"I've seen more people scared to see their favorite killers in upcoming roadmaps than excited" getting PTSD flashbacks from for honor, ah sweet orochi heavy deflect, you live forever in my heart
@@gabrote42 the legion "rework" was excellent, but he didn't need much to be enjoyable, i play with him sometimes and hitting the 5th hit is a dopamine burst.
“Oh my gosh, guys, look at our new killer! She’s a half Japanese, half Brazilian millionaire sugar Mommy who LOVES manga and is, like, super hot. Isn’t she scary? Oh my gosh, she so scary! What’s that? Her power- I dunno, she’s got skulls or something, but her waistline? Now that’s killer, right?! So scary!” - An actual employee at Behavior
Like I'm not a super huge fan of how every original killer is mutilated and monstrous, but at least it's a consistent design decision that adds character to the cast as a whole; it also makes sense given the B movie horror theme that the game takes inspiration from and the killer first person perspective makes it easy to ignore how ugly the player's character is if that would otherwise bother them. Skull Merchant breaks this established precedent and for what? She doesn't even have any particularly pretty/sexy cosmetics, they betrayed their own vision for no gain
Now I wish Skull Merchant was a pyromaniac with fire traps. Also, when you said that survivors need to accept getting hit I almost felt the seething from the low-skilled part of the survivor community.
which is the same part that got save the best for last nerfed into oblivion. y'know the perk that GAVE WEAKER KILLERS A CHANCE. and didn't help high tier killers much ?. yeah that
@@ohenthevoidwatcher3939 Nerfed into oblivion? It's just a little weaker than it used to be. I feel like this community has a unique problem with catastrophizing over every single change.
being concerned at Wesker changes just for it to be a 0.5 second cooldown reduction was pretty funny. well after the dread of a potential botching subsided
cm9i might be the best troll ever to hit the dbd scene. i don't think we will ever again see someone troll their way into playing against Team Eternal just to waste an hour of everyone's time and then go home
ha acted like an idiot, popularized the playstyle that everyone hated, got humiliated (if he even cares about that), then faded into irrelevance. Also the match was interesting to watch in the first and last 10 minutes of it
If he was a bit experienced in the comp scene then he could easily beat eternal he made a lot of mistakes. Btw eternal lost to another skull merchant player in a tournament later!
@@Porifirionhumiliated? Some no name dude wasted an hour of 4 people's and got people to tune in. If you ever play league, it's like arguing with a Yuumi player in game. As soon as you engage in trash talk, the Yuumi player already won. Yuumi doesn't have to do anything except press E every 10 seconds and will go back to watching Netflix while you're wasting time typing trash talk
I think it's unfair to say he was humiliated. Dude took the best comp team to 55 minutes. He proved his point. Was he an unlikable troll? Yea. But he took the pro team to their limits.
If you pare her lore down to the basics, Skull Merchant is a pretty strong concept, on the lines of "Hostel" or "Hard Target". She's a decadent rich psychopath who hunts people to inject some excitement into her jaded existence. Just stick with that and you've got a pretty strong concept. There was no need to keep adding stuff like the Dark Brazilian Manga.
Hear me out. Hot Take: Skull Merchant’s lore is good but full of fillery garbage and plot contrivances Either cut the manga stuff entirely and just have it be a cute minor aspect of her character, having her be a decadent rich psychopath that hunts people to inject excitement into her jaded existence Or play way harder into it, having her chuckle, and joke like fucking Dio in Chase, being a rich psychopath determined to recreate her autism as close to source material as possible. The bootstrap paradox in her tome lore is cool but maybe that should have been a minor joke or maybe even symbolism instead of the direct thing with absolutely no subtlety.
Imagine admitting to losing you confidence in your ability to design killers but still refusing to try what the people who play the characters for hundreds to thousands of hours suggest.
As someone that loves trap and intel killers, I so badly wish Skullys potential was capitalized on. Having passive "tripwires" that you can use to get info on the teams location and place through holes to get trap hits no other killer ever could sounds so cool to me. Imagine if Skully encouraged learning where every little hole and gap in every map was like Deathslinger. Literally a dream killer
This is what I thought she was when I bought her. Like a set up killer creating zones of influence and denial. I was picturing a mix of "Most Dangerous Game" and Predator/Yautja No, she's just an M1 killer who, at the time, could send a drone to force a survivor off a loop. Eventually, I switched over to playing Twins because Victor being my Vision and Attack drone fulfilled that zone of danger fantasy
As someone who cannot understand what is fun about dead by daylight I am utterly fascinated by this kind of content diving into its intricacies. Guess it's the passion for something even if it's something I don't get that pulls me in so good video!
I'll say imo its mainly the fact that its one of the only asymmetrical games (specifically "horror") that has stood the test of time, its got its issues, this video addresses many, and that's only for 1 killer, out of the now 40 something i believe? but its also all but 1 of a kind, sure there are other games in the genre, but all of them get labelled as "the game to beat dbd" and then 3 months later guess what? its irrelevant (exhibit A, texas chainsaw, or that neon one based in a highschool or smthn?). and sure its probably a large portion due to IP (ghost face, myers, chucky and alien now (i still remember when alien "was never gonna happen" wow i've played for too long XD)), but its also unique. for me specifically I enjoy the chase (like most players tbf), but both ends, reading the other player, getting a sense for the playstyle, and for killer the overall macro, when to drop chase, and defend your gens, vs when to keep up the chase. its something no other game i've played has. granted i've "moved on" from dbd, i don't play it NEARLY as much as I used to (1k hr player, but that was almost entirely in ~1-2 years, and now im probably 1.3-1.5k hrs after coming back sometime in iirc 2022?), but thats just because i've gotten a factory game "addiction" XD
After watching, I think this video is well edited with the right amount of humor paced through the video, on what I think is this game’s most controversial subject. I think it’s a shame that the most controversial part of this game isn’t the rampant hacking, monetization practices, BHVR’s poor or lackluster approaches to accessibility… but no instead it’s an unpopular character that people don’t like.
The idea that the laser of her drone broke down because she was spamming the rotate button is amazing! Also love the little animations throughout the whole video!
The latest changes to skull merchant is literally how the game was back in 2017 when survivors would dc and complain about Freddy which got him nerfed back then
36:00 Holy shit, you gotta talk about this. Some players straight up think they should be immortal and any disruption of this narrative is seen as heresy. Sometimes you are going to fail and that is just how it is.
@GlassOctopus-e1k plenty of survivor players feel entitled to a sense of superiority and power when that was never meant to be the intention, survivor was meant to be stressful and scary considering you're being chased by a near infallible creature that wants you dead. while killer was intended to have a sense of power and invincibility. ofc being a pvp video game it needs to be sort of balanced, but ultimately thats the intended dynamic, and its ironic when certain survivor players whine abt..the role they choose to play?
The whole Skull Merchant debacle really proved to me that most of the community has no fucking idea what it's doing and just trendchases whatever content creators say.
Honestly the Pyro-tech redesign for her would have fit her lore a little better too because CEO business dudes do profit off of deforestation. Kinda hard to deduce why the amazon is on fire when witnesses say "a flying skull breathed fire onto the trees".
I 100% subscribe to the tinfoil hat theory that she was born as a 1.0 design for a Predator killer that got fucked in development because licensing fell through. Her timeline is absolutely embarrassing as a reflection on BHVR's game design and production pipeline; there's a very good reason every other live service only push small tweaks through a hot fix and save broad sweeping changes (like a rework) for the PBE. That 'checkmate' game is such a high profile disaster that I wouldn't be surprised if it was the sole inspiration for the 8 gen regression system mechanic that they eventually added. I'm pretty sure consumer laws make it impossible for them to delete her (and even if they did that would set a horrifying precedent) but it's safe to say that she's been fumbled so hard by the devs that her reputation will never recover. The funniest part is that BHVR will frequently duck public criticism of poor/unpopular design choices by hiding behind large scale data analytics, but Skull Merchant is SUCH a failure that ALL of her published statistics are outliers.
Great video! Skull Merchant is a really interesting story to talk about because it seems like BHVR genuinely has no idea what to do with her. Surely the rework will make everyone happy...
Man... I really loved playing SM after her first rework. The tracking was super nice. I hope her rework, whatever it might be, keeps tracking as a fundamental aspect of it.
Why tf would people want her banned from 2v8 when we can have OP killers like blight, nurse, and billy there? Seriously I’ll never get over how people are just fine with blight, billy, and nurse having as little counterplay as they do while they call for nerfs on B tier killers.
