Dead by Daylight killers, if you love kicking the last three generators, and leaving survivors to run in circles while you keep the match going forever, and ever, and ever, I’m afraid your days are numbered. The stalwart three-gen strategy, scourge of the DBD survivor, is targeted and nerfed by a transformative new update from BHVR. The new Dead by Daylight PTB is live. Alan Wake is the next survivor. But generators have been completely transformed, rendering the often frustrating strategy of repeatedly kicking the final three impossible.
There’s a lot going on with Dead by Daylight right now. The latest PTB, which allows BHVR to test tweaks and additions ahead of Season 31, is live. Simultaneously, the new DBD survivor has been announced as horror game icon Alan Wake, scheduled to arrive on Tuesday January 30. But buried among all this big news is something much more fascinating. Dead by Daylight killers – or rather, a particular type of DBD killer, and their favorite, frustrating strategy – are being nerfed. Survivors are going to have to change their tactics, too, as Behaviour Interactive totally overhauls how generators work.
The three-gen strategy is both simple and aggravating. There are seven generators on a Dead by Daylight map. To open the exit and escape, survivors need to activate five of them. This creates a kind of bottleneck. Once four generators are active, and only three remain, the killer can quite easily patrol those last three generators and kick them to regress all of the survivors’ progress. The killer doesn’t chase anybody – they just endlessly kick the generators and stop them being activated, trapping everyone in an endless game of attrition which normally only ends when the survivors lose patience and decide to disconnect.
But that’s all about to change. Thanks to a huge update that is now live on the Dead by Daylight PTB, each generator can only be kicked by the killer a maximum of eight times. So, if we’re down to the final three gens, yes, they can still patrol and kick them, but not infinitely – at some point, they’re going to have to chase the survivors down.
Until now, when a killer kicked a generator, it would regress the generator’s progress by 2.5%. That’s now doubled – if you’ve nearly finished cranking a gen and a killer comes by and kicks it, it will now instantly regress by 5%, and then continue regressing until you reactivate it.
All of these changes also apply to perks like Pain Resonance. Pain Resonance will now cause a 5% rather than 2.5% drop. Likewise, if the generator with the most progress has already been kicked eight times, the effect of your perk will apply to the generator with the next highest progress. But it’s not all about killers.
Survivors, if killers are losing the three-gen strategy, it’s only fair you give up something in return. Gen tapping, whereby survivors can restart a generator and reverse its regression just by running past and quickly pressing the activation button once, is now impossible.
If a generator is regressing and you want to get it started again, you need to stop, hold the button down, and refill it for a couple of seconds. No more taps. So, the three-gen strat is gone. Gen taps are gone. In theory, we should get matches where killers are doing more chasing and survivors are doing more cranking. Will this make for a more balanced and satisfying game? Let’s hope so.
In the meantime, get the latest DBD codes for January 2024. You might also want to try some of the other best multiplayer games on PC.
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