Dev Update (April 2023)
Developer Update | April 2023 - BHVR
Developer Update | April 2023
It’s been a little over a week since the Tools of Torment Mid-Chapter hit the Public Test Build (PTB), the server where we test out and fine tune upcoming changes before pushing them live. As always, our team has been combing through your feedback and identifying room for improvement before the update debuts on live servers.
We want to start by giving a huge thank you to everyone who took the time to leave detailed and constructive feedback. Thank you! Your feedback has helped shape this update’s release. In this month’s Developer Update, we’ll reveal all of the changes we’ve made to the Mid-Chapter between the PTB and live releases.
Healing
Possibly the hottest topic since it was announced, the PTB raised the base healing time to 24 seconds from the usual 16 seconds. Some tweaks were made to Med-Kits with this in mind. Changing such a fundamental part of the game is a very touchy subject, so we kept an extra close eye on this change to see how it would play out.
After reviewing player feedback, we found that many of you agreed that the speed which you heal others was already in a good spot prior to the update. This change also had knock-on effects elsewhere in the game, making effects like Mangled and Hemorrhage stronger and making ‘slugging’ (leaving Survivors in the dying state) even more effective.
Therefore, we have reverted the base healing time to 16 seconds.
On the other hand, we found there was a lot of support for tuning down Med-Kits in particular. Med-Kits allowed Survivors to heal themselves multiple times whenever it was convenient to them, leaving their teammates free to work on Generators while they do so. We have decided to shift our focus to Med-Kits with a series of changes.
First and foremost, all Med-Kits will have a total of 24 charges (the same as the PTB).
Second, we’ve increased the healing speed bonus when healing others across all Med-Kits. The new bonus is as follows:
- Camping Aid Kit: Increases the speed that you heal others by 35%,
- First Aid Kit: Increases the speed that you heal others by 40%.
- Emergency Med-Kit: Increases the speed that you heal others by 45%.
- Ranger Med-Kit: Increases the speed that you heal others by 50%.
Third, all Med-Kits will now have a 33% speed and efficiency penalty when used for self healing. This will reduce the number of times a Med-Kit can be used to heal yourself and make it take longer to do so. This means that a Med-Kit will by default grant one self heal over the span of 24 seconds (before factoring in Add-ons).
Combined, these changes will decrease the power of Med-Kits when used for self healing, but increase their power when used for healing teammates in return. (We all know you’ll probably continue using them for self heals, but at least the choice is there!)
Last but not least, in light of the tweaks above, we’ve made some adjustments to various Med-Kit Add-ons:
- Rubber Gloves: New effect – Increases the Great Skill Check success zone by 10%.
- Butterfly Tape: Increases healing speed by 5% (was 3%).
- Sponge: New effect – Increases the Great Skill Check success zone by 20%.
- Needle & Thread:
- Added effect – Increases progression bonus for succeeding a Great Skill Check by 5%.
- Removed effect – No longer provides bonus Bloodpoints for hitting Great Skill Checks.
- Medical Scissors: Increases healing speed by 10% (was 12%).
- Surgical Suture:
- Added effect – Increases progression bonus for succeeding a Great Skill Check by 10%.
- Removed effect – No longer provides bonus Bloodpoints for hitting Great Skill Checks.
- Abdominal Dressing:
- Increases healing speed by 15% (was 20%).
- Rarity increased to Very Rare (was Rare).
- Gel Dressings:
- Adds 16 charges to the Med-Kit (was 14).
- Rarity increased to Ultra Rare (was Rare).
- Anti-Hemorrhagic Syringe: While this Add-on is unchanged, please note that its healing speed will be reduced by the Med-Kit self healing penalty (resulting in a 24 second heal by default).
We hope these changes will tone down Med-Kits when used for self healing while making them more appealing for altruistic heals.
The Hillbilly
On the PTB, we tested out some changes for The Hillbilly, both toning down the overheat mechanic and adjusting two of his top performing Add-ons. While the overheat mechanic felt less oppressive, many of you raised concerns with the changes to the Engraving Add-ons, reminding us that these Add-ons allowed The Hillbilly’s power to be used in more situations. This overshadowed the overheat adjustments and made the whole package feel like a downgrade.
