MID-CHAPTER DEVELOPER UPDATE PART 2 - DISCUSSION
KILLER UPDATES
THE DEATHSLINGER
We’ve kept an eye on The Deathslinger since his release last year, and we have a few small changes aimed at (haha, get it?) his power.
Currently, there is almost no delay between aiming down sights and being able to fire your weapon. Likewise, there is almost no delay between cancelling your shot and going for a basic attack. This creates lose-lose situations for the Survivor where there is nothing they can realistically do to avoid getting hit. For example, if they vault a window, you can easily aim down sights and fire without giving them a chance to dodge your shot. But if they decide to not vault the window, you can easily cancel your shot and hit them with a basic attack instead. Additionally, since there’s almost no delay, the Survivor must constantly dodge and run erratically just in case the Killer decides to shoot.
With that in mind, we’ve made the following changes:
- You can no longer shoot until you have fully aimed down sights
- Increased the delay after cancelling your shot before you can start a Basic Attack
- Decreased movement speed penalty while aiming down sights
Since The Deathslinger would spend more time aiming down his sights than before if you quickly aimed and fired, we felt it was only fair to increase his movement speed while aiming down sights to compensate. This will cause you to lose less ground while aiming and keep up with the Survivor a little longer.
Last, but not least, we’ve increased The Deathslinger’s terror radius to 32m. The Deathslinger is the only ranged Killer that does not have a "lullaby", which meant terror radius reducing perks like Monitor & Abuse could allow you to get close enough to surprise and hit a Survivor without them getting any warning whatsoever.
Like usual, we have also gone through a few of The Deathslinger’s add-ons and given some small buffs to the least used/powerful ones.
THE PLAGUE
The Plague has been in the game for a while now and hasn’t seen a whole lot of change, but that ends today: We’re making a series of quality-of-life changes that should make her more effective and more fun to play.
First, we looked at infected objects. Previously, interacting with something would cause your infection to increase faster. We’re adding an additional penalty to interacting with something that is currently infected, meaning your infection will increase even faster than before. Additionally, we’ve increased the base infection duration on objects (like generators) from 35 seconds to 40 seconds. These changes will make infecting objects feel much more impactful.
Next, we turned to her Vile Purge. The Plague takes a massive hit to her movement speed whenever she is on cooldown (after purging or cancelling her purge). We’ve increased her movement speed from 2.3m/s while on cooldown to 3.6m/s. This will cause her to lose far less ground when she does so.
One of the things that felt really bad for the Killer was when you let get of your power button a little too soon, causing your power to be cancelled entirely. Now, tapping the button or letting go before the minimum threshold will cause your power to continue charging until the minimum amount has been reached. (Basically, it now works like the Huntress’ hatchet.)
Finally, we’ve increased the time it takes to cleanse at a fountain from 6 seconds to 8 seconds.
Like the other Killers that are changing in this update, we’ve revisited The Plague’s add-ons as well and did a complete pass on some of the less powerful or rarely used ones.
SURVIVOR ITEM ADD-ONS UPDATE
Surprise! We also updated the description of item add-ons in this update as well. Like we’ve done for Killers, each Survivor item add-on will now list their effects with numbers rather than descriptive terms like moderately, considerably, and so on. Additionally, add-ons the grant a Status Effect will also have a brief description of what that Status Effect does.
PERK UPDATES
Oh, did you think the list last week was all of them?
Windows of Opportunity
Much like Zanshin Tactics, we’re removing the cooldown from this perk entirely. We’re also increasing the range to 24/28/32m as well. Go away, cooldown, we don’t want you here!
Repressed Alliance
Repressed Alliance has the potential to save a good chunk of progress when timed well, but due to the high requirements for the perk to activate, it can often not be ready by the time you need it. With that said, we’ve reduced the time required to activate the perk to 55/50/45 seconds.
Built to Last
This perk shipped with fairly safe numbers to make sure it couldn’t get out of hand, but that ended up making it a pretty unpopular choice. We’ve reworked it to be far more effective at what it’s meant to do.
Hiding in a locker for 14/13/12 seconds with a depleted item in your hand will cause it to refill 99% of its charges. Each use of Built to Last reduced the number of charges refilled by 33%.
Any Means Necessary
Previously, we reduced the cooldown of Any Means Necessary and saw more people start to use it. It’s still not quite where we’d like it to be, so we’ve added an aura reading effect on all dropped pallets. This way, as soon as it’s ready, you’ll know exactly where you can use it!
