisible and move faster like Wraith, but she has some tracking built into her kit and has Undetectable on demand. She can't teleport across the map like Hag, but survivors still generally want to avoid or disarm her traps, which wastes their time. And she doesn't have the lethality of Trapper or Hag when a trap is activated, but she can place them wherever she wants and more easily force survivors to be tagged by them, unlike Trapper that needs to be surgical with his trap placement or Hag that has to quickly decide when to teleport to a trap since she can only go to the most recently triggered trap and also has to constantly maintain a web of traps.

    In short, her design makes sense. It's not bad, it's totally in line with how other killers are designed. She's easy to use, there's some room for more advanced stuff here and there, but her skill ceiling is relatively low.

    You say her gameplay is just "place drone, survivor leaves loop, place drone, survivor leaves loop, place drone on corner of the map, they get hit", but that simplification can be applied to every single killer. Perhaps you're just a bit jaded on how the game works because you understand the gameplay loop very well on both sides and having a killer that more or less follows conventions we've already had for a long time doesn't do much to engage you.

    But now to switch back from being devil's advocate, I just find Skull Merchant overall very uninspired, which I imagine is one of the reasons you're also so uninterested in her. She feels like a mix-and-match of previous killer and didn't really come into her own thing, and that's one of the reasons she feels very same-y to me, and I guess to you too. MY problem with her is to for all the compromises she has compared to other killers, she's lacking a single thing she can do better than the others. For example, I feel like they could have really leaned into making her a tracking/anti-stealth god, but distinct from Doctor by having her own elements of stealth. But they leaned into making her power chase-oriented and the tracking part barely comes into play. She's fine, she works, but she lacks an identity.

    I imagine that like you, I prefer more mechanically demanding killers, where the moment to moment decision making takes more mechanical skill — like actually having to aim and hit an ability that can be dodged by the survivor, for example.

    THIS is precisely why I totally get you liking Wesker and Blight so much when they came out. Because you had to engage with loops differently, you don't just hold forward and double back every now and then, you could apply their power in different ways to get new openings, force mistakes, and get hits that weren't possible with other killers. THAT is why they were so fun.

    But we can't forget that aesthetic also plays a large roll in liking a killer or not for most people. For example I really like Sadako as a scary stealth killer. She's not very lethal and also has elements borrowed from other killers, but I feel like she came into her own. For me that's enough, I like stealth killers! Ghostface is another more extreme example, because he has the best stealth power in the game and CAN be very lethal, but in chase and movement he has nothing else. They leaned into his "thing" and that's what I wanted from Skull Merchant.

    Instead, she feels like Freddy to me. A bunch of random elements put together to try and form a killer kit, but that doesn't feel unique enough. And that is a completely subjetive opinion of mine, totally separete from how I think her design compares to other killers.

    She's fine. She works. Some people may really like her. But for me, something was missing — something subjetive. Personally, I would have preferred if they leaned into making her a tracking god with elements of stealth (like Doctor but with stealth) instead of making her power chase oriented. I don't mind a killer not being for me as long as they fulfill a fantasy — a different way to play, a niche, an identity.

    But again, being as objetive as I can be, I think her design is fine for how killers are designed in general, which is the point I think pixel is trying to make — he just happens to like her on a subjetive level too. But to me (and Scott) she lacks identity and feels uninspired, which is more subjetive to our tastes in aesthetic and game design.

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  9. Not sure if people forget or just have a different opinion but I think Knight 3-gen was far worse then Skull Merchant. He was delaying games until the servers shut down long before Skull Merchant was a thing. Having the gen-kick meta just made things SO much worse that Skull Merchant doesn't seem so bad to me compared to that.

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  10. I feel like we can “hypothetically” all we want but realistically no one is going to crouch in a chase no matter the circumstances because that just not what anyone is going to do. Like yes I theoretically could crouch over pyramid heads trails to avoid getting tormented, but then I just get hit anyway. Plus running urban evasion completely negates their argument, crouch walking loses you so much distance it’s not even funny.
    Also when most people agree that something sucks, it sucks.

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  19. Objective speaks to a facet that is regardless of any subjects perception.

    You can perceive anything incorrectly as a subject but if objectively you are 100 ft off the ground, jumping from that height will have consequences congruent with that fact.
    It doesn't matter that you subjectively view it as only 12 ft.

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  20. I think the skill expression is the issue here.

    You also don't like Trapper's skill expression. You overly focus on chase but most if not all of the Trapper's expression of skill occurs PRIOR to a chase.

    And IF the survivors get caught in a trap it during a chase and it feels unfair to them it's because they overly focused on the chase. There are absolutely counter plays to the Trapper that a survivor had to have ignored either as a team or individual in order to get caught in.

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  24. I think you were both sort of confusing “objective” with “majority consensus” here. If something is objective it’s based in observable, measurable facts and statistics, it has nothing to do with opinions at all. It’s the analysis or interpretation of the data that’s subjective.

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