Debunking Skull Merchant's Common Complaints
There are a lot of things people like to say about Skull Merchant, and maddeningly, quite a lot of what's said is factually wrong, and even some of the stuff that isn't can be kind of misleading or misrepresented. This post isn't necessarily geared towards convincing you to like Skull Merchant, or even to stop hating her, but rather to try and make it so the discourse surrounding her is at least honest.
Fat chance, I'm aware, but maybe I'll convince some people.
I'm going to list some of the common complaints I see about Skull Merchant, and tackle each one in turn to explain why I think they aren't helpful and should probably be, like, retired. And not used anymore. Please?
1: "She takes no skill" / "She has no skill expression"
We'll start off with a pretty easy one. There are generally two things happening behind this statement, and both of them are things worth addressing. The first is that most people generally tend to not acknowledge the skill expression her kit does have, and that's typically because they don't even know it exists, so we'll start with that.
The Skull Merchant's skill expression comes in a few areas. General drone placement is important, largely for hiding them as traps but also because the nature of how they work means improper placement within a loop can make them useless, depending on what the loop in question is. There's also what some refer to as "lasertagging", which involves timing and aiming your drone placement mid-chase just right so you can instantly tag someone with a stack of Lock On as soon as the drone initialises and the beams come online.
Manually rotating the beams is a skill-expressive element of her kit as well, albeit to a lesser extent. It's also worth mentioning that she's still fundamentally an M1 killer, and you need to know how to do default M1 chases to play her well.
None of this is to convince you that Skull Merchant is cool and awesome and you should enjoy playing her. It's just to remind you that the initial statement - "she has no skill expression" - is factually false. If you mean that you don't find her skill expression compelling, you should say that instead.
The second thing happening behind this complaint is something that we're going to tackle in the next header, but it's ignoring everything a killer is capable of because they have one kind of cheesy strat they can use. This happens with other killers too, and it's just as silly there as it is here - you might as well just talk about the thing you don't like, without trying to act like there's nothing else possible for the killer to do.
2: "All she does is drop a drone at a loop and force you to leave"
I actually debated putting this one on the list, because to be fair, this strategy is annoying. I'm mostly including it because it was relevant to the previous point, but there is one thing to say about it beyond just pointing out it's not all she does.
Mostly, it is worth mentioning that she's the least offensive of the three killers that can do this. Unlike Artist and Knight, this strategy doesn't work at every loop and doesn't require you to run away immediately even on the loops it does work on. Still, it is annoying, so I'm not necessarily defending it.
I've also seen some people say that running away from the loop means you get hit straight away, unlike Knight and Artist, but, uh. I don't see how that could be true, let alone how to argue against it. If she's close enough to hit you like that, she was hitting you either way, idk what that complaint is on about. Maybe I just don't understand the complaint properly?
3: "She's uninteractive" / "She has no counterplay"
These two get to be part of the same header because they're inherently linked. There is actually quite a bit of interaction when it comes to the Skull Merchant's kit, and that comes as a direct consequence of the counterplay that she does, in fact, have. Note again that this is not an attempt to convince you that you should be having fun playing against her.
So, how do you counter Skull Merchant? This isn't an in-depth guide on that particular topic, so I'll try and keep it a little more light, but there are generally two elements to SM's counterplay: In chase, and out of chase.
In chase, the way the drone's beams work is crucial to her counterplay, and the interaction that comes from it comes from positioning yourself so the beams are blocked as much of the time as possible, and crouching/standing still to avoid the beams when you would otherwise be scanned by them. Sometimes you'll see some people saying you can't do that in chase, but you obviously can, people duck and crouch in chase all the time. It really depends on the length of the loop and how far away the killer is, and you'll forgive me if I don't find the concept of a killer's counterplay being nuanced and having a skill curve to be particularly compelling evidence towards that killer being uninteractive.
Briefly, I want to also touch on the idea that sometimes, when you crouch to dodge a beam, you get hit with an M1 instead. Again, briefly: Yeah, that's countering her. Forcing a killer like Bubba to M1 you at windows is part of his counterplay, because taking an injury to deny a better effect from the killer's power is not all that uncommon in this game. It applies to them, it applies to Skull Merchant.
