bjorksnas
bjorksnas
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@Rudjohns said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3744728#Comment_3744728
When Flip Flop is useful when used by itself with no wiggle perks?
But why should you get free escapes for being downed
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@NotJared said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3745342#Comment_3745342
As I've described, breaking objects faster has no practical change in the outcome of any gameplay unless the Knight is 6 seconds' worth of travel or closer to the object he is kicking.
As a matter of fact, after ~500 hours of playing Knight, I've discovered using Carnifex to damage Generators is actually usually detrimental: The faster damage duration enables Survivors to get back on Generators faster, and Guards do not apply Gen perks when used to damage generators.
It is almost always better to actually use Jailer or Assassin to break Generators, because the 6-second damage interaction duration makes it incredibly more difficult for Survivors to stop a generator from regressing by the time you arrive: the 4.2 seconds saved with Carnifex is 0.8 seconds shy for Survivors to completely stop generator regression before you show up.
Even if one does use the Carnifex to damage a generator faster, then what? Practically, what does this accomplish in the way of downing a Survivor? The only benefit to using Carnifex to damage anything is when damaging a pallet or breakable wall that is less than 6 seconds away from The Knight, as now he may walk through it faster.
Even if you believe Carnifex shouldn't be used as a chasing Guard, he needs some reason to be used, otherwise the mere act of using him is an actively detrimental part to The Knight's kit because every other option is objectively stronger and better by every measurable statistic, especially considering now you don't have to use Carnifex to chase if you don't want to!
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3745343#Comment_3745343
This is exactly the issue. Now that you can use the Guards in any order that you want, why would you ever draw a patrol path with Carnifex? Doing so is now actively detrimental to your gameplay, so people just won't use Carnifex for chases ever again.
Carnifex should have some use in chase! Why leave an aspect in Carnifex's kit that actively hurts him?
Benefits of Using Each Guard for Patrols/In Chase Under New Changes:
Assassin: Fastest chase speed, inflicts Deep Wounds
Jailer: Now has the fastest patrol speed, largest detection radius, longest patrol time, longest chase duration, and longest banner spawn time.
Carnifex: Nothing
If players now have the option to manually select which Guard they want to use in a chase, why would anyone ever select Carnifex? He needs some benefit to being used for patrols, or else there is no reason to ever ever ever choose him.
Fast pallet breaking with minimal cooldown that can be used 24/7, which is likely the optimal chase guard to hold on standby. I don't get the issue of carnifex effectively being a utility tool more than a guard to chase survivors since they don't ONLY need to be used to chase survivors.
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disagree
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They can be manually swapped between so each one doesn't need to be more versatile anymore and can be specialized
carnifex is for breaking
assassin is for fast chases
jailer is for guarding and long chases
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They should also give him a quick interact button you shouldn't need to activate your power and draw a line to a pallet or gen thats 2 feet away
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Its been that way since release along with ~4 other bugs (the more I type the higher the number gets)
Double fatigue as I'm sure your familiar
Normal lunge out of power (either by swinging right after rushing again or right at the end of a rush before you fatigue) (While this might sound like a upside its not since you usually can't prepare for it and a random normal lunge can completely throw off a hit since you can't account for both a lunge hit and a normal lethal rush hit with the same movement and mouse movement)
Permanent Vignette, sometimes it just sticks around making visibility annoying for the entire match
Attack with no hitbox, along side the normal lunge this one can also occur if you swing too soon or too late (right after rushing or right before fatigue) where you will just have no hitbox on the attack, its goofy you can be point blank against a survivor standing still for the entire lunge + swing of the lunge and you will not hit them, its not that they are inside the hitbox there just is no hitbox
Bouncing into something to the side of you or behind you, this one is less of a bug and more of a long winded complaint about latency on blight in general, if you play blight too fast latency will be there to punish you every step of the way since the input for rushing is dependent on latency, aka if you rush bump turn then rush again before the server gets all that info you won't actually be turned in the servers eyes when you rush again and will instantly bump the wall again, if you play blight on a ptb you will notice this never happens because ptbs are peer to peer but dedicated servers can roll the dice to cripple blight by just sending them to a 120 ping server at random which they seem to love to do at odd hours or during events, sorry if dbd isn't your 9 to 5 but you getting a match or two in at 10pm you are going to the glitchy realm jimbo, have fun with a 0.12s input delay on every rush surely this won't make it a pain to loop fast and effectively
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its lack of rounding
33% increased charge usage across the 24 charges of healing = 24 * 0.67 so after you use the 16 charges for a self heal you still have 0.08 charges left for self care or 0.12 charges left for healing others
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@AmpersandUnderscore said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3743600#Comment_3743600
I've seen this mentioned in most of the threads about this perk/combo, and 'taking up two slots' has no bearing on whether something is balanced or not.
