How do I pressure competent survivors?

Kinda old video but still a very good one explaining how to get pressure on survivors

You mean from the old movie back in the day?

I would recommend purely focusing on improving your chase. From there you can maybe take a look at a Tier list and see where your killers are at, and then think about maybe playing something that has a higher power budget/skill expression. So if you play trapper maybe look into hag or take a gander around the B-A tier selection.

The two things I actively try to work on all the time are getting better at chase and trying to keep track of survivors.

The biggest piece of advice is realizing that you will occasionally lose games and that's ok. I got better in chase by noticing when a survivor is a good looper and sometimes I decide to chase them instead of trying to outright win that game. It's a conscious choice, but chasing the 'good one' has made for some interesting moments, even though I obviously didn't get many kills.

I basically turn that game into a 'practice game' and that's helped me get better over time. Obviously I don't do that every game, but it's also helped me realize when I'm overcomitting when I don't mean to.

Tracking survivors is more of a game sense thing that you get over time, but info perks help a lot. Lethal pursuer is a staple in most of my builds, and usually something like BBQ or darkness revealed that has synergy with it. Really anything that keeps the game rolling, which could be noticing a boon location or a gen with a bit of progress where you can probably find someone later on.

Ideally, if I can track, chase, hook, repeat, the game at least has a good flow of constant pressure. Choosing to disrupt as many survivors as possible keeps them busier with anything other than gens and might get some protection hits too.

If they’re actually good + SWF coms especially there isn’t much you can do if you’re on an m1 killer generally speaking.

What it comes down to is you need hits in under 20 seconds to not be falling behind, which as said before is near impossible if they’re good on most the killer roster. They could literally just hold w in a straight line and you wouldn’t meet that requirement. This isn’t taking into account looping, exhaustion perks, second chance perks, god pallets ect even. You have to hope they play loops and make mistakes. This gets flipped though if they’re a group just pre dropping all pallets to gen rush, then you don’t have much counter play. The unfortunate meta issue is all those hits in under 20 don’t even matter if they have a CoH up as those hits aren’t even gaining you pressure or time as they’re healing faster then the time it took you to get the hit in the first place.

Essentially it comes down to (assuming you’re playing correctly) just hoping they make a lot of mistakes you can capitalize on. If they don’t you lose.

Of course this is all highly dependent on what killer you’re playing but holds true for a majority of the roster. If you had specific killers we could get more detailed but we’re having to be generic here.

When you compare chase, hit, down, pick up, and carry times to gen speeds the math doesn’t add up, hence why to come out ahead you either need them to mess up heavily or unfortunately tunnel/camp. Now most groups do mess up and make mistakes thankfully, but I’m telling you assuming you’ve got a good group playing optimally.

If it’s good vs good you generally are the security guard in this scenario as you felt.

Lot of good suggestions so far.

To add my own, pressure is just a fancy way of saying "Doing stuff that causes as many survivors as possible to not be on gens." In that light, if there's ever two Survivors in one spot, that's where you want to be. Doesn't matter if it is a gen, a heal, or an unhook, if you can manage to show up you'll have 2 survivors running from you instead of just 1. Another good tactic if you can pull it off is to steer chases towards gens. Especially gens you know are getting worked on. If you can stop somebody else's gen progress for 10s while the chase barrels through where the Gen is, that's great for you.

You're in the hour range where killers typically hit a wall. You start to see more competent players and you get matched against literally every skill bracket. The 500-1000 hour range tends to be brutal for killers. You get a false sense of security from facing baby survivors one match, and then a rude awakening from 4000 hour survivors the next match.

Make sure you have your basics down. Don't just assume you understand how to run every basic tile efficiently. Study it. Work on your basic mechanics and specific killer power mechanics. It's way too early to focus on balance and builds. You can play Builds by Daylight and that can carry you to a point, but you just kick the can down the road. I play in a 20k hr SWF that easily 4 outs bad quad slowdown killers and also gets 4k'd by great killers with 1 or 2 slowdowns. Builds will not save you, and slowdown does nothing if you aren't hitting survivors with regularity.