Then we move on to out of chase counterplay, which revolves around knowing which drones to hack and when to hack them. If it's hovering over a generator, you'd ignore it, but if it's in a loop you think might be high traffic in the foreseeable future, you'd go hack it and reap the rewards when a teammate is chased there and SM has to replace the drone instead of benefiting from it. A direct benefit, as a reward for interacting with her power, or… counterplay.
Again, none of this is to say it can't be improved or that you have to enjoy it. I'm debunking a specific complaint here.
4: "Her kit is bloated" / "She has too many status effects"
I'll come out straight and acknowledge something: This is the most subjective thing on the list, but I do feel strongly enough in my reasoning to still make a case against it.
So, the reason I think this particular complaint is really misleading is the fact that it misses a very crucial detail: Her kit doesn't do much else.
The only things her kit does that aren't related to a status effect are the tracking on her radar and the fact that she can push survivors into interacting with a map prop, everything else comes from a status effect. This is different to other killers (especially ones closer to her in how recently they were released), who may get a few status effects, but get some of the value in their kit from more baked-in mechanics as well. Take Wesker, for example: he and Skull Merchant do a comparable amount of things, after all. He and SM both have:
- A way of speeding themselves up
- A way of slowing the survivors down
- A way of injuring survivors
- A way of applying Deep Wound
- A way of tracking survivors
- A map prop survivors interact with as part of the counterplay
The only thing Merchant has basekit that Wesker doesn't is stealth, outside of that they do a similar number of things. The difference is that Wesker's comes from a mix of baked-in mechanics and status effects, and Merchant's is almost exclusively status effects.
Please don't reply to this to say you think Wesker is better designed, that's not the argument being made and you'd just be proving my point. If you're okay with that NUMBER of effects on Wesker, your problem with Merchant can't be the NUMBER of effects she has.
5: "She gets all her status effects just for pushing a button"
No she doesn't. She gets Undetectable for pushing a button, everything else comes from scanning survivors.
This is relevant because two very important things are true about the spread of Skull Merchant's effects. One, they're staggered, they don't all happen at once. Two, survivors being scanned is something that both sides are putting effort and skill into playing around; the killer wants it to happen, the survivor wants to avoid it.
This point mostly just loops back around to the arguments in the counterplay header, but it's a separate complaint so it gets its own header.
6: "She gets passive, unpredictable Haste"
The Skull Merchant's Haste effect is both not passive, and is very predictable. It only happens when someone is shown on her scanner, and it happens for twelve seconds after a single scan. This is information the survivor players do have access to, though I'll grant the duration is only something you'd know if you look it up.
(As an aside, I would very much like to see that duration conveyed to the survivors via their Lock On stack counter turning red while they're shown on the scanner, to address that.)
The only reason this effect would be passive is if someone's tripping drones outside of chase, which is almost always avoidable and the result of skilled placement when it isn't, which would make it not passive in the latter case. Being rewarded for survivor mistakes you can't rely on or force is not a passive effect.
7: "She's still the best at 3-genning" / "3-genning wasn't fixed"
This one doesn't pop up as much because I think most people kind of understand why it isn't true? But for the sake of completionism I might as well address it here as well.
The argument you see in favour of this complaint typically revolves around arguing that Merchant can set up her drones near generators, and survivors will get scanned when she comes to harass them away from that generator, building up towards a Claw Trap. The problem with this is… well, there are a few problems:
- This isn't actually guaranteed to happen. A survivor running away from a generator MIGHT get scanned on their way out, but they equally might not.
- This means Skull Merchant has to approach and leave the same generator three separate times before she even gets an injury, let alone a down. During this time, the other two generators are free to be repaired with no risk.
- Most importantly, other killers can make that initial approach, the time where Skull Merchant has to be content with a single scan, actually immediately threatening. They get objectively more reward for the same patrol pattern.
These things combined reveal that the situation being described is exactly why Merchant's 3-genning isn't still a problem. She is now at best on par with every other killer- which isn't to say that 3-genning isn't still useful, because it is, for every killer. She's just in a position where her power barely adds anything to the tactic anymore, let alone stall games out for fifty minutes like it used to.