Otherwise, you're implying that BU+FtP and FB+BP nerfs were somehow unwarranted because those also took up two perk slots.
I'm basically calling its effects niche for the cost and bad so its a mediocre combo balanced out by the fact it both doesn't do much and is half your build
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Its a 2 perk combo for info and item disruption
heres my "nerf"
it takes up 2 perks slots so you only have 2 other perks to use in your build
would be an effective change
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@Bafugaboo said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3742837#Comment_3742837
and so is supporting a game where they could not do something as simplistic as shared bp for everyone playing. It makes the newer players still gain something.
I mean if you don't like how fast you progress in a game don't play it but you seem to be complaining enough as if you want the game to improve but can't just outright say what should be improved to the devs so you harass the forums in a roundabout way to get your point across. Just make a discussion then move on
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Its not a bad combination, something you might not be accounting for with this duo is that michael doesn't instant down survivors he exposes them meaning both killers can instant down while 1 is effectively undetectable and the other one is hard to track
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@Bafugaboo said:
After the event no killer is fun. New player here done with this game.
isn't the event optional?
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People know hag is good they just don't like playing hag for any number of reasons, one of them is usually that you can never default to a 115 killer if things get rough like survivors find all your traps or break your 3 gens early so you can't make a good web. The best playstyle often conflicts with most peoples average or preferred playstyles
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Unironically its a bug that happens when you play the game fast, which now stacks with the other 2 bugs he has when you play the game fast that he has had since release
the other two are sometimes its just a normal lunge if you swing too soon, like actual normal lunge no power cooldown full wasd control lunge, and the other one is there is just no hitbox if you swing too soon, you can be point blank against a survivor for the entire swing middle of your screen and just slide off them or end a swing hitting air with them right there\
but they might not killswitch it for the event duration because it doesn't look good for new players to see things disabled during a celebration and the inability to spend bp on him
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Depends on when the skill check occurs, if it occurs during the animation lock or after, this is also a problem in the base game so the real problem is the skillcheck not being consistently fast enough
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@Jeff_Jay said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3739863#Comment_3739863
This should work, BUT do you remember why people complained about STBL? None of the strongest killers used it, only M1, but still was asked to be nerfed…
That's because people are silly and don't like when their playtime with a weak killer is cut short or ends up with them losing
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@KateMain86 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3740093#Comment_3740093
They absolutely should be accounted for in game design because they influence how others will play. I'm not saying the moment you get knocked down you should be able to get back up. Oni's power lasts for a short duration. The twins can go straight to you after downing someone with victor. You don't need to leave multiple survivors on the ground for half the match for these killers to be viable. In fact most of the ones I go against never do this. Again, this falls under making excuses for the exception when the exception wouldn't even be affected by a proper anti-slug change.
As I said there is no excuse for this. No killer main will be at a disadvantage for not being able to leave multiple or even an entire team on the ground for full bleed outs. Its not "removing slugging" if you make it impossible to leave multiple survivors on the ground while refusing to hook them for several minutes.
