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The Skull Merchant might be the most hated killer in Dead by Daylight, but she deserves better than what’s happening to her. The Player Test Build is Behaviour‘s opportunity to test changes before they go live, but you’d never know it from Adriana’s Patch 8.3 nerfs. Though I detest the whirring of Skull Merchant’s drones as much as any mediocre Nea main, Behaviour’s approach to the killer is setting a bad precedent. Hard nerfing a paid DLC character into the ground instead of reworking (or kill-switching and refunding them) is the wrong direction to go. Here’s why the Skull Merchant nerfs should concern every Dead by Daylight player.
Skull Merchant’s 8.3 PTB Nerfs
Skull Merchant flopped upon the launch of Tools of Torment, disappointing many with her lackluster visual design and overcomplicated power. Worse, she soon entrenched herself in the meta as the perfect 3-gen controller. This gave rise to endless “Chess Merchant” memes for her ability to “outplay” survivors simply by causing stalemates so long and frustrating that people rage quit. Behaviour reworked her once, but breaking her 3-gen playstyle left the killer with even less of an identity. The result? A muddled character whose greatest strength is her ability to force DCs and suicides. Here are the 8.3 changes:
- Decrease the Hindered penalty when scanned while having a Claw Trap to 5% (was 10%)
- Drones are always in the active state (NEW)
- Drone scan lines are only visible within 16 meters (NEW)
- Decrease the number of scan lines to 1 (was 2)
- The Skull Merchant no longer gains Haste from Survivors being scanned or from Survivors having a Claw Trap
At the risk of oversimplifying things, it looks like Behaviour has decided to solve Skull Merchant’s excessive kill-rate with nerfs that plant her in D-tier beside Trapper and Freddy. It’s not quite, say, removing Mario’s ability to jump, but it does gut the gameplay that players bought and paid for. Yes, as a DbD original killer, you can buy Skull Merchant with in-game Shards instead of premium Auric Cells, but plenty of players dropped actual cash on a gameplay experience increasingly different from (and worse than) what they paid for. Nurse and Blight are stronger than Chess Merchant ever was, but that’s not the point. If Skull Merchant is so broken, she should be kill-switched until there’s a proper rework.
DLC Expectations
Developers have every right to rework characters after release. That said, removing Adriana’s Haste, decreasing scan lines from 2 to 1, and cutting the Hindered penalty doesn’t make it fun to play as or against her. It just gives Adraina the Misery sledgehammer treatment, ensuring she’s in no shape to hobble off and cause problems. The Entity’s sinister magic is a free pass to retcon The Skull Merchant in fun ways, so refusal to do so raises prioritization concerns. Cosmetic sales might pay the bills, but leaving a character in this state isn’t right, even if her backstory involves dark Brazilian manga.
