Dev Update: 10.2.0 Perks Update
Greetings, Fog Dwellers. Today we wanted to talk to you about some of the perk changes (spoiler alert: 58 perks are changing) and content that you can expect in the next PTB, as well as the reasonings behind them.
Back in update 9.6.0, we added Diminishing Returns to the game. You may have noticed that this feature did not ship with exponential balance changes to accompany it; we wanted to ease players into the change, monitoring the impact on perk selection first, while we watch to see if any issues arise before making further changes. We feel that now is the time.
Our ultimate goal is to update effects that bypass or are minimized by Diminishing Returns, and to buff gameplay effects that can safely be affected by Diminishing Returns to allow players to play around with builds and perks that aren’t picked often. Overall, we will have 26 perks affected by these changes. Today, we will start by highlighting two:
Do No Harm
While healing another Survivor for each Hook State they have:
- You heal 30/40/50% faster.
- Great basic Skill Check, grant 3% more progress.
- Increase the odds of triggering a Skill Check by 5%.
Dev note: We wanted Do No Harm to better distinguish itself from We'll Make It and other flat healing speed perks. We added a scaling increase Skill Check odds and made the great skill check bonus scale as well. It should find a home with Survivors who like skill checks and skill check perks.
Knock Out
Whenever a Survivor drops a Pallet, for the next 6s, if they move 10m away from it, they gain 20% Hindered for 3/4/5s.
This ends early if the Pallet is broken.
Dev Note: We want Knock Out to really feel impactful for those cases where Survivors refuse to loop around a pallet. We've increased the range to account for some longer loops, as our intent is that this should only impact players who intentionally run away from a pallet. We've also updated the removal effect to now also end the Hindered early if the pallet gets broken, even if it's already been applied.
On top of adjusting perks that were impacted by Diminishing Returns, we are making changes to 23 general perks to breathe new life into them. We’re also adjusting 9 perks that either promote unhealthy playstyles or are oppressive while avoiding the impacts of Diminishing Returns. We’ll be sharing the full list of changes in tomorrow’s PTB patch notes, so stay tuned!
While the primary intent behind the general perk changes is to make them more valuable to newer players, we also want to create opportunities for them to be valid options in the wider meta. We’ve focused on buffs and effect changes to general perks to improve their viability while making some of the more confusing perks easier to understand. Although in some cases, we are bringing Tier I and Tier II values closer to what players can expect from a fully upgraded perk to support our newer players.
Finally, we wanted to come back to the Survivor Intent System we previously shared with you. This feature will be making its PTB debut this week and we couldn’t be more excited! Put simply, the system allows Survivors to send and receive short, pre-defined text messages mid-match to coordinate, from splitting up, to calling an unhook.
This new system will be enabled by default but can be adjusted (like choosing which messages you want to use) or disabled in the Settings menu and comes with muting and anti-spam protections. Plus, based on community feedback, we’ve added a visual signifier to show if someone has this system disabled so you know who’s able to see your messages at a glance. We plan to continue iterating on this system in the future, including adding more selectable messages, so we look forward to hearing your feedback!
We hope that you’ll look forward to playing around with these new changes on the PTB, and we eagerly await your feedback. You won’t have long to wait, either! The 10.2.0 PTB goes live tomorrow (Sept. 15), alongside full patch notes detailing every change and addition.
Until next time…
The Dead by Daylight Team
Comments
DbD really needed a big perk overhaul — I'm really looking forward to seeing all of the changes tomorrow.
it doesnt matter what you people do if playing one role (survivor) is so miserable with this mmr that no one wants to play it. 45 minute queue for killer which is the only role decently fun to play. Great. How about making survivor less miserable?
Very interested to see the rest of the changes tomorrow
I was hoping we would, but we're getting the perk update and the chat wheel in one patch, and we're getting 58 perk changes instead of 45? Whether the changes end up being good or not, for a mid chapter I'm pretty excited for this patch.