So how would you balance this then, if 2+ survivors on the ground have 3x crows for more than 1 minute should they be able to pick themselves up then, giving the killer plenty of time and info to find the survivors and hook them, less, more, give me an idea rather than just say X bad needs a fix.
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@Caiman said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3740093#Comment_3740093
Not to mention all the times killers have to slug against their will, such as hook sabos or Boil Over on bad maps, or survivors fishing for flashlight/pallet saves, or survivors just stubbornly bodyblocking a hook, especially if they're using DS (which the survivor mains say you should counter by slugging, funnily).
Oops, sorry Mr. Killer, you gotta go in the timeout corner because you left someone on the ground longer than 30 seconds because they ran to Badham's basement every time you glimpsed them.
Yep, thats unironically why I kind of like the event as killer since most of those things just can't happen with decent timing almost every down is a hook regardless of pallet stun, sabo, bad hook layout, or flashlight, (flashbangs and ds seem to still work but hey theres something)
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People playing in bad faith shouldn't be accounted for in game design. If you find something that you can do to annoy people the entire game (because slugging isn't just a small part of it) shouldn't suddenly be changed in such a way that it affects regular people playing the game as well because of a niche situation that you ended up in with a bad actor.
Stuff like that is too broad and has too many implications on killers with it in part of their design, what does oni and the twins get if you shouldn't be slugging more than one survivor at a time
What's the point of them still having a power after downing that first survivor just instantly smite victor and drain all blood oni has.
Idk its too rare of a problem and too difficult of a fix without just ruining some aspects of the game, slugging 100% can counter survivor greed and give the killer a win if they do it without any perks backing them up and removing slugging would just be babyproofing the game for survivors to remove a niche situation.
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@CrossTheSholf said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3739867#Comment_3739867
I'd argue inherently arguing for one side to be limited without balancing the other side of the equation is "Us vs them"
This isn't arguing its a thought experiment, as much as I want to make a 2 page text post to make sure its not an "us vs them" oh wait a minute
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Two reasons
- Hitbox
The survivor running hitbox lags very far behind a survivor, its basically where your back leg is while running so while your front half may have rounded a corner your leg back there is still far back enough to get hit by the saw
2. Latency
The game just isn't 1:1 almost no online games are except ones where you literally take turns like chess. They can only receive info from your machine send it to the server, have the server interpret it, send it back to your machine, and display it so fast. Killer gets priority in this process unless they are way too laggy, just the way it is, if you have 60 ping and the killer has 60 ping (both are pretty average) your are lagging behind 0.12s on the killers screen compared to your screen which is a big enough window to make things look like they shouldn't hit.
Combine both and hits that look like they shouldn't happen, happen.
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@Eelanos said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3739875#Comment_3739875
"why cant I just kill, no find, only kill. press button, happy chemicals go vroooom"
Boy, you have 7 generators to check at the start of the match and they get reduced to 3 throughout the match. You have a perk specifically to know exactly where survivors start, another to know exactly where to go after hooking someone and another one to reveal everyone after opening a locker just in case a survivor outplayed your aura reading and you no longer know where to go. At this point, the game is playing itself. Finding someone is 50% of your job, just like sitting in front of a gen without blinking for several minutes is the survivors' "engaging gameplay" - gameplay that makes your job easy by reducing the number of places you have to search.
Honestly, do you even like the game.
I mostly play blight or a mobility killer so I can do faster patrol and more chasing. And I use an info perk like bbq to facilitate it. Also this is a counterpoint against a someone else's post using my entire counterpoint as my entire identity isn't so accurate so maybe calm down it was about how low power killers would suffer even more without info perks to guide their patrols because they are running on a short timer as it is and its not an interesting part of the game.
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@Predated said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3739875#Comment_3739875
It is part of the gameplay loop, because it gives survivor a small moment to breathe to avoid the killer and move pressure around.
A killer being able to beeline to a survivor right after hooking a survivor means that 3 survivors are always busy, be it healing, being hooked, being chased or moving somewhere to avoid being intercepted.