For the release, we have reverted the changes to the Death Engravings and Doom Engravings Add-ons.
We have kept the tweaks to the overheat mechanic to make it less limiting than before, making The Hillbilly feel better to play.
Perks
The PTB featured updates to various Perks, including some meta options for both Killer and Survivor. When it comes to toning down a powerful Perk, some level of contention is expected. But with that said, we’ve heard some very convincing arguments for a few of these perks, so we have done some fine tuning before the changes go live.
Dead Hard
Since reducing the Endurance effect any further would make Dead Hard too finicky to use, we instead opted to limit the number of times it could be used by requiring a safe unhook to activate the Perk. While this had the intended result of limiting the number of times it appeared in the match (and prevented it from being used in the first chase of the match), some of you pointed out that this new design indirectly encouraged the Killer to chase the unhooked Survivor. This makes a lot of sense; the unhooker may have activated their Dead Hard, but you can be sure that the unhooked Survivor does not have it.
For the update’s release, we have changed Dead Hard to instead activate when you are unhooked or unhook yourself. This way, the unhooked Survivor becomes less of a clear target for the Killer.
Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance
On the PTB, Pain Resonance was changed to only activate the first time each Survivor is placed on a Scourge Hook. This change was specifically made to reduce the number of times Pain Resonance could activate in a given match, especially later in the match when one or more Survivors were likely to be sacrificed. While this did have the intended result, many pointed out that this left the Perk in a fairly weak state, not quite stacking up to other regression Perks.
Considering Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance can now only activate four times in a match and requires the Killer to target different Survivors, we feel comfortable making it more rewarding for Killers who choose to take on the added challenge.
Therefore, we have increased the regression amount of Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance to 15/20/25% (was 11/13/15%).
We hope those who choose not to chase the unhooked Survivor will find this perk much more rewarding.
Boon: Circle of Healing
Since this Perk no longer grants the self-heal ability, Circle of Healing found itself in an awkward spot. The altruistic heal speed bonus was nice, but when you crunched the numbers, Circle of Healing rarely provided any benefit. A 50% healing speed bonus would only shave roughly 5 seconds off of a heal, but it’s easy to spend that much time running over to the Boon’s area of effect- and that doesn’t even begin to factor in the time it takes to set up.
With this in mind, we have increased the healing speed bonus on Circle of Healing to 50/75/100% (was 40/45/50%).
While this won’t make setting up or running to the Boon the optimal choice in every situation, we expect this to make it more impactful if the Boon is nearby.
Autohaven Wreckers
Last but not least, we managed to sneak one more change into the Autohaven Wreckers map updates. A while back, we added some new tiles to the realm. One of these new tiles- which featured a window and pallet- ended up being fairly unsafe. We rebalanced this tile, but it unfortunately didn’t make it into the PTB in time. However, an updated version of this tile will be available upon release. Take a look!
With that, we’ve reached the end of the Developer Update. We want to once again thank everyone who gave the changes a try and left detailed and constructive feedback. Our team will continue to keep a close eye on things once the update goes live to ensure that everything goes smoothly.
Until next time…
The Dead by Daylight team
Comments
Excellent changes. Big thumbs up 👍
That's...actually almost perfect! Dead Hard will still remain a top tier meta perk, but now if you go for all four survivors you can guarantee four chases without a third health state, good for chill killers, sucks for sweaty ones.
I'm curious to see how the gen defense nerf will affect the general balancing though. Still, a wonderful job on listening to the feedback, it's much appreciated!
Just washed to put a n my +1 for this update. Huuuuge thank you for listening to the billy feedback because double engravings nerfs would have decimated his fun completely. I still think the DH rework was fine before this nerf, but I'm not going to complain about this change either. Good changes on COH and medkits too. This is gonna be an awesome patch!
Any chance we can get a release date for this patch?
I know it might be asking for a bit too much after giving us such a great dev update, but I just cant wait to get my hands on it :)
Any idea when this update will come out?