Because she isn’t fun to play against. Just horribly boring and uninteractive. The Blight has more gameplay interactions in a single rush than SM has across an entire match. The opportunities for your personal skill expression are everywhere against those strong killers. SM is just… an M1 killer with annoying drones you need to turn off every once in a while. Just terrible from a gameplay perspective for both the killer and survivors.
Part of the reason is that Skull Merchent is just really complicated. Blight, Nurse, and Billy are very simple to understand, which limits the complexity of an already insane gameplay. Also SM has hud elements over survivor portraits which are not that visable and would be complicated if they added other killer with these portrait hud elements
i laugh as a plague main. they spend time bullying low tier killers but the minute plague gets added into 2v8 (which most likely will be a bit as shes got a complicated power) shes going to stomp so hard. oh you dont enjoy playing against useless drones? i bet you'll enjoy being stomped by a 6 foot babylonian woman whos power you don't understand. 😭
Because Nurse while strong, she is fun to play against in moderation. SM is just the worst designed killer, visually and gameplay wise in the game. She is just boring
As a skully main, I think the only problem skull merchant 2.0 had wasn’t what she could do, it’s how she could do it. Taking a health state, speed manipulation, undetectable were all fine on paper, it was her low risk high reward gameplay that let her achieve good results for little effort. While her current iteration is horrid and anybody who thinks it was justified is just wrong, credit where credit is due being active with her drones in order to get claw traps feels really rewarding
as a fellow SM player, i agree. a buff to current merchant could be all we need, maybe more rotation speed basekit, a way to gain temporarily the 2 scanlines on a targeted drone, revert the vault immunity to get scanned sounds reasonable. but yeah, more rewards to active play should be the way to go, i find SM so fun, even in her terrible state. one thing to note, i started playing her after her rework and found kind of nice a low skill floor to make my return to DBD a bit easier, it's not inherently bad to have some killers with a lower skill floor overall.
@ exactly. I don’t get how people say DBD needs killer variety but then when there’s a variety it’s bad lol. DBD needs low skill floor and low skill ceiling killers, because not every player wants to be huntress or nurse or blight. They simply have to be designed and balanced accordingly for it
Yeah, I think this video is mostly great, but I feel like the problems section fails to mention that while haste/hinder, the status effects, the players, and the unintuitiveness are all commonly mentioned factors, the number one thing I see people say is that they simply just don't find her power fun to play against in chase, regardless of its power. You can still argue hypocrisy regarding this, considering how Clown is a killer also considered to have a very boring power to play against, while getting very little mechanical reworks and a lot of noticeable buffs, unlike SM. However, I do think the suggestion of giving this power to a more thematically accurate killer would solve pretty little as I think even if it was fitting, people would still probably consider it unfun to fight against.
@@somekinnn I totally see what you mean, but I can’t help but find the argument of “it doesn’t matter if it’s weak or strong, it’s still boring” a BS argument with no ground to stand on. Obvious thing first, fun is subjective and so many people forget that. No killer in this game is 100% loved by everyone; there will always be people who don’t like going up against a specific killer, skully included. Skully is anti loop and that tends to be one of the least favoured playstyles, but that doesn’t make her flawed. The people that don’t like going up against what her power does will not feel differently if it gets rebalanced and that’s ok, but people need to stop pretending that because they don’t like it, then it’s wrong. But also, fun can only occur if we let ourselves have a capacity for it. There’s so many people who are extremely biased against skully, and no matter how drastically they change her they’ll still claim it’s unfun. It has nothing to do with what her power actually is but rather they simply won’t let themselves give it a chance
“Credit is where credit is due 🤓 “ says the whiners complaining about a dude who took the time to learn nurse and those pallets and loops no longer works shut up you whiner like throwing down every pallet in the map take skill
Dissolution is strong in theory, but the problem is that it takes 3 seconds to activate, and then everyone in the match gets told about it, meaning high hour lobbies would know immediately to either pre-vault or not use pallets as much, which with TL tiles being buffed for survivors for literally no reason (junk in the way causing easier fast vaults and in the way of killers who are hugging the turn, looking at Macmillan here especially) windows are already ridiculously safe if you’re good at the game, not to mention chase bugging the killer to get more than three vaults
16:04 Bro! The L4D music, I cant! 💀💀💀 Being in a match with her was as if you were grabbed by a special infected and your tema is far, you are just waiting to straight up die. (Awesome video btw, massive props!)
The funniest part of this whole update cycle was trying to play skull merchant at all even when they nerfed her into the dirt. I remember seeing the update, reading the text and going 'wow, she's dog water now!' only to win all my games because every match had at least 2 survivors DC or kill themselves on hook. Really sad
When unlocking her adept achievement, I’ve never sweated so hard in a game before. Not because I was having a hard game, but because I was trying to win as quickly as possible so someone wouldn’t DC or kill themselves on hook.
The whole SM ordeal is basically what happened to OG Freddy. His power was kinda unintuitive to survivors to play against, despite having really easy counterplay, to the point they gave up in games against him and complained about the chapter to the point BHVR actually nerfed him to the ground. Survivor players once again basically just refused to learn how to play against SM after her first major chase oriented rework with the removal of active zones. In both cases the killer's power obviously needed (and still needs in case of SM) a better, more thought out rework, but nerfing the character to the ground, while they're already dogshit is definitely not the way to approach balancing in such cases, esp if the only purpose it serves is to make people complain less while they're actively refusing to learn how to play against a character
Honestly, though SM was pretty overpowered. Even a top pro team had trouble against her (game lasted nearly an hour), because if you just played 3 gen lockdown she was ridiculously strong with very little skill required. Yes, she was beatable with proper callouts and slowly working the gens she wasn't at, but that's a 4 man squad on comms. If four pros with voice comms had such trouble, four random solo survivors had zero chance, and the SM player didn't really even have to be a very good player.
@taragnor yeah no, original "Chess Merchant" was an outright toxic gameplay design with the action slowdown near drones and all the stuff she had. Chase Merchant that we had right before she got recently publicly executed was comparable with OG Freddy, as many survivors outright refused to learn how to play against her, and when you did learn how she worked, she essentially became a powerless M1 killer. The Merchant player had a bit more ways to work around the survivor's counterplay to her than OG Freddy did, as he had basically no way of stopping people from self-caring between loops.
@@mattphyx I wouldn't say that. I mean her stealth alone could be very powerful. Yeah, if you had callouts on voice comms, you could tear her up, but she was tricky otherwise, since you either had to disable her drone (and let her know you were working a gen), or just try to crouch and work the gen without touching the drone, which could work but given how it was pretty easy for SM to get undetectable by just tossing drones, she had good potential to sneak up on you and get a free hit. With proper coordination, she was counterable, but still very powerful versus survivors that couldn't communicate. Of course if you had someone that was keeping track of her and calling out where she was going to nullify her stealth, she was rather weak, since she basically relied on patrolling gens with undetectable and getting some cheap hits. She wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as chess merchant, but she was still annoying to go against. Also helped that they changed it so gen regression had a limit, so it was possible to grind down her ability to regress generators. Going against her in solo queue still sucked, especially give you had survivors that would give her haste, which was really awful.
@taragnor after her first major rework standing still, crouching and repairing generators made you undetectable to the generators, you could literally just ignore them. Even in chases the drones weren't that threatening due to the requirement of 3 scans for an injury that were easily avoidable. She also only got undetectable for a short period of time after placing a drone instead of entering its radius.
@@mattphyx Yeah most skull merchants kind of spam the drones to keep the undetectable going, since I find they sneak up on me with no terror radius quite a bit. I don't get a ton of warning usually. And yeah crouching and repairing is pretty much my go-to strategy. Works well when there's a lot of gens left, but generally at 3-4 gen the SM will be patrolling everywhere anyway.
As someone who has recently become a DBD content creator and has found the underground for smaller creators, videos like this are so entertaining and it only proves further to me that there is a blossoming content revival for DBD rn. I don’t even like skull merchant nor was I playing until after she was changed horrendously but this still felt so refreshing to watch. Honestly the future of DBD content is gonna be promising especially with the new chapter coming out, thanks to the small content creators like you and others.
idk, I really liked the changes they made to knight when Larua Croft released. I don't think he needs fundamental changes aside from his bugs, but I have a little more faith with BHVR regarding Knight than I do most other killers.