So excited for the Knock Out buff ahhh!
Japanese dbd twitter account posted changes to spine chill, distressing, shoulder the burden, thrill of the hunt, road life and nothing but misery
That is nice . As much as i appreciate the survivor intent system . The biggest issue with the role for me are quitters both people who just dc and those who give up on the match by going afk or running at the killer. I've had matches where we win despite someone quitting in their first chase for no reason . What boggles me is how they can quit my match and get into another one before the match they just ruined even ends . More punishments and changes need to happen to those who DC constantly or mentally check out of a match at any incovenience. That is what trully ruins solo queue for me more then anything and it happens nearlly half the match when i play survivor.
The changes sound like they were made before Vigil was nerfed. Now they negatively impact all players significantly more.
From what I read the new shoulder gives you a broken status for 120 seconds and it injures you if you're healthy
it is indeed quite a bit in this patch!
Yeah Broken has more downsides than Exposed too. But once per match seems totally reasonable, in normal MMR you hardly ever see more than 1 Shoulder.
It also says that it only activates one per trial across all survivors. So instead of once per survivor it's once per all survivors. Not sure if the translation is correct
Yeah but that is reasonable I think. Glad they worked out a way to allow that interaction.
Honestly very concerned about Knock Out, on normal killers it might be fine, but on a killer like Wesker, Legion, Ghoul or to a lesser extent Lich that can vault pallets or lift them up it might be a little too strong in that the killer doesn't have to take the intended distance around the pallet.
We're going to be doing the "pooped your pants" walk a lot more 😅
It appears the perk deactivates for everyone once it is used. Frankly I think is overkill. Changing Exposed to becoming Broken is fair, but I am against the idea of your perks deactivating due to the actions of other players.
I hope they change dissolution in this ptb otherwise this combo will be discusting and boring to go against.
I am pretty sure that dissolution does count as a pallet break so knock out would deactivate
Yes but the survivor obviously will leave the pallet when dissolution is active to waste the perk timer but now they will have 20% hindered in their back, I’m not looking foward to go against this.
Same. I dont really mind Shoulder the Burden, since I dont go against the Survivors who would make the Perk a problem (and neither do the majority of Killer players).
But I am really not a fan of Perks deactivating because someone else did something. Especially since this hurts SoloQ the most, since you dont know other peoples Perks before the game. And especially in SoloQ StB was already way weaker, since you could neither control that you are the person doing the Unhook nor control what the unhooked person is doing.
Meanwhile highly coordinated 4 man SWFs (the rare breed where StB is actually a problem) will still get huge value out of the Perk.
I really hope this means cutting back on the awful pallets that you physically can't drop without getting injured/downed because the killer can just swing around it. Survivors love looping pallet structures and playing for 50's but sometimes, especially a lot lately, you have to "distance-max", pre-dop and keep running for your best chance to survive.
Pair these bad pallet structures with bad ping (which there is a lot of lately) you're just dead.
Good for swfs who can coordinate perks for maximum value. Not so good for solo queue, it will lead to wasted perk slots. Particularly if this 'once per trial total' thing applies to more than one perk change.
Same I have only been shouldered a handful of times in thousands of solo queue matches, so it is not an issue in "normal" MMR.
A problem might be that in solo queue you might be with a duo or trio who use the perk for their party and not a random player who might need it more.
@Mandy is there a special reason why the Japanese account shares more perk changes than the official dev update? It just feels a bit off to me when different accounts share different information :/
This is part of making sure Regions get slightly different information, and more to what is discussed in their communities - rather than just a translated version going out to all the regions. The CM's for that region are responsible for what they come up with based on the PTB information.
Ok that makes sense. Thanks for the answer!
I'm also looking forward to tomorrow's PTB. It look really promising and I'm happy you finally do another big metashift with some changes for more and healthier perk variety!