8: "She has the best stealth in the game" / "Her stealth has no tell"
This is another slightly more subjective one, but I think one of the things people need to remember here is that her stealth is balanced with a short timer, not a tell. Every time someone lists a group of killers who have Undetectable but a tell, it's always the killers who have permanent stealth until some action is taken, whereas Skull Merchant's is on a timer.
…Also Dredge is on the list sometimes, but its stealth just sucks in general.
I'm not necessarily saying there's no argument to be had about whether or not that's a fair way of balancing stealth, but the fact that nobody is ever making that argument means the actual complaint made belongs on this list.
—As we close out the list here, I'm going to repeat an important caveat: This list is NOT evidence that there are absolutely no problems worth discussing with the Skull Merchant, nor is it meant to convince you that you should love and adore her. Keep hating her all you want, the point of this list is to at least try and make the discourse surrounding this killer more rooted in the actual, observable power she actually has in the actual game, rather than the misconceptions constantly passed around.In fact, as a show of good faith, I'm going to acknowledge a flaw I think this killer does actually have: I think the amount to which her drones can overlap is honestly a big problem, especially on indoor maps. That's a legitimate problem I'd like to see fixed, but to loop back to the point of this list… how often does that come up? Sometimes, but it's not one of the big and most common complaints, right?We can criticise and provide feedback for a killer while still being honest and fair about them, and that's what I'm trying to achieve here.
Comments
Fully agreed! It would be fantastic if that were the argument people were making.
Of course, it isn't the argument people make. Hence it not being on this list.
Personally I would probably add footsteps discernable within ~12m and that buzzing sound she gets when undetectable should be audible either in a big area or global and see where it goes from there but that might be all it needs or even a bit less
I'm less interested in really exploring the nuances of that discussion now, and more interested in pointing out that the common version of that complaint is missing an extremely key element of the discussion.
After all, this is a post of responses to common complaints.
Great write up! I have zero problems with SM. Love her as part of the greater Killer roster. Also, games against her (imo) actually feel “Most Dangerous ‘Gamey’”. Running from loop to loop against her feels thrilling and exciting. I personally cannot complain about her.
Especially when she locks the whole map down with drones, it feels like an infiltration horror movie.
She takes the barest amount of skill. Really more game experience than anything. Just gotta know to put Drone's in loops and on gens and you'll win 99/100 times.
She does take away Survivor skill. That's literally her entire kit. If she places a drone, which she will, you HAVE to leave the loop or get hit. That's removing the most skillful thing about Survivor, looping. God forbid you actually try to loop her since she can be faster and not have a tell. Couple that with Hindered and random Undetectable without warning and you have a Killer that specializes in making things as unskillful as possible.
She gets plenty of value against all but the best coordinated Survivors.
Hyperbole or not, it's still correct.
Low skill-floor but high-value is a problem. SM has nearly zero skill expression, certainly none related to her power, and the riveting counterplay of, "Delay the hit by 5 seconds by leaving the loop when she puts down a Drone or else you just die"
Even BL3 falters against some pallets and you are forced to break them. SM, and Knight, will keep forcing you to new loops and you'll be forced to play the same counterplay over and over again. At least Knight has his Banner. With SM, even if she places a Drone at Shack and can't get you, you still get Hindered and she gets Haste, so you get zero distance.
Not sure why you just ignore her issues simply because you play her a lot. I play Knight a lot but I fully recognize that he sucks ass to play against and that the game would be better if he were re-designed. Enjoying a character doesn't mean you can't think they are fundamentally flawed.
The problem you keep running into here is that you keep conflating one possible thing she can do with her entire kit. I think you're also overblowing that one thing - there are three killers who can do the "drop stuff at a loop, force survivors to run" thing and she's the least problematic of the three - but even if you aren't, that's not the whole killer.
The most you could conclude from this argument - YOUR argument, not mine - is that the one thing you're describing desperately needs to be fixed. It's NOT grounds to conclude that the whole killer needs to be redesigned, or tossed out, or that she has no skill expression, etcetera etcetera, because what you're describing is not her whole kit, it's one specific tactic she can do.