Honestly, with this change to Pain Res, it shouldn’t be a scourge hook perk any more and should work on any hook. Only being able to use the perk at most 4 times and also have to deal with scourge hook RNG really makes it not worth it.
By picking DH over any other other exhaustion perk you make the decision to have an exhaustion perk that won't exist for your first chase(s) and will be only available twice per match at most. It's Smash Hit tier now.
~in 2 weeks
Wonderfull changes, this is pretty much exactly what the community wanted.
No more Billy nerf, good compromise with the healing by still nerfing self healing but keeping altruistic healing the same, further tweaks to the perks.
This has pretty much been the perfect ptb. Drastic changes to then fine tune them after feedback. I can't wait for the update!
Actually, this change is perfect for a scourge perk. It allows you to choose when you use it, so that you don't waste it at a time when there's no gen with 25% or more progress.
If you down a survivor for the first time and a gen is nearly complete, scourge. If you you know there's no gen with progress, stick them on a regular hook and save the regression for the second time you hook them.
You can run multiple Exhaustion perks though, as long as you can "control" when the other perk activates (so basically as long as it's not Sprint Burst). Use something like Balanced Landing in your first chase and then Dead Hard after you get unhooked or something. Spending half your perk slots on Exhaustion perks is probably a very terrible idea however I admit.
I also feel like this change probably kills the perk but it's an option you can run sometimes.
If you still need another exhaustion perk along your first exhaustion perk then the said perk is just bad. I also just don't see people ever sacrificing 2 perk slots for two different exhaustion perks. The only exception being Adren, for obvious reasons.
Personally I think I would have preferred adding protection hits as an activation method in additionto unhooks. At least that way you're actively losing a health state to potentially gain one in chase.
This way it turns it into an effective anti-tunnel perk though, which isn't awful.
So now Killers will have to "wait out" Dead Hard again, just not during the first chase.
This reduces the power of the perk but ignores all of its actual issues. I guess it was to optimistic to expect to see a the single most enduring Survivor meta perk to be treated like every single Killer meta perk.
Agree massive step in the right direction from the original.
Dead Hard - I think this is overcomplicating things. Why not just have it - Dead Hard is not available until you have at least one hook state?
I get the idea of what is happening with DH. Early game DHs can really set the killer back before he has pressure, that's a good change. The current wording creates a max of two uses. Even with the above suggested change that's still what would happen most of the time, but creates the possibility of a survivor getting away and recharging DH when exhaustion wears off. That's the kind of advantage survivors sometimes need later in the game once the killer has a ton of pressure.
But a great idea to limit it's early game use and to not attach it to unhooks as that is way too hard for soloQ and easy for SWFs.
Circle of Healing - The boost was the obvious thing needed to make the perk potentially viable.
Pain Res - Creates an interesting scenario. There are lots of games where I'm on a generator where I know the killer is taking the survivor to a hook. Sometimes I finish the gen right before the hook (killer wasted a lot of time), sometimes the killer catches me right before the finish. This change amplifies that effect.
I think that is a good game design, but others might disagree on that as the game can swing based off a couple of seconds.
Healing Revert - Had to happen. If for no other reason you shouldn't be changing base kit and meta perks at the same time. You nerfed the major killer and survivor perks (plus a powerful survivor addon) - throwing in such a massive basekit change is not the right time for trying something like that out.
Not to mention is that it was having lots of (potentially) unintended side effects on slugging and self care.
Med-kits - When the PTB was first announced I wasn't sure about this. I almost never run top level items/addons. Since it was announced I've been burning through my purple and green medkits. Yeah, I see the complaint, they give such a massive advantage to have.
Thank you for listening, devs! Really glad you guys listened to the community. Love the 16s altruistic heals and I love the elegant change of DH to become a passive deterrent to tunneling much like how DS used to be.
I would've preferred a method to regain tokens for Pain Resonance rather than an extra 10% regression, Considering all the counters to the actual perk and the actual requirement to reach a scourge hook in the first place.
As for altruistic healing, Wasn't it the whole point to make spreading out injuries matter now that nearly all regression perks is pointless? Meeting on the halfway mark would've been more ideal for altruistic healing in my opinion.