I'm looking forward to it as well - as a player as well as my job!
We're gonna need you all to be really tight on the feedback, so that perk names are mentioned clearly etc as this is going to be a lot to keep track of.
I hope the 58 Perk update puts Survivor back to a playable state but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
The Windows of Opportunity nerf is a mistake.
Why would you guys do this? For fun? For diversity's sake? It feels like Behaviour is completely out of touch with this change. This perk is what makes the game accessible to new players, and it's on Kate Denson, an easy-to-obtain Survivor. It's what lets players begin the long, arduous process of grasping one of the most important core mechanics of Dead by Daylight. By proposing, and enacting this change, you would penalize learning players. You're thinking of turning what used to be one perk into two, and that's neither fun nor interesting - it is just economic inflation.
If players want to continue using the current Windows, they will have to additionally obtain and equip Five Moves Ahead which costs at least 9,000 Iri Shards or 2,000 at some undetermined point in the future. This is cruel at best and only makes playing the game harder for players who need WoO the most. This change doesn't affect many long-standing players of the game at all. Five Moves Ahead is differentiated enough already by having a cooldown and activation requirement; these perks ALREADY co-exist healthily. You don't need to change them just because 5MA isn't nearly as popular, not many people can or want to spend 9,000 shards on a character just for a side-grade to WoO.
My disabled significant other, who has recently started playing DBD despite my warnings, has literally just unlocked and prestiged Kate. She's been having a good time with the game, and I've been harping on WoO for a while now, and now I'm going to have to be the bearer of bad news and tell her that this perk, that has been largely untouched for YEARS, is now changing for the worse for no discernably reasonable cause, and that she's going to have to spend even more of her hard-earned shards to get the same result with ANOTHER perk slot taken up. She has trouble with keeping track of visual information and nerfing Windows will mean she will have a SIGNIFICANTLY HARDER TIME LEARNING for literally no other reason than a developer being bored. She's already really discouraged on looping (she comments about how she'll never learn all the time) and it doesn't help that you don't have accessibility options for controller (where is the hold/tap for interactions???). I've been trying to help her get started with that, and to have this come out literally RIGHT WHEN I'm trying to teach her is some ######### timing.
B.I., purely looking at statistics and making changes based on that is not tenable and only leads to negligible buffs/nerfs or complete unviability. You don't actually understand why WoO being popular is a good thing. When you implement changes without considering very deeply what, and who those changes might affect, you affect thousands of lives.
Please do not push the Windows of Opportunity change to the live build.
It is unnecessary, unfun, and unhealthy for people who actually enjoy playing your game.
Nothing but Misery buff makes me a happy man! Can't wait to use it.
Oh my sweet summer child… Do you really think that? Survivor Meta Perks will get a bunch of Nerfs with some bones thrown at them. Similar to nerfing SB, Vigil and Deli while buffing Adrenaline a bit (which you might not even activate).
WoO will also be nerfed by only showing Windows while Five Moves ahead will be nerfed by only showing Pallets. So if you want the old effect you have to dedicate half your Perk Build for that. And both Perks are completely fine.
But I guess since we are nerfing the most popular Survivor Perk (WoO), we will also nerf the most popular Killer Perk… right? right?? /s
There's probably till a lot of buffs on survivor side that we don't know yet and nerfs on killer side.
The WoO and Five moves ahead change is to make them have separate identity and not windows overpowering five moves ahead, now it will actually be better as pallets are more useful than windows. Both are meta perks (windows is the most used perk in the game) and if you are good enough you will not need to use those perks and know the locations of pallets and windows.
Also it's Windows of opportunity, not pallets of opportunity.
As I said, there will be more buffs for survivor perks and maybe they haven't revealed important nerfs for killer perks, you can fully counter pain res with repressed alliance btw and it's very overrated imo.
They did reduce it to 4 hits, it was revealed in Japanese dbd, it will still be 5% but it will now also decrease the vault speed.