@zhadmina2214 I'm mostly just afraid the community is gonna move from hating skull merchant beyond any reason, to hating knight beyond any reason, and then I'll lose my favorite killer to 20 hour players on twitter who still think you can insta place guards at loops
What an incredibly well made video! Other than loving the content and your script of course I just loved the editing and sound effects so much, this was so entertaining to watch and I can tell it took a lot of time and effort to produce. Keep up the good work! This was truly enjoyable!
So my main issue with her is that she no only got a while mechanic introduced due to her original state (that indirectly nerfed M1 killers you know the majority of killers in the game) but she also got several perks nerfed when only one or two needed changes. Her visual design is terrible and could do with improvements like cybernetic parts, a better back story would be nice too
Your intuitive example of turning Skull Merchant into a pyromaniac seemed like a much better idea. I think herself and Legion are both killers that really suffer from poor intuition around their power usage. I disagree about old Shelter Woods being beloved. It had about 3 pallets, and its "main building" was a tree with no obstacles. At best you're playing killer and it's uninteresting, as well as being a long walk to any gens. At worst you're survivor, have no chase options, and literally can't use Balanced Landing. And sadly, I'll say it: Negative feedback IS enough to warrant a nerf. We don't think in terms of strength, just in terms of fun. DBD is not a strictly balanced competitive game. If my favorite killer or perk were nerfed to hell, I might be briefly upset...but I'd use a different killer or perk instead. I say this as someone who enjoys playing as Knight, but WANTED them to nerf him because I knew he was not fun for my opponents, and I disliked my universally winning option of "plop guard at my feet".
i hope skull merchants penultimate rework ends up letting her use her radar a LOT more. its so fucking sad that in my opinion the coolest info ability is just... non existent. because you only get scans whenever you're already with a survivor, in chase, intentionally tagging them. its a damn shame.
The claw traps need to make a comeback with her rework because they were a huge part of her tracking ability in her original design. It's much less common for people to get claw trapped now *especially* outside of chases, which only makes her tracking that much more lackluster when compounded with the fact that nobody gets scanned outside of chases, like you said. Her identity lies with tracking, and if they conserve anything about her, it needs to be that.
Cuz they want to block the 3 gen strat for the whiners there is no no winning with these whiners as long as a killer can move something is always unfair to whiners im pretty sure its ppl whining about Freddy
i really miss the brief time after her major rework to gut her 3-gen ability and people just, forgot she existed. no one gave a shit for like half a year and i could play her and enjoy her kit in peace, and then people remembered she existed and got really pissed. and things have never been the same
Fantastic work on the video! I can really feel the passion and hard work behind this. I am a smaller creator myself I really took note of what great dbd content can really look like. Thank you for making this and I will be looking forward to new content! All the best!
It has been such a nightmare getting into playing this killer. Players give up right away and Behavior keeps making the perception of her arguably worse. Though now she is also weak on top of that. As a basic m1 she feels good to play, power aside, and her cosmetics are really decent which is necessary since she has the single fugliest base design of the entire roster.
I like how the Brazilian-Japanese human with tiny waist, cleavage, and an ass so big you can see it from the front is considered your "fugliest" killer Granted, you're not wrong. She just looks boring and generic. And a terrible case of lordosis
I think flatout villains have a place in the game too. I don't necessarily care if killers aren't scary, as long as they can get the job done. She just sucks at it because of her ugly design and lack of an interesting power imo
So why is it acceptable for survivor players to have oppressive perks, be allowed to disable entire skills for a whole match, have access to Flashbaning during animation lock, AND fast gen with NO recourse, AND NO DEFENSE to it. But We can't have killers with perks that fuck over survivors for fast gens or have killers good at 3-genning all the time? Killers have to deal with oppressive and stupid shit all the time. But when surviors get a taste of that medicine, killers have to bend the knee.
1. Oppressive perks? Such as? Please enlighten me. There's only a handful of meta survivor perks, I can count the genuinely good perks with my fingers, and the majority of them are so mid and/or need to be paired with others to be even remotely useful. Meanwhile, killers have access to over twenty aura reading perks (as well as multiple aura reading add-ons for some), slowdown perks, some powerful expose and hex perks, Rancor is literally a free kill during endgame if the survivor doesn't know to look out for it or wasn't able to hide in a locker before the last gen pops, and y'all have Lightborn (which makes an entire playstyle/item completely useless, but y'all were mad about Distortion). Survivors literally can't be oppressive; that is intrinsic to the killer role. The most "oppression" a killer will ever face is a toxic SWF, whose main goal was most likely to bully the killer in the first place by taking a highly coordinated approach that most survivors aren't doing. 2. Disable entire skills? Are you upset that killer powers actually have counterplay? Isn't that the entire purpose? It wouldn't be a game if survivors couldn't do anything against it. Not to mention, survivors need to actually learn how to counter three dozen killers, and most aren't effectively doing that at all. It's a very high skill ceiling. 3. Similar to being able to counterplay a killer; flashbanging, stunning, or blinding the killer during a pick up animation all take skill and proper timing to pull off. A survivor has to effectively learn the timing for a very tight window, and multiple timings for different pick up animations. You're mad survivors have some tools to... survive. 4. Powering up the generators is quite literally the main objective for the survivor. And if anything, "gen rushing" is more or less a reaction to the actual oppressive slowdown meta killers had access to in the past. Cleansing hex totems, blessing totems, taking hits or hooks for teammates on death hook, hiding because you're exposed, and more instances are literal recourses for survivors. Your comment is crazy because you're essentially mad that killers have to actually have a degree of skill, too lol. Please spare me the killer tears when survivors have to put up with just as much shit as killers do. Or did your favorite killer get nerfed? If anything, your energy would be better directed towards BHVR, who doesn't know the definition of balance if it slapped them in the face or how to implement proper game design.
@13BeachesInVenice in terms of perks He's mainly referring to how when killer get something that's busted it gets fixed shortly after the outcry. When survivors get busted things (insta blinds, borrowed time, decisive strike, mettle of man) it can take them forever to balance it. Only time I can think of killers getting something busted for a prolonged period of time was ruin.
This video came out when I finally decided to get the Skull Merchant to do a study as to why she's deemed the "worst killer of all time" and I've gotta say, I love the way you edit
Really cool video, I really enjoyed the new editing style and your cute character. Also I would love to see a video about the singularity changes, if that is of interest to you. Thanks for the cool vid
This vid was.... Fantastic! The effort Zozo put in here is drastically great and large, and as a SM main, I feeled every part of her history with such an empathy and pain. Hovewer, I think I will stick around the new Houndmaster since I like the summoner style of gameplay. Also want to see future case studies as for Freddy - the weakest licensed killer above all of them ( My first main). God bless you, Zozo❤.
Wdym you felt every part of her history with empathy and pain, shes literally a video game character with 1 min worth of terrible lore and design along with the lowest skill floor and ceiling dbd has seen, shes not real
@@werewolfenjoyer5000 Its not about her lore. Its terrible. I talked about a character and her place in DBD as a killer. Only the person who mains her can understand that. And it doesn't matter what skill lvl required in order to play the character since different people got different skill level perspective.
Honestly at this rate, I feel like Skull Merchant's last hope of being at least "decent" is with 2v8 when they inevitably add her into it, cuz she does feel like she'd be good as a decent supporting killer (assuming they actually go out of their way to rework her kit to actually work well in 2v8)
When you pointed out how Knight and Singularity have similar concepts behind their powers, I imagined what Skull Merchant would have looked like with all those little aspects to her power. I feel like we missed out on a super high tech killer that specialized in surveillance and tracking. Would have been neat, if overwhelming, but give that Dracula and Vecna have like 4 powers attached to them the I wish Skull Merchant got a similar treatment
Part of it is also that her biggest content creators are terrible people, completely detached from them maining her, so her stigma worsens, shes just a cursed cat
4:43 I mean, we’re talking about the same game where every survivor is somehow capable of repairing a generator just by fiddling with the same 2 wires for several minutes 💀😂
During the first version of SkullMerchant, I was still doing my No mither only thing that I'd been doing for like... 2 years straight. So SkullMerchant's ability did nothing to me.
I was in a pub with randoms during her 3 gen rein. Nobody dc'd. It took 40 mins, with 3 injured survivors, and we almost broke the three gen with 3, but as soon as the 3rd went down, it was down hill from there, and it was jover. I was so proud of us though because we were randoms. I wouldn't want every match to be 40 mins....but that was an exciting intense match. I do feel bad for the Skull Merchant stans. Also...I feel bad for those Tricksters at the end of the video XDD. Good pathing on your part...poor Trickster lol.
