Developer Update April 2021 Discussion - Nightmare / Huntress / Demo / Twins & Perk Changes
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/241887
We’re back with another Developer Update, a series of posts going over the biggest changes coming to Dead by Daylight. This time around, we’ll cover a long list of Killer, perk, and quality of life updates that’ll appear in the upcoming Player Test Build (PTB).
KILLER UPDATES
THE NIGHTMARE
For some time, The Nightmare has stood out from the crowd with a particularly high kill rate, averaging roughly 3 kills per match. With that in mind, we’ve made some slight tweaks to bring him closer in line with the rest of the roster.
We’ve decreased his movement speed while placing a snare to 4.0m/s (previously no speed change) and reduced the maximum number of placed snares from 8 to 5. Likewise, the maximum number of dream pallets has been reduced from 10 to 7.
A handful of add-ons have also received changes. Add-ons which previously reduced action speeds now make various actions louder (repairing generators, grunts of pain, and footsteps). Black Box also has a brand-new effect: When an exit gate is opened, it is blocked for sleeping Survivors for the next 10 seconds.
Alarm clocks have also received some tweaks to make their effects clearer and more rewarding. Using an alarm clock will now make you fully immune to sleep— including sleep caused by a Killer hit — for 30 seconds. This effect is now shown on the HUD by turning your sleep timer yellow and having it tick down.
With these changes, we hope to promote more strategic use of his Dream Traps rather than placing them constantly during a chase, as well as encouraging Survivors to seek out and use alarm clocks. We’ll monitor his performance closely and adjust where necessary going forward.
THE DEMOGORGON
Our focus for The Demogorgon is to give it more mobility with its portals. We’ve made the following changes to base portals:
- Increased speed while in a portal
- Reduced cooldown after exiting a portal
- Increased Undetectable length after exiting a portal
On top of these changes, we have done a complete pass on The Demogorgon’s add-ons to make some of the lesser used ones more appealing.
THE HUNTRESS
Don’t panic: We have not changed The Huntress’ base kit. We have, however, done a pass on her add-ons to bring them up to modern standards. Yes, this included the infamous Iridescent Head.
THE TWINS
Last but not least, we have a small set of tweaks for The Twins.
- Increased cooldown after successfully downing a Survivor with Victor from 3 to 5 seconds
- Camera control is now immediately restored when taking control of Charlotte
- Silencing Cloth: Increased Undetectable duration to 20 seconds upon taking control of Charlotte
- Iridescent Pendant: Increased Exposed duration to 30 seconds when a Survivor crushes an idle Victor
PERK UPDATES
SMALL GAME
It has come to our attention that some of you really hate small piles of bones. To aid you in your totem destroying mission, we’ve made some long-requested changes to Small Game:
- Small Game now shows the number of remaining totems as tokens on the perk
- The detection range decreases by 5° for each totem cleansed
- Small Game no longer detects Killer traps
These changes improve Small Game’s ability to track and cleanse totems while also removing the antiquated part that only applies to specific Killers with traps.
LUCKY BREAK
Lucky Break now hides scratch marks in addition to blood pools to help you lose the Killer. To compensate, the total duration of has been reduced to 70/80/90 seconds.
SOUL GUARD
A small change here: Soul Guard now has a cooldown of 30 seconds after activating.
Realistically, this won’t affect the vast majority of cases. This change is purely to prevent stacking healing speeds and Soul Guard from getting out of hand.
OPEN HANDED
Take two for Open Handed: We’ve slotted this update back in for the upcoming PTB.
Open Handed now has an increased effect (8/12/16 meters), but no longer stacks with itself. This makes the perk more appealing on its own without needing to stack it with other Survivors in the match.
ZANSHIN TACTICS
A very straightforward change: Zanshin Tactics is now permanently active and also has a larger range.
BORROWED TIME
To remove some confusing intricacies with how Borrowed Time interacts with some Killers and the Oblivious status effect, we have removed the terror radius condition from the perk. To compensate, we have reduced the duration of the Endurance effect to 8/10/12 seconds.
OBJECT OF OBSESSION
This PTB also features the newly reworked Object of Obsession: Any time your aura is revealed to the Killer, their aura is revealed to you and gain a 2/4/6% bonus to healing, repairing, a cleansing speed. If you are the obsession, your aura is revealed to the Killer for 3 seconds every 30 seconds.
