We need to talk about Skull Merchant
Today, Team Eternal - the top comp team in the game - played against a P100 Skull Merchant streamer, who I won't name, who camped a 3-gen from the start of the match on Torment Creek. The entire match lasted 50 minutes, and only through perfect coordination were Eternal able to break the 3-gen. If it takes almost enough time for the game to end for the best team in the world to break a 3-gen, what's the average pub solo Q team expected to do?
There is absolutely no excuse for this killer to continue to exist in her current configuration. She needs to be killswitched until something better can be made of her.
EDIT: This game also showcased a critical design flaw with Overcharge, that was never removed when the perk was nerfed: the perk still guarantees a skill check, which regresses 15% of the generator if it is failed. Team Eternal - the best team in the world - failed the skill check numerous times. An infinitely recharging difficult skill check that regresses 15% of a generator shouldn't exist, and is just as problematic as old Call of Brine and old Overcharge were for the game. The skill check either needs to have a hefty cooldown attached to it, or be significantly easier to hit (I'm talking 2x the current size). As it stands, Overcharge is much stronger than Call of Brine, and Call of Brine is just a much worse version of Surveillance.
Comments
Yeah, it wouldn't have.
Welcome to DBD, you must be new here. The 3-gen issue people are talking about is where a killer identifies a 3-gen from the start and then proceeds to play only to keep the survivors from holding those three gens.
If Eternal had focused on those three gens first, the match would only have been slightly different in sequence, not overall play.
I agree with you. I really didnt think about that but it is true. If they did killswitch a killer who isn't bugged/broken it would create a precedent that if enough ppl whine loud enough about something they can get it removed from the game for a long time till that thing is reworked. Honestly, I love to know the numbers behind SM, her pickrate, and what % of matches on a daily basis ppl even go against SM. I bet it's not as high as a lot of these ppl want you to believe. I also like to see match lengths.
Also I bet the amount of games that actually get close to the 1 hour mark are very small too
I can only speak for myself but I have seen maybe 5 SM since her launch and none of them even reached the 30min mark. They was normal length matches.
This is precisely why they put that in the EULA. Otherwise, people like you would ask for refunds every single time they change something in game.
I never said it was easy in fact I said the exact opposite more than once. Jesus dude read the post before you reply to it.
I have no point to prove beyond suggesting what’s worked for me and others when facing a 3 gen SM.
There are now reddit posts popping up about what I’ve been talking about.
Some people look for solutions some just piss and moan about problems.
SM needs tweaks to prevent games dragging out for ages but until that happens I’ll approach her in the manner discussed and take the best shot at beating her.
I’ll leave the pissing and moaning about it to rest of this thread, that’s all it’s good for.
Never understood why she was introduced in the first place. A killer with the only power to hold a 3 gen. Doing exactly that.
You know what? I thought about it a bit more and I would like to amend my earlier statement about how it wouldn't have made a difference. It would have made a difference.
But not to Team Eternal's benefit.
If the killer is going to be patrolling the 3-gen the entire match in the express hopes of keeping those three from being completed within 60 minutes, then they're not going to be chasing, downing and hooking. Knowing this, Team Eternal got the first four gens out of the way completely uncontested.
If they'd broken the 3-gen first, still taking upwards of 40 minutes to do so, they'd either be doing the remaining four gens while Skull Merchant is actually being a threat to them, or they'd get stuck with a new 3-gen for her to hold.
So basically, tackling the 3-gen first would've been the worse option either way.
Just to add: SM didn't have a 3 gen in that match, they had an easy 4 gen. If Eternal had broken the 3 gen first. The SM player could have just switched to that without much of a change. Even if they had the other gens 99'ed, not having the other gens done just gives SM more chances for downs/stalling.
Regardless, the match still would have gone on just as long.
DBD players really think giving someone a product and making them pay real money for it then taking it away without warning is a morally correct and justified thing lol
Its more like me telling you as someone with an insane amount of playtime and experience with her "Hey there's a plethora of alternative playstyles she has that are fun and effective" then you saying "NO YOURE WRONG SHE CAN ONLY DEFEND GENS SHES HORRIBLE AT EVERYTHING ELSE!!!!" Like okay you clearly didn't play her, experiment with her, or take time to actually learn her kit that is a problem on you not Skull Merchant
I can only assume you're trolling at this point, but I'll try again.
The Skull Merchant has drones on the 3 gens in question. Her power tells her there are no survivors in that area at the start. That means she can patrol the rest of the map. This is not indicative of an opportunity to break the 3 gen. She's only patrolling there because she knows survivors aren't trying to break the 3 gen in the first place.
Eternal even did one of the problem gens. It was a 4 gen near main. Then the killer moved to defending the 3 gen when survivors started pushing it.
It doesn't matter at what point in the game you try to break 3 gen if that is the killer's entire strategy. If they try to break the 3 gen early, they spend the exact same amount of time doing it with the loadouts they had. If you have 3 marbles in a box and close the lid, you still have 3 marbles in the box. And no, they couldn't do it with the one Potential Energy because they needed all 4 survivors there to tank hits or keep Overcharge from killing the gens.