This video was very informative, and very well put together. It was a treat to have you make such a long video about my favorite Killer! It makes me want to get back into playing Skull Merchant, but with the overall community reception that Killer has gotten has rubbed off on me, coupled with the recent changes made to her kit, my confidence to even try to play her is quite low. All that being said, I still wanna try playing her at some point...
SM haters when they are forced to stop at a red light when driving (unfair zoning) I’m glad to finally watch this video especially during lunch break!🤘
@@InterchangeofNightIt's not even a good joke. Op's joke at least made sense, your's is just "haha poo poo head". I shouldn't be surprise you have no sense of humor considering you're a skully hater.
43:05 I mean yes, most balances in games aren't based around logic and reasoning but feeling; if something feels bad it gets nerfed/ changed. People don't balance around logic, otherwise we'd be having MUCH different design choices in many games.
I gotta say, this video is super well put together. The discussions raised are points that many SM mains have discussed, and I am glad to see you shared in the sentiment that the 2.0 version of SM at least was healthier considering the amount of mistakes players had to make to give SM value. Me and Banette raised similar issues too with the SM updates, including the fact that players are now afraid of changes, as it could mean their killer is deleted purely because the community don't have a glowing reception towards them. Overall, it was a great video to watch, and it reminds me of what I truly miss on SM, her trap based identity that they pushed more for has been shotgunned to the grave and HoundMaster fills a niche I wanted, but not the Trap niche I having been aching for since Hag's release in 2016. P.S. No, Freddy is not a Trap killer, he is just put there because no one else wants him.
Your channel is so underrated, there is a severe lack of high quality DBD content that isn’t just over or under edited stream highlights. I think you are the only DBD RUclipsr I enjoy watching besides ardetha, love your editing style too.
You genuinely have such a well put together video, I just found your channel and I was absolutely gobsmacked when I saw you were under 500k subs. This content is fucking golden and id love to see you get bigger
Here's to hoping this video and channel blow up cause the scripting and editing was really well done. I'll never not love watching a good hour long video on game balance, especially when this much effort was put into it
Hey man new sub here really loved listening to this while i work and would love to see more commentary content out of you. Very good video keep it up dude
I hate going against Billy, and really wanted the overheat mechanic to remain... but people hate me for thinking that way. That's essentially what happened to Merchant, but they got what they wanted. Is it fair? No, but there's a clear double standard here. I definitely think the fact that BHVR made it look like a Predator chapter didn't help her initial impression, and her base model isn't great either (she has trickster's face under that mask). That plus how terribly the drones were handled... yeah. I can see why she's disliked, but as a friend of mine pointed out, most survivors don't play the other side, nor keep up to date with how killers change. People still don't get how Onryo works, and she's changed three times since her launch. Point is, Pure survivors don't care about balance, they just want the game to stay the same for them, for easy wins. They want to bully the killer, and get an easy 4 man escape. They'll BM and be holier than thou in the chat. Just how it is. As long as they never change, the balance will remain terrible.
From what we know there are 2 teams that make killers and it goes in order a team then b team what my guess as to what happened was both teams were told to make an intel killer one was Skully the other Larry and my theory on why Skull fells so slapped together is she was going to be a pure intel killer. No traps, no haste, no nothing just her drones telling her where people were and when Larry was being shown they realized they could have a bit more and that most of the player base wouldn't like an intel only killer so they added all this other stuff to her. The reason I think that is if you look at her trailer the clawtraps are NOWHERE the only thing in it is the drone telling her where the twins are and that's it. That is not even taking into account the same team did Xeno who has so much new to add like the fire effects and the tunnel system.
I've been watching your videos since the trickster video and your quickly becoming one of my favorite dbd RUclipsrs, I can tell you put effort into your videos and I didn't disagree with you about a single point in this video, it pisses me off how people complained about a c tier killer, get her nerfed into the floor and still complain, it amazes me how instead of bhvr fixing sm they don't redid her but covered it up with "look she has a dog!" Like at that point either rework her or just remove her from the damn game
They did a lot more than give her a dog, the power's far more interesting and intuitive, the design is way cooler, they let you pet the dog, and the character actually has interesting lore and personality outside of gooner bait lol. I think thats a lot more than covering her up, I think they wish they could remove her from the game though but people did unfortunately pay money for her
I'm really excited for that Hux video you teased. I'm a hux main. Been one since he released. And I found his update to be pretty damn good all things considered (a bit rocky on the ptb just)
Awesome video, the graphics and animations/renders were beautiful, as a former Skully main 😅 I greatly appreciate this video and hope it’ll gain a good amount of attention! The effort is palpable here 🥳 Also you hit the nail on the head with Houndmaster lol, onto her now ig
I really liked playing against Skull Merchant, I take her over Blight and Nurse any day. I can not understand people who rather want to face the two of them, than Skull Merchant. Yes, 3 Gen was a problem, but at least I could play the game and actually spent time, playing the builds I created. Against Nurses and Blights the Matches go by too fast, people dc quickly or kill themselves on Hook way more, than the survivors ever did facing Skull Merchant in the Matches I was against her. Even now I would rather play at the most buffed merchant, than against a skilled full aura reading Nurse on a small map. Then yes, I do not have fun playing against Killers like Nurse, as matches go by too quickly. Not to mention how sweaty most Nurses and Blights are, slugging and even tunneling you when the rest of your team already Disconnected and you are the only real player left in the Match now full of Bots.
Honestly I got the trophies from the “Tools of Torment” chapter (where she debuted) and yeah she’s got a difficulty curve to work with. Heck the generator trophy was the bane of my existence for quite time.
Not gonna lie, I’d love a video about the plague 3 gen thing. I’ve only ever heard horror stories about skull merchant’s three genning, plus I took a break from DBD during the 3 gen time frame, so I’d love something about how she wasn’t the only issue
Love the name "The Pyro" This Was A Great Video And Thank You For Making It X3 P.S Outed Yourself As One Of the Complainers Of Dbd...Who Am I Kidding We All Complain About The Game Here XD
"I've seen more people scared to see their favorite killers in upcoming roadmaps than excited" getting PTSD flashbacks from for honor, ah sweet orochi heavy deflect, you live forever in my heart
yup, seeing plague in the roadmap worries me, they already butchered my skully.
Not many will know you're talking about for honor
@@Kal_Nightmare @dh3725 I understood it!!
As a Legion main, quite the contrary
@@gabrote42 the legion "rework" was excellent, but he didn't need much to be enjoyable, i play with him sometimes and hitting the 5th hit is a dopamine burst.
Do I like skull merchant? No. Will I watch an hour long video documenting the mess surrounding her? Absolutely.
That makes us two
Make it 3.
That’s about the average time a match against her lasts
@@westnekon2106let’s make it 4
5
“Oh my gosh, guys, look at our new killer! She’s a half Japanese, half Brazilian millionaire sugar Mommy who LOVES manga and is, like, super hot. Isn’t she scary? Oh my gosh, she so scary! What’s that? Her power- I dunno, she’s got skulls or something, but her waistline? Now that’s killer, right?! So scary!”
- An actual employee at Behavior
☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️ dont scare me so much please very scary
tbh, the Unknown and Singularity's backstories also had that "let's throw every trope imaginable and see what sticks!" vibe.
@@origamifan5515 I mean, ain’t that the point of the unknown?
Then again it works for unknown @@origamifan5515
Like I'm not a super huge fan of how every original killer is mutilated and monstrous, but at least it's a consistent design decision that adds character to the cast as a whole; it also makes sense given the B movie horror theme that the game takes inspiration from and the killer first person perspective makes it easy to ignore how ugly the player's character is if that would otherwise bother them. Skull Merchant breaks this established precedent and for what? She doesn't even have any particularly pretty/sexy cosmetics, they betrayed their own vision for no gain
Now I wish Skull Merchant was a pyromaniac with fire traps.
Also, when you said that survivors need to accept getting hit I almost felt the seething from the low-skilled part of the survivor community.
So the entire survivor community?