To say that she has "nearly zero skill expression, certainly none related to her power" because of one thing she CAN do but does not NEED to do is massively reductive for no benefit.
I've made my points, you've done the same thing since the first comment and have stuck your head in the sand, but it's not my responsibility nor goal to convince you.
I feel I've accurately conveyed my argument in the best way possible to show other people why they should not tolerate such lackluster Killer design.
All this to say, I'm out lol
Your bias is so massive, it's punching through the roof. I can't take this seriously at all.
I can justify that if you want. I'll even also say that it honestly doesn't even matter, it's a problem for all three and should be fixed somehow for all three.
But, if we want to go down that route, I don't think those three killers are on equal footing when it comes to how problematic the strat is.
There's only a fine line between "massive bias" and "having actually thought about the topic and having a more substantial take on it".
Skull Merchant is an affront to game design.
There's nothing particularly skillful about following a survivor to a loop, tapping M2, and profiting — which is how 99.9% of SMs play. Her having the ability to do some interesting things like hiding drones or lasertagging is moot, because the majority of players will take the path of least resistance to win and this so-called "skill expression" will never see the light of day.
As long as you acknowledge her kit has skill expression, then you're not falling afoul of that point in this post.
People starting from that more honest and accurate position would definitely elevate the state of discourse to the point where conversations can actually happen, but then again, most people would still be starting with that emotionally-driven comment up at the start of your post, I suppose…
This is what always gets me. If the majority of people are coming to the same conclusion and saying this same thing then maybe they have a point?
Mostly the issue there is that it isn't really a majority, it's just a common sentiment. Also, there are a lot of common sentiments that aren't actually accurate, the appeal to majority is a fallacy for a reason.
Like, this post exists for a reason. I got up to eight common complaints that were wrong in some way, seven if you discount the second one that mostly exists to support the first. Those things that people are saying absolutely do not have a point, hence the post existing. Yet, they're still common.
just when i think I'm out, you pull me right back in…
Just because you believe complaints to be wrong doesn't ACTUALLY make them wrong. You haven't proven anything and clearly, people disagree with your ideas.
I might re-evaluate.
Yeah, I mean, that's what the post is for. Laying out the reasons why they're wrong.
Like, that's the proof. The stuff I wrote. In the post you're responding to.
You're welcome to disagree, but outside of doggedly refusing to acknowledge the difference between a killer being able to do a thing and that thing being, quote, "literally her entire kit", you've not exactly supported that disagreement with anything substantial.
Wrong according to you.
Which I laid out two thousand words worth of reasoning for.
I'm not just saying "it's wrong because I say so". I did actually go to the lengths of explaining my position.
You probably said it better than me, but yeah. Most of the anger towards Skull Merchant is 1) entitlement, and 2) blissful ignorance. They don't want to have to strategize, not 3-gen themselves, actually learning about her power, paying attention to how fast she's moving or if she's undetectable, etc. There are also many who did put in the time and effort to learn her original release form, and now just rage quit out of entitlement, not knowing that she's not even the same killer. "What? She can't expose me with the drones now?" No. That's what the constant balance updates are for. The other practical gameplay scenarios you mentioned are also sound advice. Like really? She can just put a drone down at every loop, or 3-gen from the start, and automatically beat you that way? No. People would kill to have it that easy as killer.
Literally nothing you wrote is proof. Obviously you see it as 100% fact, but not many other people do.
It comes off as just ignoring criticism by saying, "I already disproved that, because I think what I'm saying is right."
You are the one making a claim here. The burden of proof falls to you and most of us are unsatisfied with the arguments you've presented. Most are opinion, but a couple are just outright wrong.
So, just to be clear: I'm not saying "I already disproved that because I think what I'm saying is right". I'm directing you to the fact that I've already laid out a response to the thing you're saying. It's not that I'm saying it's 100% fact, it's that those are my reasonings and you're not actually responding to them.
You haven't added anything to this discussion. You're just repeating the claims I made this post to counter. You're acting like all there is to her is zoning out survivors with mid-chase drones, and ignoring any attempt I make at pointing out that this isn't true. You even tried to duck out of the conversation entirely when I confronted you on that directly.