No Mither
No Mither allows you to trade a health state for other bonuses, but these bonuses aren’t strong enough to warrant using the perk. We’ve increased the Grunts of Pain reduction to 25/50/75%. Additionally, we added a 15/20/25% increase recovery speed while in the dying state.
Side note: Yes, we know a lot of you use this perk as sort of a “hard mode”. We’re not looking to completely get rid of that, as silly as it may be.
Mindbreaker/Fearmonger
This is a simple one: Survivors who are working on a generator will now suffer from Blindness in addition to Exhaustion. This’ll cause the perk to not only prevent the use of Exhaustion perks, but also any aura reading that the Survivor may have.
THE HATCH & KEYS
The hatch, and keys by extension, have long been very contentious topics, leading to some heated debates. We have some changes incoming to make them a little fairer.
First, the hatch will no longer spawn if there’s more than one Survivors in the trial. This means you’ll never have to worry about the last three Survivors vanishing when there’s still one generator left.
Additionally, the hatch will now take a few seconds to open with a key once it is closed. Progress does not reset when the Survivor cancels the interaction. This eliminates the problem where a Survivor can simply sprint straight at the hatch and instantly open it and escape.
With that said, these changes will make the “Where Did They Go!?” achievement impossible to obtain, so it will be changed to ‘Escape through the Hatch using a Key.”
BOON TOTEMS
As promised in the Anniversary Live Broadcast, we are introducing some new gameplay around Totems, these will add an extra objective around the map and much like Killers Hex Totems, are tied to Survivor Perks.
Survivors will be able to bless a totem to change it into a Boon Totem and these blessings are designed to offer comfort to the Survivor Team, a small safe haven. However, unlike a Hex Totem, the Killer can also quickly interact with the created Boon Totem to completely remove the associated blessing, once again turning it into a dull totem, they will also be able to hear the Boon Totem when in its range.
Each Survivor can only have one Boon Totem active at a time. This Boon Totem will combine the effects of all of their equipped Boon perks.
This will add some more strategic decisions for survivors to make when it comes to their interactions with Totems.
With that, we’ve come to the end of the Developer Update (for real this time!) All of the changes mentioned in this two-part post (and more!) will be available for testing in next week’s Player Test Build! We look forward to hearing what you think, and until next time…
The Dead by Daylight team
Comments
"One of the things that felt really bad for the Killer was when you let get of your power button a little too soon, causing your power to be cancelled entirely."
You know what really feels bad as Plague. Hitting a survivor with a full with the Vile Purge, and they don't get sick
Okay, so... let me get this straight:
You really deem Myers with NO TR AT ALL on two tiers fair?
Survivors needs to Bless their Totems in match, Ruin/Undying is activated right at the start.
NOED has the same conditions, if there's no Dulls remaining it wont activate. Not sure if it'll activate after breaking a Boon in the EGC though, probably not but we'll see.
M&A Tier 2 Myers is not 0.
For the type of killer he is, yes.
The devs are slowly making it easier and easier for good survivors to easily win the 1v1 against any killer, in a 1v4 game where the killer is supposed to be the power role. Two hook games will be the norm at high MMR soon!
So, does this remove all traps from the Pigs inventory or does she still have 4?
The hatch and key nerfs sound great. I am so glad they changed the achievement. This is my favorite part of the update.
Deathslinger’s TR nerf sounds like too much considering the other changes he got.
Everything else looks fine to me.
So with Vanity mirror he gets wall hacks without the movement speed penalty? That's actually pretty nice. Throw on some dead rabbit or Monitor with it and that can be a really fun build.
lets hope she still has the 4 otherwise this addon will not be very helpful to the pigs slowdown at all later in the game
Can't you nerf keys without the hatch?
I'm a survivor main and I don't like keys. I use them for rift challenges, that's it. I'll avoid them on the bloodweb and even if I do have to buy them I never equip them without a rift reason for doing so.
If there are 2 survivors left sometimes it's just "a hatch game". I'm not looking for the hatch to key us both out, but for whichever of us is left after the other dies. This is completely negated.
NERF KEYS NOT THE HATCH.
So far all the changes look great for the most part. But I'm anxiously waiting to see how they're going to touch my baby Trickster with the add ons being revised and possible additional changes that may come.
Big changes and most sound great but I'm not fond of the Boon totem.
Killers are already dealing with how fast gens pop while trying to do their objective, now they also have to bust Boon totems? Meh.
Theres a bug/feature where the hatch has collision when invisible. You can find where it spawns fairly early in the game.
