Skull Merchant - What’s going on with her?
How is Dead by Daylight supposed to pretend The Skull Merchant is balanced when she literally has almost no map control anymore AND barely even has a chase power?
Her drones do almost nothing unless survivors mess up badly, survivors can disable them constantly, and half the time her “power” feels like it doesn’t even exist in chase. Meanwhile killers like Michael Myers can insta-down people with giant lunges and snowball entire games off one power activation. Other killers get teleports, anti-loop, mobility, pressure, or guaranteed hits. Skull Merchant gets… information that barely matters and weak hinder effects.
How is it fair that some killers can end chases in seconds while Skull Merchant has to play like an M1 killer with extra steps? No real mobility, weak pressure, weak anti-loop, and almost no reward for setting up drones. At this point she honestly feels like one of the weakest killers in the game.
The craziest part is people STILL act like she’s overpowered because of old versions of her, even though current Skull Merchant feels completely gutted.
Comments
I didn't enjoy playing against her before, I still dont like to play against her now.
I am biased but I dont particularly enjoy undetectable killers simply because I like to multitask.
Skull Merchants reputation is damaged beyond repair IMO. She was never too strong, she had one very boring playstyle and thats it. But she is a good example of why weak Killers can also be incredibly unfun to go against.
The problem is that her general Kit is not really fixable IMO. The Devs tried it by removing her 3-Gen potential by just slapping on a bunch of status effects on her, but I dont think that this made her any more exciting to play or more bearable to go against. And the current state is her just being weak, because the Devs dont know what to do with her.
They thought about reworking her and making her Drones projectiles, but this was also not received positive either. I am not a big fan of Reworks (e.g. Myers, since you mention him, one of the worst Reworks in the games existence) but I feel that Skull Merchant needs a rework, because her power is not really fixable. I think the most boring aspect is that there is not really Killer/Survivor-Interaction, the only action which happens is between the players and her drones.
One thing she did have going was temporary stealth activation. Thats been nerfed now too with the new activation requirement being look away from the chase to remove a placed drone somewhere that couldve clipped somebody at some point. She was alredy gutted at the time but then they had to go and make the one thing i did like about her - more tedious and less convenient.
the devs said they'll leave her be if she's actually in a good spot from her recent buffs, which obviously that wasn't the case as she's still dog water, so I really wonder of what plans are they gonna do with her, hopefully not take like 1 to 2 years
I may be totally wrong on this one, but I feel like the expectations around those awful design previews was that, somehow, they would be well received.
But since they obviously were not, as they completely deleted any identity the Skull Merchant has, she is kinda being left aimlessly. I have no doubt she would be left as she was if her strength wasn't so abysmal.
They just released an outfit for her and updated her power HUD. They might take some of the funds from the new outfit to fund the changes needed to adjust skull merchant.