Beyond the mechanics, you need reps to develop game sense and the ability to read player movement. It really comes down to experience and repetition. There's no shortcut or guide out there to tell you to do X when Y because DbD doesn't work that way. Take it from someone who played killer in comp for years. DbD isn't played in a vacuum. You just have to develop a feel for timing, player movement, player positioning, and figure out what works for you. The second someone starts rattling off "survivors hold W for 32.7 second and 2 survivors work on a gen for 43 seconds, hooks take 12 seconds", it's safe to tune it out. You'll experience paralysis by analysis when you try to reduce DbD to a spreadsheet.

You either put in the hours to learn Blight/Nurse to where you can dunk on anyone that's not a tourney team, or you don't. There's a reason you don't see Pigs and Wraiths in serious tournaments, the game is not balanced around the basic M1 killer performance. You can be literally the best mindgame god on the planet, but you aren't going to win against four survivors who are focused and well coordinated if you are playing some D tier killer.

To be able to give more targeted help I'd have to know what killers you play and what builds you use on them? Beyond that here are three general tips.

1. Your most important chase is the first one of the match, if you end it quickly there are 5 gens left and three survivors not on gens, you take a normal amount of time to end it your looking at 2 to 3 gens left and you're climbing up a hill. To that end if you're struggling with early game chases take lethal pursuer or discordance and go straight to the place with the most survivors at the start of the match, the moment you show up one survivor will play the loop, the other survivor/survivors will either try to hide or leave the loop, go after those ones as they've put themselves in a bad position and you can usually get a quick first hit, then it is up to your play to land the second hit.
2. You need to keep a mental picture of the game in your head at all times. This means you need to remember where you chased before and then when you're chasing survivors herd them to that area, remember you're in control of where the chase goes, the survivors have to react to you, once you've had a few chases in the same area of the map that area becomes a dead zone and much easier to catch survivors in, you also want to force this dead zone to appear near uncompleted gens, making those gens really hard to complete in the future, and keeping your chases near gens means survivors either have to not work on those gens or risk giving you free hits working on them while you're chasing nearby. Another mental picture you need to keep in your head during the game is survivor locations, whether you've gotten this information through perks, by gens popping, unhooks or just visually seeing a survivor you can know the general area most survivors are in most of the match, then it is simply going to the points of interest in their general area to find them. As a rule always go where you know there are multiple survivors, only one can run a loop at a time so one of them is going to have to give you an easy hit. This knowledge also helps you know when to drop chase, survivor going to an area with no other survivors that you haven't chased in before, leave them, survivor taking you to a strong area away from important gens you know survivors were near not to long ago, leave them. Only ever chase on your terms, never the survivors.
3. Implement the right strategy for the right time of the game, lots of people advocate for camping, but it's rarely the right move, it's only smart when you identify you can't contest the remaining gens/all the gens are done, the survivor is close to hitting the next stage or their entire team is injured so they can't rescue in your face, proxy camping is a bit different, if you can pressure the hook while also pressuring gens definitely do it, this creates an insane amount of pressure on the survivors. Same goes for tunneling but there is more nuance to it, ideally the best way to pressure is down one survivor hook them, find another survivor hook them, then find the first survivor and then repeat, in that way you're keeping up pressure while also getting people out fast, but don't hard commit to this, always take the easiest chase early on in the game. Hard tunneling doesn't tend to work out that well. In a hard tunnel situation survivors tend to be more than happy to early drop every single pallet in the map, playing extremely safe, while their unharassed team just sits on gens. Against SWFs and higher mmr in general during a hard tunnel people are going to body block you at which point if you continue on your hard tunnel with out save the best for last, you're going to lose the match, with save the best for last, this will win you the match though, especially if you're willing to pivot from your hard tunnel to one of the blocking survivors when they take a hit in an area that isn't safe. Hard tunneling and camping can work out really well against weak survivors but strong survivors will punish you for it.

Beyond those tips I'd have to know what killer you're using and your builds, killers all excel at different things while being weak at others. Without knowing your killers/builds the best I can say is take perks which enhance your power over perks which improve something you're weak at, better to have overwhelming force in one vector than mediocre force in multiple vectors.

This is honestly one of the best ways you can improve at the game. I actually get spun, whiff my power and misjudge the distance on lunges fairly regularly; I often just brute-force pallet loops and don't play high-tier Killers, but I still get a good number of 4Ks even against good Survivors because I'm always thinking in terms of macro, never get fixated on winning this one chase. Almost every decision I make is calculated.