You complain because you can't freely tunnel now it work exactly how supposed to. You can even use all otr, ds and dh combo to make killer potentially lose game with tunneling.
Please don't go through with the CoH change. You may have killed the solo side of the perk, but it will be completely broken for SWFs. These changes were to reduce the amount of fast heals.
Because someone can't dislike a change unless they are a tunneling killer. Good to know you'll never be a reasonable person to interact with.
LOL
how biassed you are, even killer mains made videos showing it was unfair on PTB.
dude, it got stronger than the last change so yeah, it's a buff
you can't change reality just because you wanted more
buff = making something stronger
nerf = making it weaker
Nothing you say will change that, the INCREASE slow down was a BUFF.
The end.
This isn't coming back, right?
What is the plan to prevent face-camping if you are still nerfing the self heal aspect of Circle of Healing? Literally today in solo-queue I’ve faced nothing but face-camping killers who has tunneled out everyone immediately. It’s been literally the worst time.
Legion ? =D
All the love for fellow Legion mains !! <3
Devs what are you doing with reverting the altruistic healing esp. with COH?
I main Twins and I was looking forward to that extra healing time so you know the time it takes to down switch to Charlotte and walk over to the downed survivor would help.
Most survivors know to group up against Twins so thanks for nothing!
Great changes overall. Thanks for listening to player feedback. If I may, I'd like to suggest one additional change to pain res. With there only being 4 tokens, it feels bad if you waste a token when there isn't even a gen at 25% progress. For example, from my experience a lot of times you down the first survivor and just as you are about to hook the survivor a gen pops (likely the only gen being worked on). So you lose a token and don't get any significant gen regression. It would be nice if it only lost a token and activated if there is at least one gen with 25% or more progress.
So you'd be in favor of CoB, OC, and even Eruption at their peak regression values, but you get, at most, 2 uses of each per game then the perks deactivate permanently?
Interesting.
"revert the healing nerf"
They directly attacked the self healing so it will take 24 seconds with any medkit (33% speed and efficiency penalty for self heal with a medkit). the altruistic healing was reverted to 16 because it was not only an unnecessary change but also impacted more than just the healing, it was affecting recovery speed too and had it take 48 seconds (which is longer than would have been for the finishing mori/basekit unbreakable) to get up off the ground without perks, and even with the help of another survivor. Basekit altruistic healing at 16 seconds is fine, it takes up the time of two survivors. People can no longer self heal in 8 seconds which was a huge problem, maybe actually read further into an update at least once, this is hugely beneficial for killers.
Mmm. Self heal times should have been kept in my opinion, but let's see how things turn out.
Overall this feels like an extreme killer nerf while only a slight survivor nerf.
Lets me wondering where are slower, methodical killers going to get their slowdown from...
Seems like all recent changes are focused on making the game chase oriented, while discouraging tunneling and camping, but they don't address the fact that survivor efficient gameplay remains just as strong and that chase outcome currently largely relies on survivors mistakes rather than killer agency.
I would be thrilled to see changes made to the maps that actually encourage chase based builds, as well as new powerful chase perks
What exactly do you mean by "self heal times should have been kept"? If you mean as they currently are on live servers, they are far too fast and efficient, with addons/green medkits. If you mean as they were on PTB, they actually are being kept at 24 seconds, and only the basekit altruistic healing is being reverted to 16 seconds. This is good, there is more incentive to heal other people with a medkit, if you heal yourself it is significantly slower and takes the entire medkit (if it has no addons) to do so
Self heal times were kept.
You can only Self heal using either a medkit (nerfed to 24s) or Selfcare (as always, takes ages)
How was it an 'extreme' killer nerf when only three killer perks got nerfed, which aren't at all necessary and many killers don't use anyway?
I never use CoB, Overcharge or Pain Res, my killer games are completely un-nerfed. And I main M1 killers like Ghostface and Pig.