Yes Pain Res will only work on the first 2 survivors now. And Lightborn does blind you now but only in 1 eye.
It might be a translation error but looks like Decisive Strike has been renamed again to Indecisive Nudge - the killer will be immune to the stun 60% of the time.
It's probably to not make rapid brutality + save the best for last + nothing but misery strong, so that's why it will remain 5%.
Shoulder changes should not go through. If you are getting hooks as a killer you're doing fine.
I am neither using WoO or Five Moves ahead. But nerfing them just shows that BHVR once again listens to the loud people. Because the Perks are no issue at all. A bad Survivor with WoO will still be bad, you can tell the difference between an actual capable Survivor and a yellow aura gamer pretty easy.
Yet Killers act as if WoO is making them lose games.
I will wait for the full list of Perks, but I sure hope there are some Aura and Slowdown Perks on that list.
as a non windows user i truly won’ be affected but i gotta wonder, are crutch killer perks getting nerfed too? Starting to feel like this balance is in favor of killers lately.
Blood Favor, Dissolution, and Dead Man's Switch were all mentioned in the spanish blogpost.
Yes, exactly that's how it deactivates. Translation from Japanese is kinda misunderstanding
And this is something which I then dont really understand.
Dissolution deserves a Nerf, no questions here. This Perk is so boring and unhealthy.
But Blood Favor is completely fine when it is not part of a full Hex-Build with TOTH. It is a good Perk, but it is a Hex-Perk, after all. Even if it is not so different from Dissolution when it comes to its function (making it unable to use Pallets), but as a Hex, I think this is fine. Not as a Hex which takes ages to cleanse, but as a regular Hex, no issues.
And DMS… Depends what they do. Might be a numbers nerf or might be something related to how it blocks Gens. E.g. by not blocking a Gen when a Survivor is not manually leaving it. But personally I think that DMS was fine as well.
I'm gonna test the perks and the community wheel (a really appreciated feature) on the PTB and make sure to give feedback!
The time around the anniversary event and before the Chorus of Sin chapter felt really bad due to the stale and boring metagame, so I'm more than thankful that you, the devs, do such a big update.
(a bit off topic but it deserves a mention) I also appreciate the fact that this month is much better cosmetic-wise with Xenomorph King, and six other cosmetics. So, if you can, it would be nice to pass that feedback to the cosmetic-team that we love this old frequency of cosmetic releases (It was also a criticism you responded in the reddit ama)
It obvious this perks update will affect huge players base playing style/ ability both on killer & survivor side, but for the better or thw worse, we will have to wait to see.
Pain res again??? 4 is already so few instances and you gotta time it right to get value from it. Thats insane.
Overall i really like what i've seen so far, but a few things i'd like to mention regarding knock out:
- Knock out losing all effects once the pallet breaks might be a bit too extreme. I understand the worries but as it stands it locks the perk out of the hands of many of the killers, including the cannibal, which the perk even comes with.
- I would suggest reducing the hindered severity once the pallet breaks instead of removing it completely. Something like going from 20% to 10% once the pallet breaks would still incentivise playing around the pallet, instead of locking the perk behind killers able to vault or harm players at a range.
So far I really like the changes, especially the shoulder the burden nerf, Thrill is a bit questionable, but we will see how it works it out, but it doesn't really help much with totem defense
On the Shoulder the burden end, I feel like the limit to having it happen once per match is enough on its own. The broken effect isn't really necessary when the perk cannot be stacked multiple times.
Having the only change be a limit per match and not extra damaging downsides would keep it useful in SoloQ whilst limiting the potential of a coordinated team to remove killer pressure and imo be the best middle ground between what we currently have and the proposed changes.
Don't worry it was a sarcastic post.
It will be 4 hits now! And with a new effect to decrease vault speed. So you'll get the perk sooner.
IMO this is more an issue with the specific Killers in this case.