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