@@kinsan89*90% of survivor comunnity
@@Nicolas-dr3yp 98%
which is the same part that got save the best for last nerfed into oblivion. y'know the perk that GAVE WEAKER KILLERS A CHANCE. and didn't help high tier killers much ?. yeah that
@@ohenthevoidwatcher3939 Nerfed into oblivion? It's just a little weaker than it used to be. I feel like this community has a unique problem with catastrophizing over every single change.
being concerned at Wesker changes just for it to be a 0.5 second cooldown reduction was pretty funny. well after the dread of a potential botching subsided
The anxiety wave immediately turning into disappointment was hilarious LMFAOO
"A monkey could reach her skill ceiling" HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Based
FORESHADOWING IS A LITERARY DEVICE--
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE
cm9i might be the best troll ever to hit the dbd scene. i don't think we will ever again see someone troll their way into playing against Team Eternal just to waste an hour of everyone's time and then go home
ha acted like an idiot, popularized the playstyle that everyone hated, got humiliated (if he even cares about that), then faded into irrelevance. Also the match was interesting to watch in the first and last 10 minutes of it
By calling cm9i a competent troll you popularized Stall Merchant, the fault lies with you once more Iggymale.
If he was a bit experienced in the comp scene then he could easily beat eternal he made a lot of mistakes. Btw eternal lost to another skull merchant player in a tournament later!
@@Porifirionhumiliated? Some no name dude wasted an hour of 4 people's and got people to tune in.
If you ever play league, it's like arguing with a Yuumi player in game. As soon as you engage in trash talk, the Yuumi player already won.
Yuumi doesn't have to do anything except press E every 10 seconds and will go back to watching Netflix while you're wasting time typing trash talk
I think it's unfair to say he was humiliated. Dude took the best comp team to 55 minutes. He proved his point. Was he an unlikable troll? Yea. But he took the pro team to their limits.
I saw a dude have a mental breakdown on reddit because of the skull merchant nerfs, just checked he is still having it
Drop the @ im begging im in thr hospital and need entertainment
If you pare her lore down to the basics, Skull Merchant is a pretty strong concept, on the lines of "Hostel" or "Hard Target". She's a decadent rich psychopath who hunts people to inject some excitement into her jaded existence. Just stick with that and you've got a pretty strong concept. There was no need to keep adding stuff like the Dark Brazilian Manga.
Hear me out.
Hot Take: Skull Merchant’s lore is good but full of fillery garbage and plot contrivances
Either cut the manga stuff entirely and just have it be a cute minor aspect of her character, having her be a decadent rich psychopath that hunts people to inject excitement into her jaded existence
Or play way harder into it, having her chuckle, and joke like fucking Dio in Chase, being a rich psychopath determined to recreate her autism as close to source material as possible.
The bootstrap paradox in her tome lore is cool but maybe that should have been a minor joke or maybe even symbolism instead of the direct thing with absolutely no subtlety.
my dear, what did they do to you?
banger video chief
It’s him! King Skull Merchant!
A respectful F to you. You're the sole reason I don't hate her any more. I just feel sorry for her.
im on a 43 skull merchant streak pixel!! go live on twitch!!!!
omg! It's John Skull Merchant himself!
Pixel!!!!
Imagine admitting to losing you confidence in your ability to design killers but still refusing to try what the people who play the characters for hundreds to thousands of hours suggest.
As someone that loves trap and intel killers, I so badly wish Skullys potential was capitalized on.
Having passive "tripwires" that you can use to get info on the teams location and place through holes to get trap hits no other killer ever could sounds so cool to me.
Imagine if Skully encouraged learning where every little hole and gap in every map was like Deathslinger. Literally a dream killer
This is what I thought she was when I bought her.
Like a set up killer creating zones of influence and denial. I was picturing a mix of "Most Dangerous Game" and Predator/Yautja
No, she's just an M1 killer who, at the time, could send a drone to force a survivor off a loop.
Eventually, I switched over to playing Twins because Victor being my Vision and Attack drone fulfilled that zone of danger fantasy
As someone who cannot understand what is fun about dead by daylight I am utterly fascinated by this kind of content diving into its intricacies. Guess it's the passion for something even if it's something I don't get that pulls me in so good video!
I'll say imo its mainly the fact that its one of the only asymmetrical games (specifically "horror") that has stood the test of time, its got its issues, this video addresses many, and that's only for 1 killer, out of the now 40 something i believe?
but its also all but 1 of a kind, sure there are other games in the genre, but all of them get labelled as "the game to beat dbd" and then 3 months later guess what? its irrelevant (exhibit A, texas chainsaw, or that neon one based in a highschool or smthn?). and sure its probably a large portion due to IP (ghost face, myers, chucky and alien now (i still remember when alien "was never gonna happen" wow i've played for too long XD)), but its also unique.
for me specifically I enjoy the chase (like most players tbf), but both ends, reading the other player, getting a sense for the playstyle, and for killer the overall macro, when to drop chase, and defend your gens, vs when to keep up the chase. its something no other game i've played has. granted i've "moved on" from dbd, i don't play it NEARLY as much as I used to (1k hr player, but that was almost entirely in ~1-2 years, and now im probably 1.3-1.5k hrs after coming back sometime in iirc 2022?), but thats just because i've gotten a factory game "addiction" XD
After watching, I think this video is well edited with the right amount of humor paced through the video, on what I think is this game’s most controversial subject. I think it’s a shame that the most controversial part of this game isn’t the rampant hacking, monetization practices, BHVR’s poor or lackluster approaches to accessibility… but no instead it’s an unpopular character that people don’t like.
The idea that the laser of her drone broke down because she was spamming the rotate button is amazing! Also love the little animations throughout the whole video!
The latest changes to skull merchant is literally how the game was back in 2017 when survivors would dc and complain about Freddy which got him nerfed back then
36:00 Holy shit, you gotta talk about this. Some players straight up think they should be immortal and any disruption of this narrative is seen as heresy.
Sometimes you are going to fail and that is just how it is.
right like the power trip comes from playing killer you're on the wrong side bro 😭
@@simplyysyrup ??? Brother what ???
@GlassOctopus-e1k plenty of survivor players feel entitled to a sense of superiority and power when that was never meant to be the intention, survivor was meant to be stressful and scary considering you're being chased by a near infallible creature that wants you dead. while killer was intended to have a sense of power and invincibility. ofc being a pvp video game it needs to be sort of balanced, but ultimately thats the intended dynamic, and its ironic when certain survivor players whine abt..the role they choose to play?
Genuinely a crazy amount of production value for such a small channel. its a crime more people haven't watched this.
The whole Skull Merchant debacle really proved to me that most of the community has no fucking idea what it's doing and just trendchases whatever content creators say.
I agree
Honestly the Pyro-tech redesign for her would have fit her lore a little better too because CEO business dudes do profit off of deforestation. Kinda hard to deduce why the amazon is on fire when witnesses say "a flying skull breathed fire onto the trees".
this video is probably the best thing to ever come from skull merchant
That’s me Mom! That’s Me!
Anyways, great video as always Zoe. Cannot wait for your next one ❤
Leaving my support comment for when this inevitably blows up and it will, amazing job my friend
Ngl I still think the Skull Merchant was originally meant to be The Predator but some licensing issue prevented it
I 100% subscribe to the tinfoil hat theory that she was born as a 1.0 design for a Predator killer that got fucked in development because licensing fell through. Her timeline is absolutely embarrassing as a reflection on BHVR's game design and production pipeline; there's a very good reason every other live service only push small tweaks through a hot fix and save broad sweeping changes (like a rework) for the PBE. That 'checkmate' game is such a high profile disaster that I wouldn't be surprised if it was the sole inspiration for the 8 gen regression system mechanic that they eventually added.
I'm pretty sure consumer laws make it impossible for them to delete her (and even if they did that would set a horrifying precedent) but it's safe to say that she's been fumbled so hard by the devs that her reputation will never recover. The funniest part is that BHVR will frequently duck public criticism of poor/unpopular design choices by hiding behind large scale data analytics, but Skull Merchant is SUCH a failure that ALL of her published statistics are outliers.
Great video! Skull Merchant is a really interesting story to talk about because it seems like BHVR genuinely has no idea what to do with her. Surely the rework will make everyone happy...
Man... I really loved playing SM after her first rework. The tracking was super nice.
I hope her rework, whatever it might be, keeps tracking as a fundamental aspect of it.
cm9i’s rage bait was incredible.
Why tf would people want her banned from 2v8 when we can have OP killers like blight, nurse, and billy there? Seriously I’ll never get over how people are just fine with blight, billy, and nurse having as little counterplay as they do while they call for nerfs on B tier killers.
Blight Billy and nurse have interesting chase interactions, they’re much more easily forgiven for being strong
Because she isn’t fun to play against. Just horribly boring and uninteractive.