Jeez those are really big nerfs to Deathslinger.
Like, he was already bad on Console but now he's even worse.
Still no switch crossprogression, nice. Other than that, this is a pretty good update.
Time to rename Deathslinger to Deadslinger. With these changes he might become the weakest killer in DbD easily since there was just two things going for him and both of them are going to be nerfed.
Damn, right after I started learning him. I'll stick to Nemesis now, I guess that's what BHVR wanted us to do.
It's much healthier the way Behaviour is changing it imo. I've been in plenty of games where after 1 or 2 survivors die, one of them just starts looking for hatch and hiding instead of doing generators or helping the team (and we would have escaped if they had done otherwise). It also stops people with keys from just ditching the team before the objectives are finished, leaving them down a man.
Slinger would have been better off with a lullaby instead of the TR changes to be more in line with other ranged killers such as huntress. The delay seems tentatively ok although running erratically was a fair point of being chased by someone with a gun.
Mind breaker sounds more interesting, now that 5 seconds slowdown does not start until killer is physically visible or heard, might start using this for jumpscares although some killers do this more confidently with their powers.
Boons seem like they will be a headache and conflict with killer hex builds; I personally use a 4-5 totem setup often with thrill/undying/retribution/haunted grounds. Maybe increasing the totem count would be good?
Overall pleased to see addon reworks, for better or worse. Many add-ons collect dust, I would love to see more unique uses outside of increasing base powers of killers (like nurses return to original location addon as opposed to basic range/cooldown add-ons).
Please tell me there's more add-ons we can see, especially from licensed Killers.
Or if Nemesis is actually going to get some changes that make him more pleasant to play.
Really disappointed that Legion wasn’t one of the many killers that received an addon pass or change. His addons weren’t updated when his power was changed so long ago. He has two useless purple addons and is consistently ranked as one of the worst killers. Not to mention that he has several bugs, including the ability to detect survivors while in feral frenzy. Devs hate Legion confirmed.
100% justifable nerf to the killer called Deathslinger. The most unhealthy power in the game.
Insta shot, insta cancel, almost instant reload with double add ons.
Power with 0 downsides.
Just dodge!
Amazing, fantastic, incredible. This is better than a homerun, this is a milestone. If you keep this up, expect very good things for this game.
Will be interesting to use new windows of opportunity with open handed that's gonna be a long range
Deathslinger nerf is overkill. He already had bad gen pressure, and quickshotting was the only fun way around dealing with the warning sound. Now he'll need to flickshot instead. Yet another change that doesn't make killer harder as much as it makes killer bizarre.
In this PTB we see all changes mentioned?
but the current system is what turns games into this dull game of hide and seek when there's two survivors left. 2 solos without a key will generally both stop doing anything and wait for the other to be found and die. 2 survivors in a swf together with a key will creep around the map looking for the hatch - this is especially excruciating on swamp.
Yes, although please keep in mind that there was one change that unfortunately didn't make it into the update in time: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2517379/#Comment_2517379
Is the custom music for killers still something you guys are looking at? It seems like we had a couple more, but now you guys don't really full rework killers and it feels like the rest of the cast may mis out on custom music.
The Shape seriously needs some attention too. His play style is out of date and needs reworked.
Plague Buff : Yeah
Deathslinger Nerf : Why ? Only needed the TR change, but slowing down his aim and everything is so bad :( Quick shot was actually a skill and now survivors have even more chances and time to avid his chain. I'm not liking those changes.
Perks : WoO and Any M N are amazing ! Build to Last is worrying me especially with Medkits.
Hatch : yeah !! but i think it should still spawn if all gens are done and there are multiple survivors. they earned their other way to escape imo.
Boon totem : we still don't know the effect of the perk so for now i don't know, but i'm not a huge fan of killer having to look for a totem while they are already running low on time ^^
If you can dodge a bullet. You can dodge a ball.
so this change has two problems for deathslinger
1) The increased TR means that deathslinger will not be able to land first hits, so he has land 2 shots every single chase despite having only 1 shot. This goes on a killer that moves extremely, has zero mobility options and has slow reload that is forced with almost non-existed 4vs1.
2) The second change went from deathslinger aim and survivor movement impacts the reliability of landing a shot to survivor always dodges because they can perfectly react to deathslinger's harpoon shot at a distance. Deathslinger's aiming skill has no impact on being able to land the shot.
deathslinger might as well be 115% ms now now that he has irregular terror radius to 110% m/s killers and that his ability is nearly irrelevant.