Especially with how popular tunneling is these days, meaning 1 survivor gets killed at 3-4 gens remaining, and then keep the gameplay loop with 3 survivors being always busy means gen progression comes to a full stop.
Thats an issue. I'm genuinely more fine with killer instinct replacing at least half the aura perks. Survivors cannot avoid it, but it also doesnt mean a killer can simply beeline to their location as its not fully accurate. It just gives a general sense.Now you are throwing too many angles into a discussion about distortion. Much harder to be tunneled with distortion so run distortion or its cousin off the record.
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@DraculaChad said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3739875#Comment_3739875
You have all gens and all exit gates revealed to you by default. You don't have to "track survivors" you just patrol generators and you will find a survivor. How do you STRUGGLE finding a survivor in a game in which if survivors are not on the gens (which again, YOU HAVE IT REVEALED BY DEFAULT) they immediatly lose?
Boy imagine how much the Killer winrate would drop if they removed the ability to see generators at all times and you'd have to actually find them like Survivors need to do.
I mean it would be silly to not show killer where their defense objective is
but this isn't about patrolling vs wandering, this is about patrolling with or without guidance
checking 1 or 2 of the wrong gens is a massive time sink that add up quickly and lose matches, no aura reading perks to guide patrolling is just asking to lose as a mid or lower tiered killer
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Ah yes the most fun part of the gameplay loop finding where survivors are by wandering around the map at 4.6m/s. Other than the fact that 9 times out of 10 they have no where near the amount of time to support that kind of playstyle.
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Its should either only recharge tokens in chase or when being hooked. Recharging out of chase usually hard counters 1/2 info perks for the entire match and lead to a 3v1 where the killer only chases the other 3 survivors because thats the only people they can find. I hate the gameplay loop it creates and how strong of a counter it is to the average build.
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@CrossTheSholf said:
Ok, survivors should only get one gen perk per build, or a toolbox
Again this isn't an us vs them this is just its own self contained idea, the opposite side of the coin of gen speed perks, vs second chance esc perks has its own discussion to be made.
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@Jeff_Jay said:
the problem here is… strong killers wouldn't be affected and the weaker killers would only become more weak. And for exemple, allow trapper to have 3/4 slowdown perks, it would become an artificial way to balance the game, because Nurse an Blight would have 1 or none at all, that would suck.
True but that has a balancing of its own, most weaker killers end up using m1 attacks while most stronger killers are dominantly m2 attacks so they both use hook perks the same but m1 killers use the m1 perks better, so if m1 perks were better than hook perks only the weaker killers so not billy, blight, and nurse (spirit might be a problem) would get the stronger m1 perks.
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Huntress, 5% movespeed when out of hatchets is silly
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@Akumakaji said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3738030#Comment_3738030
I complained a lot about FTP+Buckle Up, which was really disgusting for a two perk combo, due to the lack of any real counterplay when pulled off right. At least in this case here you can drop you item at a safe place, if you really need it for some special occasion.
Right but FTP + Buckle up wasn't info + debuff, it was instant pick up and endurance which was a chase reset that can't be countered easily. This combo you can just put an item in a corner and retrieve it later then exit the game with it and the "op op combo" does the bare minimum of a single aura read and a single oblivious effect.
If the combo was two slowdown perks that stacked perfectly then people should be up in arms but its literally just info and debuff
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I mean it would kind of be silly to complain about a 2 perk combo being good because its half your build in one combo and its info and a bit of debuff.
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@jesterkind said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3737217#Comment_3737217
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
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@Junylar said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736446#Comment_3736446
SURVIVOR, by definition, is someone who SURVIVES. So of course they do the only thing they need to - they SURVIVE. There is nothing to report here.
If they don't do gens or progress the game and hide they are holding it hostage which is against game rules, if they do this for ~10+ minutes its 100% holding the killer hostage
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@jesterkind said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3737032#Comment_3737032
Alright, let's crack into these!