The Blight has more gameplay interactions in a single rush than SM has across an entire match. The opportunities for your personal skill expression are everywhere against those strong killers. SM is just… an M1 killer with annoying drones you need to turn off every once in a while. Just terrible from a gameplay perspective for both the killer and survivors.
Part of the reason is that Skull Merchent is just really complicated. Blight, Nurse, and Billy are very simple to understand, which limits the complexity of an already insane gameplay. Also SM has hud elements over survivor portraits which are not that visable and would be complicated if they added other killer with these portrait hud elements
i laugh as a plague main. they spend time bullying low tier killers but the minute plague gets added into 2v8 (which most likely will be a bit as shes got a complicated power) shes going to stomp so hard. oh you dont enjoy playing against useless drones? i bet you'll enjoy being stomped by a 6 foot babylonian woman whos power you don't understand. 😭
Because Nurse while strong, she is fun to play against in moderation. SM is just the worst designed killer, visually and gameplay wise in the game. She is just boring
I remember watching that 50 min skull match vs eternal. It really did feel like the shot heard across the world.
As a skully main, I think the only problem skull merchant 2.0 had wasn’t what she could do, it’s how she could do it. Taking a health state, speed manipulation, undetectable were all fine on paper, it was her low risk high reward gameplay that let her achieve good results for little effort. While her current iteration is horrid and anybody who thinks it was justified is just wrong, credit where credit is due being active with her drones in order to get claw traps feels really rewarding
as a fellow SM player, i agree. a buff to current merchant could be all we need, maybe more rotation speed basekit, a way to gain temporarily the 2 scanlines on a targeted drone, revert the vault immunity to get scanned sounds reasonable.
but yeah, more rewards to active play should be the way to go, i find SM so fun, even in her terrible state.
one thing to note, i started playing her after her rework and found kind of nice a low skill floor to make my return to DBD a bit easier, it's not inherently bad to have some killers with a lower skill floor overall.
@ exactly. I don’t get how people say DBD needs killer variety but then when there’s a variety it’s bad lol. DBD needs low skill floor and low skill ceiling killers, because not every player wants to be huntress or nurse or blight. They simply have to be designed and balanced accordingly for it
Yeah, I think this video is mostly great, but I feel like the problems section fails to mention that while haste/hinder, the status effects, the players, and the unintuitiveness are all commonly mentioned factors, the number one thing I see people say is that they simply just don't find her power fun to play against in chase, regardless of its power. You can still argue hypocrisy regarding this, considering how Clown is a killer also considered to have a very boring power to play against, while getting very little mechanical reworks and a lot of noticeable buffs, unlike SM. However, I do think the suggestion of giving this power to a more thematically accurate killer would solve pretty little as I think even if it was fitting, people would still probably consider it unfun to fight against.
@@somekinnn I totally see what you mean, but I can’t help but find the argument of “it doesn’t matter if it’s weak or strong, it’s still boring” a BS argument with no ground to stand on. Obvious thing first, fun is subjective and so many people forget that. No killer in this game is 100% loved by everyone; there will always be people who don’t like going up against a specific killer, skully included. Skully is anti loop and that tends to be one of the least favoured playstyles, but that doesn’t make her flawed. The people that don’t like going up against what her power does will not feel differently if it gets rebalanced and that’s ok, but people need to stop pretending that because they don’t like it, then it’s wrong. But also, fun can only occur if we let ourselves have a capacity for it. There’s so many people who are extremely biased against skully, and no matter how drastically they change her they’ll still claim it’s unfun. It has nothing to do with what her power actually is but rather they simply won’t let themselves give it a chance
“Credit is where credit is due 🤓 “ says the whiners complaining about a dude who took the time to learn nurse and those pallets and loops no longer works shut up you whiner like throwing down every pallet in the map take skill
Dissolution is strong in theory, but the problem is that it takes 3 seconds to activate, and then everyone in the match gets told about it, meaning high hour lobbies would know immediately to either pre-vault or not use pallets as much, which with TL tiles being buffed for survivors for literally no reason (junk in the way causing easier fast vaults and in the way of killers who are hugging the turn, looking at Macmillan here especially) windows are already ridiculously safe if you’re good at the game, not to mention chase bugging the killer to get more than three vaults
16:04
Bro! The L4D music, I cant! 💀💀💀
Being in a match with her was as if you were grabbed by a special infected and your tema is far, you are just waiting to straight up die.
(Awesome video btw, massive props!)
The funniest part of this whole update cycle was trying to play skull merchant at all even when they nerfed her into the dirt. I remember seeing the update, reading the text and going 'wow, she's dog water now!' only to win all my games because every match had at least 2 survivors DC or kill themselves on hook. Really sad
When unlocking her adept achievement, I’ve never sweated so hard in a game before. Not because I was having a hard game, but because I was trying to win as quickly as possible so someone wouldn’t DC or kill themselves on hook.
The whole SM ordeal is basically what happened to OG Freddy. His power was kinda unintuitive to survivors to play against, despite having really easy counterplay, to the point they gave up in games against him and complained about the chapter to the point BHVR actually nerfed him to the ground. Survivor players once again basically just refused to learn how to play against SM after her first major chase oriented rework with the removal of active zones.
In both cases the killer's power obviously needed (and still needs in case of SM) a better, more thought out rework, but nerfing the character to the ground, while they're already dogshit is definitely not the way to approach balancing in such cases, esp if the only purpose it serves is to make people complain less while they're actively refusing to learn how to play against a character
Honestly, though SM was pretty overpowered. Even a top pro team had trouble against her (game lasted nearly an hour), because if you just played 3 gen lockdown she was ridiculously strong with very little skill required. Yes, she was beatable with proper callouts and slowly working the gens she wasn't at, but that's a 4 man squad on comms. If four pros with voice comms had such trouble, four random solo survivors had zero chance, and the SM player didn't really even have to be a very good player.
@taragnor yeah no, original "Chess Merchant" was an outright toxic gameplay design with the action slowdown near drones and all the stuff she had. Chase Merchant that we had right before she got recently publicly executed was comparable with OG Freddy, as many survivors outright refused to learn how to play against her, and when you did learn how she worked, she essentially became a powerless M1 killer. The Merchant player had a bit more ways to work around the survivor's counterplay to her than OG Freddy did, as he had basically no way of stopping people from self-caring between loops.
@@mattphyx I wouldn't say that. I mean her stealth alone could be very powerful. Yeah, if you had callouts on voice comms, you could tear her up, but she was tricky otherwise, since you either had to disable her drone (and let her know you were working a gen), or just try to crouch and work the gen without touching the drone, which could work but given how it was pretty easy for SM to get undetectable by just tossing drones, she had good potential to sneak up on you and get a free hit.
With proper coordination, she was counterable, but still very powerful versus survivors that couldn't communicate. Of course if you had someone that was keeping track of her and calling out where she was going to nullify her stealth, she was rather weak, since she basically relied on patrolling gens with undetectable and getting some cheap hits. She wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as chess merchant, but she was still annoying to go against. Also helped that they changed it so gen regression had a limit, so it was possible to grind down her ability to regress generators.
Going against her in solo queue still sucked, especially give you had survivors that would give her haste, which was really awful.
@taragnor after her first major rework standing still, crouching and repairing generators made you undetectable to the generators, you could literally just ignore them. Even in chases the drones weren't that threatening due to the requirement of 3 scans for an injury that were easily avoidable. She also only got undetectable for a short period of time after placing a drone instead of entering its radius.
@@mattphyx Yeah most skull merchants kind of spam the drones to keep the undetectable going, since I find they sneak up on me with no terror radius quite a bit. I don't get a ton of warning usually. And yeah crouching and repairing is pretty much my go-to strategy. Works well when there's a lot of gens left, but generally at 3-4 gen the SM will be patrolling everywhere anyway.
😇cant wait for more videos zo!
Good video. I actually understand how she works/has worked. Humor and pacing was well done. 🐐
As someone who has recently become a DBD content creator and has found the underground for smaller creators, videos like this are so entertaining and it only proves further to me that there is a blossoming content revival for DBD rn. I don’t even like skull merchant nor was I playing until after she was changed horrendously but this still felt so refreshing to watch. Honestly the future of DBD content is gonna be promising especially with the new chapter coming out, thanks to the small content creators like you and others.
gorgeous video as usual and def worth the wait, ur videos are always extremely stimulating and entertaining, seriously impressive stuff :D
@@lettuchia Hoping to get around to everyone some day...