To pressure a survivor is to make them do something other than a gen. The killer needs 8 "minutes" of hooks plus 4 chases. Survivors need to avoid chases, locate gens, and do 110 seconds of gens each.

Chases start when you finish a hook animation, and end when you finish a hook animation. Obviously the first chase starts with the killer spawning in.

Optimally a survivor gets hooked, and you get another hook within 60 seconds. If you can't get a hook within 60 seconds you need to do more than 240 (60×4) seconds worth of damage to the survivor time economy.

As that is almost impossible the killer should almost always camp a hook. Try to hook centrally to pressure some gens while camping a hook. If survivors unhook before a hook stage progresses they have advanced your "8 minutes" by 1 minute. Always try to reduce survivor action economy. You should almost always go back to hook. Someone came for unhook which means 2 people are being pressured off a gen. And 1 is a hook state closer to death.

Always tunnel, almost always camp. Don't bother kicking gens unless no survivor will touch it in the next 2 "minutes" (Survivors alive × 25 seconds) or you have gen kicking perks like Nowhere to Hide.

I run a few gen perks and force survivors to 3-gen. That's my best strat and it works even against really good survivors when I'm playing Spirit.

Choose 3 gens to protect throughout the match, pressure them, and let the other generators get complete, it's very simple and can win you games 75% of the time.

If your a chasing type of killer rather then a pressure/hit and run killer, your best bet is to not chase one survivor for a while and go for others.

Since the game uses escape based matchmaking, not skill based matchmaking, you won't always get good matches for either side. The best way to improve is record all your games. Afterwards, toss out the wins (unless someone juiced you for a stretch within there). Rewatch the losing scenarios, and try to think of other ways you could have done things. Did you hear a gen being worked on the side? Maybe you could have swapped aggro. Did you kick the pallet? Maybe you could have played it/bloodlusted it. There is always something you could have done differently, and the goal is to test out that different strat in another match.

Once you have that goal to test something different in mind, try to chase purely to get better, and ignore gens. Maybe bring only lethality perks, or passive slowdown, and just see how well you do. You aren't playing for kills, you are playing for shortest chase times possible. Maybe your MMR will drop, but you now are learning against different people, hopefully less skilled players, so you can climb that ladder of skill/gamesense/knowledge without being forced to skip a bunch of rungs.

Think of it this way. I can facecamp as Bubba and consistently get minimum 2 kills, maybe 3 or 4. That means my MMR is increasing all the while. In theory I will eventually go against too many people strictly better than me, and I will get less kills. Since I never learned how to properly play the game, and was reliant on the shortcut of facecamping, I never had to learn how to chase, or manage the macro of the game. Since MMR doesn't test all the skill needed, you can 'improve' without having any more skill. In this case you want to not care if you tank your MMR, because you want to minimize crutches whenever possible. I personally still use the crutch of Lethal Pursuer, because I know the start of the match is often the most impactful rippling out. I can ease up off the gas when I get a solid start, to try strange or different strats, because I bought myself that time in the match.

A final alternative is to talk to yourself as you play, and announce the better strat while purposely trying a different one. That way if it fails, you know you could have won if you just did the other thing, but you get to test something new without feeling the loss as harshly. If the survivors teabag at the end, you know you let them go because you wanted to try the fun risky play, instead of the boring safe one. That helps lessen if not entirely remove the impact.

That is all I can say in general without getting into more detailed perk or map or killer specifics. For a random example Pig on Borgo. Don't be afraid to bloodlust the pallets instead of kicking them. The new 15s bloodlust kicks in fast enough that it feels like that map was designed for you to bloodlust instead of kick. Only after you down the person you clean up the few dropped pallets near you.

Isnt much you can do than use perks that do that and/or use killers good enough to be able to down those players fast. Or you can get lucky. But thats not a very reliable way to win.

So part of the reason you're struggling with pressure is because of the killers you're playing, only Artist and Oni have map pressure with any degree of lethality after that only Dredge has any map pressure. I'm not counting Blight since you admit to struggling with his power. With killers that lack map pressure you have to be extra conscious about the macro and should be focusing from the early game on creating your 3gen and deadzone area because you have very little leeway to make mistakes.

You dont always have to commit to your first chase. Many times I have been able to find a survivor out of position / in a deadzone simply by leaving a chase earlier. Don't do this all the time, such as if the survivor your chasing is going to be downed soon or if they are in a deadzone.