1: So, this one is both not true and kind of irrelevant to the point being made. This post is a series of responses to common complaints, and the common complaint is that she doesn't have any skill expression. Not even that she doesn't need skill to win, that her kit doesn't have skill expression in it to even use if you wanted to.
I'd maybe buy that as hyperbole if so many people didn't double and triple down on it when pressed, so responding to the actual thing said is fairly important.
As for her having drastically less skill expression, or the whole "an okay skull merchant play and a great one has too small a difference to appreciate" thing, that's a little subjective, but I'd argue it's definitely not true. An okay Merchant play would be a basic trap or just trying to zone, and a skilled one would be hidden traps, perfect rotations, lasertagging, sniping through tiny gaps in the terrain… you'd immediately be able to tell the difference if you were paying attention and engaging in good faith. She's a killer with a low skill floor, but that isn't inherently a problem as long as her kit has skill expression and counterplay, which hers does.
2: Not sure what the point of this one is, I already acknowledged that dropping drones at loops is boring.
3: I laid out some of her counterplay in the post, and you'll notice not all of it revolved around hacking drones.
4: You're making my point back to me here. Remember again that this is a series of responses. If people want to have a conversation about the implementation of Skull Merchant's power effects, and they're starting from the position of acknowledging that the number isn't the problem, that'd be something- but they don't want to have that conversation. That's not the argument being made. People say her kit has too many effects, so I'm pointing out that it doesn't have more than other powers, comparatively. If they have a problem, and they don't also have that problem with a killer like Wesker, the problem can't be how many effects she has.
5: She still doesn't get her effects for the push of a button. Even if we're only looking at her dropping drones at a loop to force survivors into running away, and we're ignoring everything else, she still only gets Undetectable because the survivors are running away and denying the rest of them in most cases. If she wants to reliably get use out of all of her status effects, she has to put in a lot more effort than just pressing a button.
6: We agree on this one, so moving on.
7: This seems to hinge on her drones being AOEs that prevent traversal entirely, which, they're not. They're small rotating hazards that can be easily avoided when the killer isn't there to force you into moving at inopportune times. Skull Merchant gets less from patrolling a 3-gen than other killers when it comes to how her power interacts with it, that's just a fact.
8: Finally, we have the stealth. It seems like you're not quite acknowledging the point, which is that you can't JUST say she doesn't have an audio tell and act like that's proof her stealth is broken. This is one of the points that I wish people would have an honest conversation about, because I think there's a lot of room to discuss how fair her stealth is, overall. People don't do that, though, they just say she doesn't have an audio tell and act like that's all that needs to be said.
There's only one other killer with timed stealth, as you point out - so clearly stealth is typically not timed - and I don't think it's unfair to say he gets those other tells too because he's tiny. You're never gonna see him like you would a full size killer even without LoS blockers in some locations, and he needs LoS blockers to be much smaller than anyone else. Yet more nuance that would go into an actual discussion if anyone were inclined to have one.
Again, it bears repeating: This post is a series of responses. If you think the complaints being responded to are malformed and unhelpful, welcome to the state of Skull Merchant discourse, that's the thing I'm trying to address here.
I don't want to make another list so lets double down on the stealth
If you want a simple argument since you can't read a big one here you go
Her stealth needs a tell or downsides because all other stealth killers have a tell or downsides even the one with a similar "timer based stealth" has tells for his stealth so its a bad argument to make that be her balancing factor to her stealth since her timer is long enough to score hits and it being only 1 direct comparison is silly in a game with 3 months between characters and aren't all stealth characters, if her stealth lasted ~4s or ~5s the argument for timer based stealth would be fine but it lasts 8s to 9.6s its too much time to go without a tell
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@jesterkind said:
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.
Theres a lot to unpack here
- The skill expression might exist but its not really that much compared to other killers and the gap between an ok skill merchant play and a great one isn't visible enough to appreciate, most skull merchants can just slap down a drone at every loop and call it a day specific min max placement and rotation is a neat idea but I go entire matches without seeing anything special against most of them, ive probably not even seen a single drone rotate the opposite direction since they have added it or even felt the need to use it myself.
