For Dead by Daylight, big changes are coming. The most successful killer tactics will no longer be effective in the future.
Those who play Dead by Daylight know that frustration and joy are often only paper-thin apart. Whether you encounter a killer who plays “fair” or one who tunnels the entire time often determines whether you enjoy the game or wish you had never started it.
However, “tunneling” and “slugging” are two things that apparently bother the developers as well – therefore, they will be addressed in Patch 9.2.0 and prevented or penalized in various ways.
What is “slugging” and “tunneling”? In Dead by Daylight, the two terms have a fixed meaning but are often used derogatorily by survivors when criticizing the killer’s playstyle.
- “Slugging” means deliberately downing one or more survivors without hooking them. This way, the victims must be healed by other survivors while they can only crawl slowly on the ground – like a slug.
- “Tunneling” refers to the act of repeatedly targeting one survivor while ignoring all other survivors. The goal is to reduce the number of survivors as quickly as possible by fully focusing on individual opponents and ignoring everything else – essentially a “tunnel vision”.
Both practices have been criticized for some time. From a killer’s perspective, they are highly efficient, but they can make matches very one-sided or boring very quickly.
Those who tunnel strengthen the survivors
What changes with tunneling? Killers can no longer see the hook status of a survivor when hooking them, and they are not informed when a survivor is rescued from the hook. This does not apply during the endgame collapse, where this information remains.
Additionally, rescued survivors receive some temporary bonuses when they are rescued from the hook:
- Speed (Faster movement)
- Endurance (Can take a hit without going down)
- Transitory (Prevents pain screams, aura reveals, blood pools, and scratch marks)
- No collision with other players (killers and survivors)
- Immunity to killer instinct
- Can see the killer’s aura nearby.
The effects disappear immediately once the survivor performs a suspicious action – such as working on a generator. However, the effects will also disappear on their own after a few seconds. Additionally, these bonuses are no longer granted (except speed and endurance) once the last generator is repaired.
Furthermore, there is another system because:
- If a survivor completely dies before there have been a total of 6 hook status changes in the game, all survivors receive a bonus to repair speed for the remainder of the match.
- If the survivor who was last hooked is then sacrificed or killed (Mori) by the killer, generators in this match can no longer regress or be blocked.
To balance these new survivor advantages, killers also receive some new incentives to hunt different survivors. If they hook a “unique” survivor – that is, one different from the previous one – then the following advantages apply:
- The next kicked generator suffers additional damage.
- Temporary speed effect (faster movement)
- Other survivors who have been hooked less or the same number of times will be briefly displayed as an aura
These bonuses also no longer apply once the last generator is repaired.
What changes with slugging? If survivors remain in the “dying” state (lying on the ground) for more than 90 seconds without being picked up, they gain the ability to pick themselves up for the rest of the match. Additionally, survivors on the ground will move faster over time, allowing them to reach allies who can help them up more quickly. Furthermore, survivors can now regenerate while moving on the ground – which was previously only possible with a perk.
For killer fans, this means they may need to come up with new strategies in some cases, and a variety of perks will also be revised. It remains to be seen how the feedback from the test server will pan out, whether the changes have the desired effects, or whether the developers will have to return to the drawing board and explore other solutions.
If you are still unsure which of the many killers you should start your journey with, we have introduced all the killers in Dead by Daylight and revealed which one suits you.