This new version has a few benefits:
- Being able to track the Killer
- Being able to deduce which aura reading perks the Killer is using when Object of Obsession activates
- Being able to attract the Killer and then sneak away before they can get there
With these changes, we hope to make Object of Obsession a more fun and interactive perk for both sides.
MISCELLANEOUS BALANCE
TOOLBOXES
The chance to receive a skill check while using a toolbox has been increased. This change makes toolboxes feel more interactive while they’re in use and is totally not because the lead designer had a skill check challenge and got unlucky three matches in a row.
HATCHES
Another small tweak: We have decreased the time the hatch remains open after a key is used from 30 seconds to 10 seconds. Like before, if the hatch closes naturally (is not kicked shut), the End Game Collapse will not start.
Please note that this is not the final change keys will be receiving. We’ll share more info on the future of keys as soon as we can.
HUD UPDATE
For the 4.7.0 PTB, we have made some more changes to the HUD; this time focusing on the visibility of Killer powers on the Survivor portraits. In this update, we have made improvements to:
- The Doctor’s Madness effect (also made it easier to differentiate between different levels of Madness)
- The Nightmare’s Dream World effect & sleep timer
- The Plague’s Infection meter
- Stalk meters & Ghost Face’s mark
Additionally, we’ve also adjusted the Survivor portraits so they no longer obstruct the bottom of power indicators.
STRUGGLE UPDATE
In an ongoing effort to improve accessibility, we have changed the way struggling works starting in the PTB. Rather than needing to mash a button, Survivors in their second hook stage will now receive occasional skill checks. The success zones are fairly large as we’re not looking to make struggling more difficult/deadly at this time.
Missing one of these skill checks will remove a chunk of your struggle meter. If you do not attempt to hit two consecutive skill checks, you will be immediately sacrificed. As you receive skill checks, your struggle meter will gradually decrease at the same rate as before.
Our goal with this change is to make struggling more accessible to players with repetitive strain injuries while keeping struggling as an interactive mechanic.
GRAPHICAL UPDATE: COLDWIND FARM
I was going to put a funny intro here, but it was too corny.
In case you missed it, the next realm slated for a graphical update is the Coldwind Farm! Check out some concept art from the upcoming rework.
On that note, we’ve reached the end of this Developer Update. All of the changes mentioned above will be available for testing in this week’s Player Test Build, starting April 13th. We look forward to reading your feedback once you’ve had a chance to try them out!
Comments
OoO is already annoying
More annoying
Bug stuff is usually in the PTB notes themselves not the dev updates unless a dev update is focused on addressing some massive game shattering bug like the hitbox issue from a couple updates ago.
Also, you would think people would be more upset about the fact his movespeed is bugged when carrying a survivor, currently when carrying he is even slower than nurse, that actually hurts him in game directly. You pretty much need to take agitation or at least starstruck just to be functional; and if hooks are far away they have like 30% more time to wiggle out versus any other killer without agitation on lol.
Me and my swf did this a few times but we never did gens. We just killed ourselves after 5/10 minutes. It was just a meme while we were drinking lol
Trickster changes are coming in Wednesday's bugfix, which will immediately go to live. I think a Dev also said they'll be on tomorrow's PTB but I'm not sure.
Actually rolling over laughing about your complaining about Zanshin Tactics, of all things. 🤣
The game could literally delete the killer role entirely and turn it into an actual Generator Simulator game, and you would still find a way to complain about it being killer-sided. Your trolling/inane thought processes are truly a marvel of the forum. Don't ever change. 👍️
If you've ever seen them in a streamer's match, they die in like the first 20 - 60 seconds of almost every game (If they don't outright kill themselves on hook) so it's not too surprising they think literally -everything- killer related is over powered haha.
So just enjoy the humor of it xP
so you're saying its ok to be unable to find a survivor after injuring them if they're running lucky break and iron will on hawkins because there will be no way to track them
What the hell are you talking about? Please don't put words in my mouth.
I've not said anything even related to that subject in any way shape or form. The most I said was in my first post a while ago, and that was this:
The Lucky Break buff was a bit much possibly; that is (maybe) a little over powered even if it is only for the start of the match (Have to see it in practice). They may need to make it increase your sounds of pain, or make it so your sounds of pain cannot be silenced rather for it's duration, to prevent it's use with iron will for that time. Even then we'll see, I need to see what it's like in practice first it might not be as bad as I suspect it could be; but it's worth keeping an eye on because it lasts for a long time and on some maps that could mean you just lose any chase if a survivor has it, and if 4 people do it's a real problem.