- The drop drone playstyle is easy and frequent and because the stacks can only go up and not down until you either get hooked or get broken its not that fun to skip out of a loop after being tagged
- Her counterplay is niche at best and just gets countered by the strategy from point 2, if you hack a drone and go to that loop you likely get ~1 loop out of it which is the same that you would get out of a loop without a drone in it yet so its a waste of time and 2 less than any other m1 killer which is just always going to feel bad hacked drone or not go to a loop if its too hard to loop place a drone. Stacks have no counterplay other than lul just injure yourself they are near permanent, replacing a drone isn't much of a downside she doesn't get slowed while recalling, she doesn't get slowed while placing, the 10s cooldown is only important if all the drones happen to be hacked in one area where you can chain them together and only then that just buys you 10s for every drone that was hacked after the first, and each of those 10s the "counterplay" bought likely cost close to the same amount of time to find and hack all of them in the first place, and you only benefit IF you chase there or they might recall anyway when they see them hacked across the map and then its fruitless
- The problem with comparing the number of effects is the limitations between them, weskers speed comes at the cost of a cooldown while skull merchants can technically be constant, his power comes at the cost of a turn rate limiting what loops he can use it around while base movement speed its universal for any loop, ect its not really a fair comparison but basically souping up basekit numbers on an m1 killer is more universal than an m2 killer with a hit or miss power that may or may not be usable at a loop.
- She gets her best one for the start of the match at the push of a button, and while the other ones are not exactly at the push of a button they aren't much harder than that since it basically is up to the survivor to decide if she gets them or they leave the loop vsing the most common playstyle, niche out of chase speed and tracking is an ok thing but most of the time when she ends up getting the status effects it was close to the push of a button and not a complicated setup of carefully managed traps
- This one is actually fine, this is something survivors can pay attention to and take note of and is a silly complaint that is a punishment for lack of due diligence
- As the play area decreases skull merchants power is comparatively better than most other killers compared to something like clown having half the map for the same amount of drones means she gets a lot more powerful if drones cover ~10% of the maps play area halving the size of the play area means drones cover ~20% of the remaining space her power just becomes stronger in small tight nit areas with no real setup penalty against most teams she can easily pick one from the start of the match and make it a hassle which is usually too much for my poor solo queue teammates it doesn't create the most fun or fair matches
Ah the stealth with no tell, yes this is one of my favorites many a time I have made this argument and maybe a discussion or two about it so lets start by going down the comparison list, this one breaks away from the normal list for better formatting
Again almost all killers with any stealth mechanic in their basekit niche or not has a couple tells or drawbacks to it to balance it out
Wraith - Has to uncloak and has loud uncloaking sounds and gnashing sounds while cloaked
Myers - Has to stay slow to be stealthy has some breathing sounds still even with the drawback of being 105% speed for more of a tell
Freddy - Lullaby on oblivious survivors removing TR depth but still letting survivors know when you are within 32m, not always active and takes a decent amount of time to earn passively or has to be actively earned
Pig - Has to either ambush or uncrouch giving a bit of reaction time and moves slower while stealthed
Ghostface - Cooldown based and decently loud whooshing sounds
Demo - Global sound and big stomps so that undetectable is mostly just for show after portal travel
Onion - Lullaby while cloaked, and has to uncloak to hit
Dredge - whooooooooooooooooooooooooshing, and has to earn it a bit
Chucky - (This one is the closest to skull merchant so pay attension) Timer based stealth, global footstep effect, laughing, cooldown that isn't active while in stealth, oh yeah and a 110 killer
Compared to skull merchant, timer based stealth, easily reachable 80% uptime without addons due to cooling down while active her uptime isn't able to reach 100% anymore which is good but 96% with addons is still pretty strong I don't even know how fast a TR fades back out or back in but it might not even reach back to her full 32m at that speed
Her only "downside" to her stealth being "timer based" its a marginal point at best since even the other killer with a timer based cooldown has 4 countermeasures to make his stealth weaker and more spread out that skull merchants and have to actively rely on it, 8s or 9.6s is enough to get most things done, it takes 7s to reach a gen that is 32m away you can very easily gauge the distance and have perfect stealth all the way over to it with any amount of los blocking
she isn't slowed, she doesn't have footsteps, she doesn't have a passive area sound (including breathing), she doesn't have a lullaby, she doesn't have to exit her stealth before interacting with survivors, she doesn't have an activation time to enter stealth, her cooldown is active while she is in stealth, and she doesn't have to build it up as a passive / global power. Its not even a comparison at that point her stealth is just silly and should get a counter balance or two
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I kind of agree with all of these except the one about gen speeds.
