I just got back into DBD

Oh, and a bunch of maps got rebalanced. Lery's is totally remade, and Springwood has multiple different versions. There's a new Stranger Things map that is one of the new worst maps in the game (in my opinion).

Kindred got buffed into OP territory. Balanced Landing nerfed into fairly underwhelming territory (though it was necessary to stop several infinites). Pop Goes the Weasel is the new hotness when it comes to gen slowdown perks.

They removed or toned down a lot of the unreasonably safe loops. Gen speed got nerfed a little bit, but efficient survivors can still get things done quite quickly. I also took a six-month break, and anecdotally, the pace of the game has felt better to me since returning.

DS now activates when you get unhooked, and stays active for 60 seconds. Its design purpose is as an anti-tunneling perk, but a lot of people just run it with Unbreakable so that the killer has a no-win decision.

I concede that I may be wrong because I'm only describing it off the top of my head, but did they not say that was the specific design intent, when they reworked it?

Alright, well 8 months ago was October of 2019 so the last chapter you saw release was the Stranger Things Chapter? Since then 2 chapters have gone by (not counting chapter 16 which is about to be released) which have seen the introduction of The Oni and Deathslinger, both killers were well received all around from story and lore, to aesthetic / cosmetics, to power and overall viability. Yui and Zarina, their respective survivors, are ok, but nothing game changing really comes to mind immediately from those two.

The Oni is a disgraced Samurai from feudal Japan who killed his father and has some real rage in his bloodline, he's also related to the Spirit who is actually a descendant of The Oni. So that's a first for DBD where they're actually connecting characters with related history. Yui is a pretty cool (& tough) cookie who is a motorcyclist racer in a kind of gang so to speak, she had family issues so she found a new one basically in her gang and she became a kind of rouge-ish female icon.

The Deathslinger is a brilliant engineer who operated in western times during the American Frontier period, but because of his immigrant heritage he was trodden all over and taken advantage of in the land of opportunity and he eventually became violent. He designed "The Redeemer" himself and became head of the irish Hellshire Gang of outlaws. A large part of the inspiration for the lore of the chapter came from Stephen King's The Dark Tower, and gameplay inspiration was from a desire to incorporate FPS like mechanics into Dead By Daylight. Zarina is a lebanese-american documentarian who is supposed to symbolize the "Modern spirit of the old wild west" who is seen as an "uncompromising documentary filmmaker" bent on revealing the truth, demanding justice and the like.

The Map for this chapter was also notable, as "The Dead Dawg Saloon" is the first map to change the design for beyond the walls of the map, you can see canyons off in the distance, and it's also the first map that features the sun (dusk or dawn, one of the two). It also introduces a brand new game mechanic- Breakable walls, something the developers are testing out as a new mainstay feature of gameplay. They started with the Dead Dawg Saloon and when they get a better feel for how they want to work it they will slowly incorporate breakable walls into all of the older maps.

We also have the archives, I think that might have been released about the time you left about 8 months ago, it introduces a new way to tell the story of dead by daylight revealing lore entries about different characters and the world of DBD. It also comes with The Rift which is basically a battle pass, there's a free track and a premium track the latter of which costs 1000 auric cells (which you can earn all back if you complete the full rift) and includes a myriad of all kinds of premium and other cosmetics worth a lot of bang for your buck if you're willing to grind through the full 70 tiers. The stuff that shows up in the rift will not show up in the store for at least a couple of months maybe a year, since we still don't have the cosmetics from the original and first Tome I in the store yet.

We just had a stream for the fourth year anniversary and they announced a bunch of new information that I can't quite recall all at once. They're planning a full massive graphical update / overhaul, they announced a brand new mechanic for the start of the matches sort of like a "Beginning endgame collapse", the endgame collapse is meant to speed up the end so we can assume that the opposite is true for this mysterious new mechanic which is probably intended to Slow down the beginning.

As always matchmaking, and dedicated servers are constantly being worked on as usual.

I can't think of much else at the moment.

Oh, and the Deathslinger is a worse Huntress.

To each their own!! Everyone is allowed to find something fun, even if it's not the best and most OP option. I've gone up against some good Deathslingers.

Excuse me whaaa-...?

If you're struggling without Ruin, you probably should not be at the rank you're currently at. If you have to resort to Forever Freddy, that's like saying you play with Iridescent Head and Infantry Belt every game and complaining how easy it is.

DS is arguably the single strongest perk in the game, even when there is an obsession and no one is actually running it.

Survivors got some decent perks, killers mostly trash perks.

Number of players is up thanks to covid quarantines.

Graphic updates look awesome if they stay that way when we get them. I'm a console peasant.