In general I like the changes. Here are some of my thoughts.
Pallet changes
It's a good thing to decrease the pallet count. I think fake pallets hurt much more solo queue players, because you have no clue which pallets were already thrown. I still think 7 is a lot to memorize, because you also have to memorize the real pallets. According to Miller's law 7 +-2 chunks should be a limit. But there will be maybe 7 fake pallets + 7 real pallets, in sum 14. But hey, let's test it. It will be better then before ✌️.
Alarm clock
The idea of the immunity is nice, but my main problem with the clocks is that I always have to run across the whole map to reach one. Most of the time I have to leave a generator for it. And after I returned to the generator I'm short before fall asleep again. Most of the time it's not worth to run the way. An increased sleep timer would be great or maybe nearer alarm clocks.
Iridicent Head
This change looks more like a fast balance fix. It's ok, but a little bit boring. I would prefer something like one shots only for targets outside the terror radius, because this will open a world of new build combinations, like tinkerer, trail of torment etc. And it has a better counter play. But I think I would allow maybe 3 hatchets with addons, because I'm not sure, if someone will try this build with only 1 hatchet and such strong conditions.
Btw. the map screenshots look awesome, really nice work ☺️👌
Best regards
Waldbeerlein
Agree 1000% with the person who said we should get chase points for being in chase with Victor. That's one of the MOST ANNOYING things about facing the Twins.
Increasing Demo's Oblivious time doesn't help when he stomps like Herman Munster everywhere! Can we make him quieter as he STOMPS along please???
LMAO they're really trying to use the statistics as their reasoning for nerfing Freddy. Will they use them as a reason to buff Plague or are the devs being picky with their stat usage? Also they went overboard, just like I predicted. Guess I should play as much of him as I can.
I like the Demogorgon changes I'm seeing. Hopefully we'll see more like Rat Liver being made basekit and the removal of most of his map-wide audio cues. How am I supposed to be Undetectable if the Survivors can hear me coming a million miles away?
Soldier's Puttee sounds like it should be basekit for Huntress. Glad Iri Head has been nerfed, although I kinda wish that they had given it a 24 meter range requirement to help PS4 players with Skilled Huntress since they are the only platform with no way of tracking this trophy/achievement.
I have played against the Twins a grand total of five times since their release and have never played as them, so I can't really say anything about their changes.
The perk changes sound good except for one of them (BT). Good riddance Object!
Borrowed Time's effect always activating can be problematic for high mobility Killers. Giving it a 32 meter requirement would have been better.
I don't really use toolboxes or items in general, so I'm not sure how to feel about this change.
WOOHOO FIRST KEY NERF AND STRUGGLE SKILLCHECKS!
Glad to see that I'll finally be able to know for sure what Madness tier a Survivor is at with the new HUD.
It's good that Coldwind's getting reworked. Hopefully the devs manage to fix the corn.
These changes don't seem to be very thought out for both sides to be frank , some of them ok, some unnecessary, some are just..a waste of time
non-stop killer nerfs over and over very little love. only took almost 2 years to get DS nerfed now you are buffing bt against the few killers that had a chance against it. small game is turning into a totem counter making giving even less reason to use hex perks. in the mean time gen speeds are so fast that games can be done in less than 5 min total. I am a freddy main and am surprised by the nerfs, you already gutted his slowdown addons to 6% for 2 addons and now they make things more noisy and you made him slower when placing them. the only part of him you are not nerfing is the teleport which as soon as end game happens is useless anyway. I would be fine with the addon changes for sound that if you had consistent sound instead of it breaking every couple months. hell there are entire sections of the silent hill map that give 0 sound at all. so before you make it were it helps sound how about you fix sound??? also literally all of these are nerfs in one way or another except for zanshin which i honestly couldnt tell you the last time i saw it. you are literally killing this game and killers are leaving. queue times are proof of it. when i started you would wait 5+ min for a killer game now its less than 30 seconds. @devs I would honestly like to know how many of you are rank 1-3 killer mains, because it really seems like none of you are. You can call me a killer main all you want and yes I am. but i play survivor and understand the balance of the game. so at this point its just a waiting game to see how long it takes this to join death garden. (yes this is copy pasted from another post)
Her hitboxes are fine, it's latency that makes the hits seem wack.
Play killer to red ranking in Korea server first, and then talk the balance, devs have no any qualification to make balance, even they are not red rank killer.