I pray that the day knight appears on that roadmap again never comes 🙏🙏
Unless its for bugfixes, dear god he has so many
idk, I really liked the changes they made to knight when Larua Croft released. I don't think he needs fundamental changes aside from his bugs, but I have a little more faith with BHVR regarding Knight than I do most other killers.
@zhadmina2214 I'm mostly just afraid the community is gonna move from hating skull merchant beyond any reason, to hating knight beyond any reason, and then I'll lose my favorite killer to 20 hour players on twitter who still think you can insta place guards at loops
What an incredibly well made video! Other than loving the content and your script of course I just loved the editing and sound effects so much, this was so entertaining to watch and I can tell it took a lot of time and effort to produce. Keep up the good work! This was truly enjoyable!
Was not expecting wholesome 100 Palestine in a skull merchant documentary
So my main issue with her is that she no only got a while mechanic introduced due to her original state (that indirectly nerfed M1 killers you know the majority of killers in the game) but she also got several perks nerfed when only one or two needed changes.
Her visual design is terrible and could do with improvements like cybernetic parts, a better back story would be nice too
Your intuitive example of turning Skull Merchant into a pyromaniac seemed like a much better idea. I think herself and Legion are both killers that really suffer from poor intuition around their power usage.
I disagree about old Shelter Woods being beloved. It had about 3 pallets, and its "main building" was a tree with no obstacles. At best you're playing killer and it's uninteresting, as well as being a long walk to any gens. At worst you're survivor, have no chase options, and literally can't use Balanced Landing.
And sadly, I'll say it: Negative feedback IS enough to warrant a nerf. We don't think in terms of strength, just in terms of fun. DBD is not a strictly balanced competitive game. If my favorite killer or perk were nerfed to hell, I might be briefly upset...but I'd use a different killer or perk instead. I say this as someone who enjoys playing as Knight, but WANTED them to nerf him because I knew he was not fun for my opponents, and I disliked my universally winning option of "plop guard at my feet".
The incredibly loud incorrect buzzer when KnightLight says he’s “done talking with you” made me laugh my ass off
i hope skull merchants penultimate rework ends up letting her use her radar a LOT more. its so fucking sad that in my opinion the coolest info ability is just... non existent. because you only get scans whenever you're already with a survivor, in chase, intentionally tagging them. its a damn shame.
The claw traps need to make a comeback with her rework because they were a huge part of her tracking ability in her original design. It's much less common for people to get claw trapped now *especially* outside of chases, which only makes her tracking that much more lackluster when compounded with the fact that nobody gets scanned outside of chases, like you said.
Her identity lies with tracking, and if they conserve anything about her, it needs to be that.
Cuz they want to block the 3 gen strat for the whiners there is no no winning with these whiners as long as a killer can move something is always unfair to whiners im pretty sure its ppl whining about Freddy
i really miss the brief time after her major rework to gut her 3-gen ability and people just, forgot she existed. no one gave a shit for like half a year and i could play her and enjoy her kit in peace, and then people remembered she existed and got really pissed. and things have never been the same
crazy how this is the chapter that released when i started playing dbd
Fantastic work on the video! I can really feel the passion and hard work behind this. I am a smaller creator myself I really took note of what great dbd content can really look like. Thank you for making this and I will be looking forward to new content! All the best!
Best of luck!!
It has been such a nightmare getting into playing this killer. Players give up right away and Behavior keeps making the perception of her arguably worse. Though now she is also weak on top of that. As a basic m1 she feels good to play, power aside, and her cosmetics are really decent which is necessary since she has the single fugliest base design of the entire roster.
so just nea 2.0
I like how the Brazilian-Japanese human with tiny waist, cleavage, and an ass so big you can see it from the front is considered your "fugliest" killer
Granted, you're not wrong. She just looks boring and generic. And a terrible case of lordosis
This was a really long and indepth and really good video. It was still shorter in length than the cm9i eternal match though!
She feels more like a villain more than a horror character
I think flatout villains have a place in the game too. I don't necessarily care if killers aren't scary, as long as they can get the job done. She just sucks at it because of her ugly design and lack of an interesting power imo
really good video gotta say you really improved editing and videos are getting more interesting and fun to watch keep up the good work.
the editing, transitions, and demonstration animations are fire
So why is it acceptable for survivor players to have oppressive perks, be allowed to disable entire skills for a whole match, have access to Flashbaning during animation lock, AND fast gen with NO recourse, AND NO DEFENSE to it. But We can't have killers with perks that fuck over survivors for fast gens or have killers good at 3-genning all the time? Killers have to deal with oppressive and stupid shit all the time.
But when surviors get a taste of that medicine, killers have to bend the knee.
1. Oppressive perks? Such as? Please enlighten me. There's only a handful of meta survivor perks, I can count the genuinely good perks with my fingers, and the majority of them are so mid and/or need to be paired with others to be even remotely useful. Meanwhile, killers have access to over twenty aura reading perks (as well as multiple aura reading add-ons for some), slowdown perks, some powerful expose and hex perks, Rancor is literally a free kill during endgame if the survivor doesn't know to look out for it or wasn't able to hide in a locker before the last gen pops, and y'all have Lightborn (which makes an entire playstyle/item completely useless, but y'all were mad about Distortion). Survivors literally can't be oppressive; that is intrinsic to the killer role. The most "oppression" a killer will ever face is a toxic SWF, whose main goal was most likely to bully the killer in the first place by taking a highly coordinated approach that most survivors aren't doing.
2. Disable entire skills? Are you upset that killer powers actually have counterplay? Isn't that the entire purpose? It wouldn't be a game if survivors couldn't do anything against it. Not to mention, survivors need to actually learn how to counter three dozen killers, and most aren't effectively doing that at all. It's a very high skill ceiling.
3. Similar to being able to counterplay a killer; flashbanging, stunning, or blinding the killer during a pick up animation all take skill and proper timing to pull off. A survivor has to effectively learn the timing for a very tight window, and multiple timings for different pick up animations. You're mad survivors have some tools to... survive.
4. Powering up the generators is quite literally the main objective for the survivor. And if anything, "gen rushing" is more or less a reaction to the actual oppressive slowdown meta killers had access to in the past. Cleansing hex totems, blessing totems, taking hits or hooks for teammates on death hook, hiding because you're exposed, and more instances are literal recourses for survivors.
Your comment is crazy because you're essentially mad that killers have to actually have a degree of skill, too lol. Please spare me the killer tears when survivors have to put up with just as much shit as killers do. Or did your favorite killer get nerfed? If anything, your energy would be better directed towards BHVR, who doesn't know the definition of balance if it slapped them in the face or how to implement proper game design.
@13BeachesInVenice in terms of perks He's mainly referring to how when killer get something that's busted it gets fixed shortly after the outcry. When survivors get busted things (insta blinds, borrowed time, decisive strike, mettle of man) it can take them forever to balance it. Only time I can think of killers getting something busted for a prolonged period of time was ruin.
@ thank you
This video came out when I finally decided to get the Skull Merchant to do a study as to why she's deemed the "worst killer of all time" and I've gotta say, I love the way you edit
Really cool video, I really enjoyed the new editing style and your cute character. Also I would love to see a video about the singularity changes, if that is of interest to you. Thanks for the cool vid
This vid was.... Fantastic! The effort Zozo put in here is drastically great and large, and as a SM main, I feeled every part of her history with such an empathy and pain. Hovewer, I think I will stick around the new Houndmaster since I like the summoner style of gameplay. Also want to see future case studies as for Freddy - the weakest licensed killer above all of them ( My first main). God bless you, Zozo❤.
Wdym you felt every part of her history with empathy and pain, shes literally a video game character with 1 min worth of terrible lore and design along with the lowest skill floor and ceiling dbd has seen, shes not real
@@werewolfenjoyer5000 Its not about her lore. Its terrible. I talked about a character and her place in DBD as a killer. Only the person who mains her can understand that. And it doesn't matter what skill lvl required in order to play the character since different people got different skill level perspective.
Your older content was already good, but this is a huge step up! Excited to see what the future has in store! (For you and Skully)
great video, very thorough and covers everything very well
Awesome documentary, keep it up!
Damn, I found an actual gem just browsing through youtube, you definately deserve more recognition!
Honestly at this rate, I feel like Skull Merchant's last hope of being at least "decent" is with 2v8 when they inevitably add her into it, cuz she does feel like she'd be good as a decent supporting killer (assuming they actually go out of their way to rework her kit to actually work well in 2v8)
Can we just appreciate the editing in this video?
When you pointed out how Knight and Singularity have similar concepts behind their powers, I imagined what Skull Merchant would have looked like with all those little aspects to her power.