Solo queue should get more information or ways to send each other information because it creates a big gap between them and SWF. A simple menu with a few options like, going for a save, killer near me, killer on me, killer left me, killer around the hook, would be a big help in bridging the gap but it definitely needs limits to start with and not be a ping esc system.
Sabo buffs are a bit silly and it really only exists to give a 4man group some toys to bully people with, it won't see its way into normal matches so theres no point in them being even stronger with coordination since it already was strong with coordination but now its just silly.
Chucky could use a bit more turn rate "IF" he scampers under a pallet or over a window, being limited from hitting someone right next to a pallet or window you vault is a bit silly but he doesn't need much more turning in his regular attacks. That and a bit faster scamper while charging would be nice
Ds should 100% be a generic perk and it being locked behind a $5 pay wall is silly, the shrine of secrets doesn't count, over the past 18 months DS has been available twice. One of the best tools for a new player to have to either survive long enough for their team to win or just barely make it out of a match is almost always out of reach unless you can reach your wallet.
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@Batusalen said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736931#Comment_3736931
Just curious, were you playing the new killer when you faced those "undercover bots"? Because if that's the case, maybe I can give you another, more factual explanation for it than the company that still hasn't figured out how to make zombies AI not get stuck in the terrain is using fake players to fill matches.
Nope, don't even own the new killer, but another detail that was weird was during queue even when being on the 0% bp bonus side and getting near instant queues post update for those ~3 days, unless the margins are small and the mass of players made it not even matter I wonder if a good way to know if something is off is check streamer vods and see if they all got fast matches on 0% as well, most updates I can easily remember waiting 5-10 minutes for matches as new killers and on ptbs and that usually is the same with release but this one felt completely different
(after a small sample of checking) otz was getting ~40s queues scott was getting ~20s queues, neither of which is common for new content or even close to queue times on ptbs
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@Iron_Cutlass said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736923#Comment_3736923
You can very clearly tell the difference between a real player and a bot based on how they move and reaction.
Having Killers/Survivors who are not good at the game does not automatically mean they are bots, it just means they are not experienced enough to play well.
Likewise, hours dont matter too much either, some people use alternate accounts or pick up on the game faster than others. One of my friends with less than a thousand hours picked up the game faster than I did in my first two-thousand hours, so hours does not really matter.
Yes I have 3000+ hours and can very clearly tell there were some bots in my matches for ~3 days after the release of the chapter, based on how they moved played and reacted.
I'm not calling them bots because they are bad but because of strange behavior and patterns
I have a good sense for small inconsistencies like this something was off, now since its cooled down a bit I don't believe I have seen one in my string of matches today but time will tell if they do the same at the next release of content and ill make sure to get some footage
But since my instincts have bore fruit so far I see no reason not to hold firm in my belief
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@Iron_Cutlass said:
I will give you credit, for a DBD conspiracy theory, this is not only the most outlandish things Ive heard but probably the funniest thing.
