Should deadline be buffed?

I'd probably be similar to you. Mine would be:

Skill Checks appear 10% more often when healthy. When injured, skill checks appear 10%/12%/15% more often, and Great Skill Checks add an extra 1 charge on top of what you'd normally receive for a Great Skill Check.

My buff would be

10% more often when healthy, 20% when injured
When cooperating with other survivors, missed skill checks by them does not regress progress, instead they are transferred to you with 25% more speed

Deadline is a weird perk to talk about, because the actual main effect isn't small or inconsequential - +10 to the base skillcheck percentage results in an over doubled likelihood of a skillcheck at any given second while repairing generators and still a very hefty increase while healing. That's pretty huge, but because the perk has two drawbacks to keep it in line, it can be a pretty unappealing perk to use outside of niche applications like Autodidact.

I had a thread about this myself a while ago, but I think a fun way of buffing this perk would be to tie in to the theme of nearing a deadline, and having the restrictions removed as you get hooked. Start of the match, it works exactly as it does now. After one hook, you still need to be injured but they're no longer in random positions. After two hooks, they're in normal positions and the effect applies while healthy.

That'd make it more appealing and accessible while still keeping the really powerful effect in check.

I think hook states is both a more meaningful balancing factor, and much more thematic to the idea of the perk- you're closer to failing your deadline the closer you are to death, spurring you on to be more efficient. Conversely, you're closer to meeting your deadline the closer you are to leaving the trial, so that pressure doesn't apply.

Plus, while gen repairs are probably the strongest use of Deadline, it's not just for gen repairs. It also applies to healing, and that's no slouch either here.

That'd work too, for sure. The perk has a very strong effect, so what it needs is to become more accessible without going overboard, in my opinion.

I honestly don't know why it has an Injured requirement. Make it work while Healthy and it'd be at least useable.

Absolutely. While the basic chance to trigger a skill check (on a repair) is 8% and Deadline thus more than doubles it to 18%, skill checks are of course neutral at best and detrimental at worst to get, unless you hit great skill checks. Which is more difficult with Deadline, but even if it weren't, and even if you could reliably hit all great skill checks you get, the repair time reduction is simply not worth it.

With a chance of 8% per second to trigger a skill check, a 90-second gen (if you do it from 0-100% solo) will on average give you 7.2 skill checks. Since every great skill check grants 1% extra progression, that's 7.2% of 90 seconds, or 6.48 seconds. What has to be kept in mind is that with every great skill check, the repair interaction time is reduced from its 90 seconds, obviously then also decreasing the average number of skill checks you are expected to get. And there also appears to be a safety built into DbD that you cannot get another skill check for a brief time after a previous one, likely to prevent a skill check triggering while another one is already playing. Both meaning that the true average is even lower. We would on top of that have to round down the average when looking at repairs on an actual per-gen basis since you obviously can't get "partial" skill checks. But even if we for simplicity's sake look at this supposed average, Deadline even if you hit all greats only makes for a reduction of 14.58 seconds, minus the 6.48 that you usually get anyway - an 8.1-second reduction in generator repair time… on a solo 0-100% gen, if you hit all greats that are more difficult to hit with the perk (thereby also increasing the risk of missing a skill check and incurring a 10% regression and 3-second progress freeze, which more than nullifies any and all benefits Deadline will have given you), having to be injured for it, and ignoring that the real reduction will be even lower given the fact that the reduced repair time as well as the mechanic preventing consecutive skill checks lowers the average amount of checks you will get. That's beyond awful. Not to mention that it makes various perks (such as Oppression, Overcharge, Huntress Lullaby, Coulrophobia and Merciless Storm) more difficult to deal with, as well as Doctor altogether.

The only real use case for Deadline ever is alongside Hyperfocus or Autodidact. The latter is not a good perk unless you have a killer employing a hit-and-run strategy and using Mangled/Hemorrhage, in which case you can reliably get 5 tokens on a singular heal anyway by repeatedly starting it over. And the former is not popular because it is already too difficult for most players (including veterans) to consistently hit great skill checks under its effect, often blowing up gens because of it. Deadline makes this a lot more difficult still, so it's not a combo that is feasible for most of any player to truly get reliable value from.

Removing the injured stipulation is the least they could do. I would welcome if they were to also increase the triggering chances much more, hell, even to something like 40% (i. e. make it multiply chances by 5, like toolboxes do). Give the people that actually go for the challenge something for it. Getting that many skill checks would if anything only make it more challenging. Alternatively, keep it at a lower (but still increased) number but remove the "random location skill check" part. Which is the more boring route.

The effect it has now could lack a downside and still be a bad perk since it requires being healthy. Devs should do 2 of the following 3 things:
Up the strength of the effect

Remove the downside

Remove the healthy requirement

Any 2 of those would put the perk in a spot where it's not terrible