I feel like we missed out on a super high tech killer that specialized in surveillance and tracking. Would have been neat, if overwhelming, but give that Dracula and Vecna have like 4 powers attached to them the I wish Skull Merchant got a similar treatment
Part of it is also that her biggest content creators are terrible people, completely detached from them maining her, so her stigma worsens, shes just a cursed cat
Great video! I’m new to dbd and was curious why everyone hates her but it makes way more sense now lol
4:43 I mean, we’re talking about the same game where every survivor is somehow capable of repairing a generator just by fiddling with the same 2 wires for several minutes 💀😂
During the first version of SkullMerchant, I was still doing my No mither only thing that I'd been doing for like... 2 years straight. So SkullMerchant's ability did nothing to me.
This was great! There aren't a lot of characters that warrant this level of autopsy, so I'm just looking forward to whatever's next (shorter is fine!)
When RUclips recommends you a video you didn't know you wanted but actually really like? Sweet!
I was in a pub with randoms during her 3 gen rein. Nobody dc'd. It took 40 mins, with 3 injured survivors, and we almost broke the three gen with 3, but as soon as the 3rd went down, it was down hill from there, and it was jover. I was so proud of us though because we were randoms. I wouldn't want every match to be 40 mins....but that was an exciting intense match. I do feel bad for the Skull Merchant stans. Also...I feel bad for those Tricksters at the end of the video XDD. Good pathing on your part...poor Trickster lol.
I miss playing chess merchant, i could kick back, throw on lofi, win for free, and farm salty comments at the same time she really was peak
:( the references to the sorry state trickster is still in makes me sadge
This video was very informative, and very well put together. It was a treat to have you make such a long video about my favorite Killer!
It makes me want to get back into playing Skull Merchant, but with the overall community reception that Killer has gotten has rubbed off on me, coupled with the recent changes made to her kit, my confidence to even try to play her is quite low.
All that being said, I still wanna try playing her at some point...
SM haters when they are forced to stop at a red light when driving (unfair zoning)
I’m glad to finally watch this video especially during lunch break!🤘
SM mains when they have to go shower (they do not have haste while using shampoo)
@@InterchangeofNightIt’s so strange that my joke isn’t even personal against anyone but you have to be weird against people to try to be funny.
@@InterchangeofNightIt's not even a good joke. Op's joke at least made sense, your's is just "haha poo poo head". I shouldn't be surprise you have no sense of humor considering you're a skully hater.
43:05 I mean yes, most balances in games aren't based around logic and reasoning but feeling; if something feels bad it gets nerfed/ changed. People don't balance around logic, otherwise we'd be having MUCH different design choices in many games.
I gotta say, this video is super well put together. The discussions raised are points that many SM mains have discussed, and I am glad to see you shared in the sentiment that the 2.0 version of SM at least was healthier considering the amount of mistakes players had to make to give SM value. Me and Banette raised similar issues too with the SM updates, including the fact that players are now afraid of changes, as it could mean their killer is deleted purely because the community don't have a glowing reception towards them. Overall, it was a great video to watch, and it reminds me of what I truly miss on SM, her trap based identity that they pushed more for has been shotgunned to the grave and HoundMaster fills a niche I wanted, but not the Trap niche I having been aching for since Hag's release in 2016.
P.S. No, Freddy is not a Trap killer, he is just put there because no one else wants him.
Your channel is so underrated, there is a severe lack of high quality DBD content that isn’t just over or under edited stream highlights. I think you are the only DBD RUclipsr I enjoy watching besides ardetha, love your editing style too.
Keep it up man videos like this are sick I before the call to action I thought you had like 300k subs
Pardon I’m not best at English if I miss write
Someone here is a M&L fan, i recognized like half the soundtrack of this video.
I already know this will be a banger video
You genuinely have such a well put together video, I just found your channel and I was absolutely gobsmacked when I saw you were under 500k subs. This content is fucking golden and id love to see you get bigger
Top notch editing deserves more views
Here's to hoping this video and channel blow up cause the scripting and editing was really well done. I'll never not love watching a good hour long video on game balance, especially when this much effort was put into it
Hey man new sub here really loved listening to this while i work and would love to see more commentary content out of you. Very good video keep it up dude
I hate going against Billy, and really wanted the overheat mechanic to remain... but people hate me for thinking that way. That's essentially what happened to Merchant, but they got what they wanted. Is it fair? No, but there's a clear double standard here. I definitely think the fact that BHVR made it look like a Predator chapter didn't help her initial impression, and her base model isn't great either (she has trickster's face under that mask). That plus how terribly the drones were handled... yeah. I can see why she's disliked, but as a friend of mine pointed out, most survivors don't play the other side, nor keep up to date with how killers change. People still don't get how Onryo works, and she's changed three times since her launch.
Point is, Pure survivors don't care about balance, they just want the game to stay the same for them, for easy wins. They want to bully the killer, and get an easy 4 man escape. They'll BM and be holier than thou in the chat. Just how it is. As long as they never change, the balance will remain terrible.
From what we know there are 2 teams that make killers and it goes in order a team then b team what my guess as to what happened was both teams were told to make an intel killer one was Skully the other Larry and my theory on why Skull fells so slapped together is she was going to be a pure intel killer. No traps, no haste, no nothing just her drones telling her where people were and when Larry was being shown they realized they could have a bit more and that most of the player base wouldn't like an intel only killer so they added all this other stuff to her. The reason I think that is if you look at her trailer the clawtraps are NOWHERE the only thing in it is the drone telling her where the twins are and that's it. That is not even taking into account the same team did Xeno who has so much new to add like the fire effects and the tunnel system.
I've been watching your videos since the trickster video and your quickly becoming one of my favorite dbd RUclipsrs, I can tell you put effort into your videos and I didn't disagree with you about a single point in this video, it pisses me off how people complained about a c tier killer, get her nerfed into the floor and still complain, it amazes me how instead of bhvr fixing sm they don't redid her but covered it up with "look she has a dog!" Like at that point either rework her or just remove her from the damn game
They did a lot more than give her a dog, the power's far more interesting and intuitive, the design is way cooler, they let you pet the dog, and the character actually has interesting lore and personality outside of gooner bait lol. I think thats a lot more than covering her up, I think they wish they could remove her from the game though but people did unfortunately pay money for her
I remember hearing a rumor that Skull Merchant was supposed to be The Predator, but Behavior couldn't get the rights.
These Killer insight vids are prob my fav content on dbd yt. Thanks for making these!
I'm hoping to make more!!
The Skull Merchant is basically a survivor cosplaying a killer.
I'm really excited for that Hux video you teased. I'm a hux main. Been one since he released. And I found his update to be pretty damn good all things considered (a bit rocky on the ptb just)
Awesome video, the graphics and animations/renders were beautiful, as a former Skully main 😅
I greatly appreciate this video and hope it’ll gain a good amount of attention! The effort is palpable here 🥳
Also you hit the nail on the head with Houndmaster lol, onto her now ig
I really liked playing against Skull Merchant, I take her over Blight and Nurse any day. I can not understand people who rather want to face the two of them, than Skull Merchant. Yes, 3 Gen was a problem, but at least I could play the game and actually spent time, playing the builds I created. Against Nurses and Blights the Matches go by too fast, people dc quickly or kill themselves on Hook way more, than the survivors ever did facing Skull Merchant in the Matches I was against her. Even now I would rather play at the most buffed merchant, than against a skilled full aura reading Nurse on a small map. Then yes, I do not have fun playing against Killers like Nurse, as matches go by too quickly. Not to mention how sweaty most Nurses and Blights are, slugging and even tunneling you when the rest of your team already Disconnected and you are the only real player left in the Match now full of Bots.
Honestly I got the trophies from the “Tools of Torment” chapter (where she debuted) and yeah she’s got a difficulty curve to work with. Heck the generator trophy was the bane of my existence for quite time.
Not gonna lie, I’d love a video about the plague 3 gen thing. I’ve only ever heard horror stories about skull merchant’s three genning, plus I took a break from DBD during the 3 gen time frame, so I’d love something about how she wasn’t the only issue
Love the name "The Pyro" This Was A Great Video And Thank You For Making It X3 P.S Outed Yourself As One Of the Complainers Of Dbd...Who Am I Kidding We All Complain About The Game Here XD
I love your channel it's so funny and it's very intuitive 😊 all around great channel🎉
i cant stop laughing abt renato going byob in the lute 😂😂 too funny