I was wondering about this myself. If I remember they even talked at the end about not facing her enough to have an experienced strategy. Though I also wondered how it might go on an indoor map or area where they didn't have constant eyes on the killer.
Skull Merchant doesn't have some magical skill ceiling that only you have reached. She's a mechanically limited killer. Just the same way Trapper doesn't have some magical skill ceiling. In fact, I would argue Trapper has a higher skill ceiling than SM. At least, with Trapper you can hide some traps in very unexpected spots where survivors wouldn't expect them. No such thing on SM. There are no cracked mechanical plays that will turn Trapper into an S-tier killer, just the same way, there is no cracked plays that will turn SM into a good killer outside of her 3-gen potential. You don't need to put 3k hours into the killer to understand her. I would argue a player on DBD with enough experience could have seen the problem with SM before even playing her, or before her release, and a lot of people DID, just by understanding what her power can do.
With all that said, I've put enough time into SM to try different playstyles. Her only efficient one is 3-gen. You might get lucky with running a meme setup and having the stars align and everything happens how it's supposed to, but that's gonna be a one in a 100 game. To be consistent, you HAVE to play 3-gen, and that's it. It's boring, and it's stupid.
Do you realize how impossible it would be to balance the game without this? We would still have old MoM, old legion, old Freddy, old ruin, old dying light and so on and so forth.
Also there was a warning. You agreed to the EULA, where this is clearly written. The EULA is presented to you in full when you first start the game, so you can read it. If you don't like it you shouldn't have agreed to it.
Arguing that a killer having to kick a generator 42 times @2.5% to get a full generators to regress from 100% to 0% is dangerous?
I can't tell if serious. I could play for hours and not get 42 generator kicks.
just went up against a SM who refused to hook players and camped 4 gens. Game lasted over 40 minutes. How can ppl have fun playing like this? 😐️
I'm not trolling.
I know how skull merchant works I've put forward some genuine suggestions I would try to beat the 3 gen.
I'm not saying doesn't need to be reworked because clearly it does.
People are welcome to apply what I've suggested or not. But I think we can all agree that if you are complaining on the forums them you must have tried every suggestion to beat this strategy.
There are reddit threads about what people are trying and they mirror some of the comments I've made here. People have had some success mainly as SWF because it requires that coordination but its possible.
I realize generally there are two types of people in this world... those that seek solutions to problems and those that just complain without trying anything to change the scenario. I make no assumptions about what category any of the posters may personally fall into but I know which one I fall into, ask yourself which do you fall into?
Half the challenge is beating the seemingly unbeatable. That's what everyone is going to have to do till they patch it out.
Let me tell you anyone who sits down and working within the games rules and mechanics finds a near unbeatable strategy, is welcome to apply that strategy for as long as it works. Kudos to them.
We as community need to start doing something
And this something is just refusing to play against any SM
just killing ourselves on first hook is the right answer
They are not gonna do anything unless they see a gigantic spike on kills for her
Eternal only missed skillchecks because of skull merchant's addon that mutes the skillcheck warning.
Doesn't change the fsct that Overcharge is bad design in the same way OG Ruin was.
Punishes new players to the point they have no hope of winning whilst not affecting veterans except in extenuating circumstances.
Fart Merchant just has to go. Knight is already a pain in the butt, but she is just so so unbelievable boring and annoying. I'd go against 100 sweat Nurses, Blights or Weskers than being trapped in a game with Dull Merchant.
Doesn’t matter if it’s the “best comp team in the world” , there are so many expert players who’ve played for years who aren’t interested in comp, and the same happens to them. The three gen is so narrowly achievable.
she needs a complete overhaul rework, the biggest nerf to her drones or just plain removal.
I just KMS whenever I hear SM’s chase music.
I don't disagree that the skill check could be bad design, but I think the 'always available' aspect has become the main problem. They could always tweak the skill check to be slightly larger, or to never appear before 6 o'clock, or even nerf the regression chunk it takes for missing, but it wouldn't change that OC has effectively infinite uses.
I think the days of 'it's not worth kicking gens' are dead and gone, sadly, and gen regression perks in modern dbd generally all need to have actual activation conditions, cooldowns, or charges. Pop is healthy because it triggers on hook and hold one charge. So if Overcharge did something similar you'd only get at most a dozen of them a match. These one hour games pretty much prove that even decent gen regression can be exploitable if it has infinite uses. And, like pain res, with limited uses they might be able to have the regression buffed again.
I kind of chalk it up to the 'Eruption effect', where being incapacitated wasn't nearly as much of a problem when you only saw the perk incredibly rarely for adepts and such before it's buff, but when everyone decided to run it in every game and (more specifically) focus on only applying the perk every 10 seconds at the expense of actual game play, then it's abuse becomes problematic and game breaking.
I still agree with the thread that SM is just designed to be too good at holding games hostage and is the primary problem here.