I am more than open to debating my points. That just requires acknowledging my points and trying to counter them. You think some of the arguments I laid out are outright wrong? Make that case! I'm more than down for discussing it. You just aren't doing that.
I stopped at "The Skull Merchant's skill expression comes in a few areas"
Yeah, not wasting my time with this one
So why waste both our time by commenting?
Not wasting anymore
See ya
You CAN play Sniper Knight. You could have played non condemned Sadako.
That doesn't mean that the playstyles that 99% of players used are suddenly okay. Sure, if some people don't do that, it's nice. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter if there are other options if nobody uses them.
I Just think that killer is absolute boring and she got everything just pressing a button and wait, no skill, boring, terrible counterplayer, i never play against her and i will give up instantly, i dont need stay where im playing boring. If this happen. Its a company problem and BHVR needs understand why this product make people stop to play. SM is an issue. If u disagree. OK. Its my opinion and i dont change my mind
You have done exactly the same when people showed you why the skill ceiling with SM is so low and the argument of her requiring very few skill is true to a lot of people. You just refuse to acknowledge that she requires by many orders of magnitude very low skill in order to get results effectively.
You just repeat your point like its 100% fact when way more people have showed you why its not. Hell I even played some skull merchant after pixelbushs guide to discover her apparent skill ceiling, she is still one if not the easiest killer to master.
Because all the macro she requires all killer need to master too, so its not intrinsic to her, her techs are minimal and incredibly easy to master at that, using drones at an elevation to allow double floor scans just requires you to know its possible and be able to click m2, laser tagging is just as easy too.
And looping with her is just place drone at a loop and either go after them when they leave or continue looping until they get slowed and its a free down or they crouch and stand still and you get m1s.
You did not place a drone at a loop? How you are using m1 gameplay, which is not exclusive to SM and any m1 killer does. You are using her drones in the entrance to main building or inbetween chain tiles for clutch scans? Wow you needed to know where to places are and press m2, how difficult.
You complain people who undermine SM do not listen to your arguments however you yourself are incapable of accepting an argument that does not support your previous views.
It doesn't, no. This particular reply, in isolation, is completely correct.
What it doesn't do is support the rest of your arguments in this thread. Like I said to you before, the most you can conclude here is that the loop-zoning strategy needs to be fixed. It doesn't support the argument that it's "literally her entire kit", it doesn't support the argument that she should be deleted from the game, it doesn't support the argument that she's a failure, or any of the other things you and others say about her regularly. It just means there's a problem.
Like I said to you before, you're acting like there being one problem means the entire rest of the power no longer exists. It's an irrational starting position that poisons all discourse, and actively obfuscates any chance of meaningful, useful feedback.
Right, so, things have started drifting off course and I'll try to bring them back on track.
There are a few different positions all being smushed together here, which to be fair is pretty easy to do. For the record, I would never claim that Skull Merchant is not a killer with a low skill floor, nor would I pretend that she's up there with the hardest killers to master. She has a low skill floor, and most of her skill ceiling is tactical rather than mechanical. This is a perfectly fine thing to say in isolation, and I agree with it- she's basically in line with killers like Clown and Legion, neither of whom are mechanically difficult to play and mostly revolve around macro strats and specific positioning of power usage (in Clown's case) as you get to higher level play.
The problem is, people warp that position into something else. They warp it into saying that she gets massive value for extremely little effort, which isn't true. The skill floor is low, but the rewards for the low-skill plays are proportionately low. Not exactly where they should be, mind, but the whole "drop something at a loop and force survivors to run away" thing doesn't exactly win games against halfway decent survivors no matter which killer does it, and that's the only thing that gives disproportionate reward. It's a problem, but not because it's OP.
So, yes, I will "refuse" to acknowledge that she gets massive results for little effort, because that isn't true. The second that survivors understand how her power works - and I will acknowledge that isn't as likely to happen as it should be because of her reputation - even dropping stuff at a loop to zone gets less effective. I am more than happy to support that statement with further arguments if there's actually interest in hearing me out, instead of just shutting down the mere idea of discussing this by stubbornly repeating the core claim back at me as though I haven't been trying to argue against it this entire time.