how would it be the most outlandish thing, the game has bots so they use the bots on releases to smooth out queue times since a lot of people all try and play the new killer at once
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@KatsuhxP said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736899#Comment_3736899
I'll stay on my point, bots in dbd are really notable by their movement and style to loop, I'd notice it if I played against a bot. It's just weird players for sure, not everyone plays absolutely flawless and perfectly reasonable, you're under quite a bit of stress while looping if you don't do it super often so it could be that they just panic xD
Well in the end there's no way to know until bhvr says anything to that ^^
It seems to be a different flavor of bot, its more los based in chases but the rest of the gameplay is 100% normal bhvr bot
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@SleepyLunatic said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736436#Comment_3736436
IF the killer bleeds you out, why stay in basement? Huge skill issue and i also wouldnt go down there to hel you in this case/
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736435#Comment_3736435
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736437#Comment_3736437
This comments prove me further you just got skill issues and have no basis on what you claimed.
Atleast @bjorksnas could come up with some understandable points.Ive just never felt the need to record it honestly but ive noticed it happened twice, I think it was ~5-6 months back but they DELETED the post about it
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@KatsuhxP said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736421#Comment_3736421
That's the thing you look out for in bots? You know that the movemennt of bots is super cryptic because they basically don't have a real reactiontime, besides that they can't be mindgamed, they just have stable things they do at certain distances xD
You're just discribing people that wanna survive as long as possible but not comp-cornering, could be ether because they don't like it or because they didn't think about that xD
No im saying you can watch them do strange behavior that people almost never do in 99% of matches, how often will a survivor loop the edge of the map with nothing, almost never, if they know they are dead what would they likely do either comp corner, or try and just barely reach something in case they actually had enough distance or just loop nothing and die anyway but in a good spot for killer. If I end up finding one I'll show it off but trust me its visible and obvious with enough playtime that they just aren't real players.
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Just record it and report the survivors its against the game rules since they just don't participate in gameplay, if they waste a lot of your time they will get punished.
Now mechanic wise we could get something but it might be a while
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@Bafugaboo said:
wow you really don’t see it
Gotta press the quote button so they will see the response to their message
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@SleepyLunatic said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736421#Comment_3736421
If thats true, thats a huge L and i really hope you guys are wrong about that. I dont want bots.
If things go the way they are now they will probably stick 1 / 2 in every match when updates come out to balance the killer / survivor disparity that happens with every chapter release so both sides get lightning fast queues but just not great matches
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@SleepyLunatic said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3736412#Comment_3736412
So you guys claim they feed us bots? Seriously?
Ive played against it before and even have made posts about it before. Its obvious and they don't play like regular players, they have already done some testing for them and this is probably going to be the main usage of them going forward. Chase a survivor to the outside of the map while injured and watch them run around like a bot instead of comp cornering
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I think the throw them on after big content updates to keep the lobbies and games chugging along its very obvious because who loops the outside of the map unless its a z wall and they are tbagging on the other side. But it just ends up ruining matches because its a 3v1 or 2v1 from the start
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agitation is 25% further carry distance, while iron grasp is 12% further carry distance
agitation hooks faster, iron grasp makes it easier to hook but not by enough to warrant comparison
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I don't think any killers get any aura reading effects on survivors as part of their powers except for trapper which is also a scream historically the only one was old freddy. It would be silly if you could counter killers powers information with perks like distortion and well doctor has been kinda of overlooked in this regard but much less people use calm spirit
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@Valuetown said:
I'm not going to sugarcoat it: this combination needs a nerf. Franklin's in and of itself is already such an unfun perk to play against, but Weave Attunement takes it 100 steps too far.
Please stop giving killers aura read for almost 0 effort. The aura range needs to be cut in half at least. It provides too much coverage at loops. Oblivious needs to go. Either that or have there be a cooldown on the perk. Better yet, make Weave Attunement only activate within the killer's terror radius AND have a cooldown.
This game is balanced around killers using addons and survivors using items. I would much rather play against 4 slowdown with an item of my choice over 2 slowdown and no item because of this awful combination. Too much information for free. Unnecessary status effect. Zero cooldown. Terrible design.
I mean you say too much information for free but its half their perk slots, thats not exactly free