I'm even more inclined to use Pain Res again now, as it'll be much more strategic in choosing when to hook on a scourge based on gen progress, and I just like running healthy anti-camp/tunnel perks anyway, like MYC. (It provides proof I wasn't camping/tunnelling when I inevitably get accused of doing so)
If anyone from BHVR could respond, I'd really appreciate it.
Will DH still deactivate if you whiff it? It did on the PTB and I was wondering if you were planning on keeping that change moving forward.
Thanks!
Very well done changes. So happy to see the devs listened to the overwhelming feedback about healing.
My only complaint (sorry) is that all my higher valued med kits are getting nerfed. That is so many bloodpoints I spent to get those higher priced items for them all to just get changed on me. 😭
RIP Med Kit bloodpoints, maybe you can spend some time with the wasted bloodpoints from the lightening rods and Red Envelopes.
I was afraid I was only gonna play killer starting next patch but I'm pleasantly surprised. Patch is mostly a win all around. Kicking gens is only fun for a time, after all.
Changes to self heal should hopefully make chases more worthwhile. Can't wait to see how things go.
Mandy has answered this already I think:
(though my tired brain can’t figure out front this wording which is the intended way..)
Lemme clear up DH as I'm seeing a few things on it.
You get unhooked or you kobe (use Deliverance), you will have Dead Hard proc'd and ready. You can be healed, Dead Hard is still there...when you are injured again and want to evade the hit and use your Dead Hard it's gone...until the next time you are unhooked. If you were successful in evading the hit (so you timed it right), Dead Hard is gone until the next time you are unhooked.
If you were not successful in evading the hit (you timed it wrong for example), Dead Hard is gone until the next time you are unhooked.
I hope that clears up some questions on it.
Yes, thank you
Single use attempt. BHVR has stated multiple times their original wording was incorrect.
surprised bhvr didnt beg the survivors for forgiveness for daring to suggest actual meaningful nerfs
all this drama just to gut a few of the last usable killer perks and call it a day
Well this is a joke. Survivors can still delete any injuries they get, so hit and run isn't going to be a viable tactic, and each hook can potentially get you 2 dead hards to deal with, so you're still going to have to play the game assuming everyone has it, until you see them use another exhaustion perk. Lunges will continue to not be worth using and survivors will continue to be able to erase any mistakes that they make at windows or on loops.
I was hoping to run an anti-heal build after this patch, but now, I don't know. My gen regression is gone, and I guess I'm going to just have to suck it up and continue to be strapped for time, because killers have to get gutted while survivors get the lightest, tiniest slap on the wrist.
I'd be nice if anyone at BHVR actually played killer and understood the problems with it, but eh, this is about as much as we can expect from them I guess.
Imagine still complaining about dead hard 💀
I think you really have upset a lot of killers now. Still get decent games but against a swf on comms that just wants to gen rush it's going to be even more diabolical than it already is.
Way to go.
I'm complaining about a lot more than just dead hard. The killer's time economy is pretty messed up as it is, and now that regression perks got nuked, with no healing nerfs to compensate, it's going to get a lot worse.
The base healing and billy add ons changes shouldn't have seen the light of earth in the first place. It was a mistake that could easily killed the game. I don't know why you thank them.
So COH is back to 8-second altruistic healing.
Didn't they learn anything from the go-live on this?
I don't use those perks either. I main wraith with coxcombed/all seeing combo and pain resonance, enduring, spirit fury, bamboozle perks. The update actually greatly benefits me, given my play style.
There is however no denying that I still get destroyed by efficient survivors and that, while sure some killers do fine without heavy regression because they either have it build in or they are super aggressive and can end chases very fast, not every killer is like this and there is a clear portion of the player base that are going to find themselves against the same old super efficient survivors, with nothing to push back.
You seem to like new pain resonance, because you can be strategic with it, but honestly I don't think it's gonna be much use for me anymore. It was never a consistent value perk to begin, but now it's even more inconsistent. I'm gonna try it out, but I kinda feel I'm going to be replacing it with something else soon. Since there is no slowdown perks anymore I'm thinking information?
What could be a good 4th chase perk?
When will the patch be released?
Also, somewhat disappointed that Dead Hard will still be a meta perk.