http://dbd.game/killswitch
Developer Update | July 2025
Comments
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Cages really need more use. Quickhooking is offset by the fact that they also get quick and safe rescues from them. There is way too much of a tradeoff. The reason people would use them is for tunneling, which I'm glad is being nerfed, but there's nothing to compensate for this.
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PH already slows down when using trails. He's 110 during it so he'll now be 105, I suppose.
-1 -
I consider Pyramid Head to be my main killer, so naturally when changes for him are planned, I'm all ears (and I sincerely wish for as little changes as possible as I think he's fine the way he is).
First thoughts: I actually don't need a higher base-range of Punishment of the Dead. I consider him to be a short- to mid-range killer. Of course, extra range is good on him and it's a clear buff, but I personally dislike changes that could change the general feel of a character.
I'm honestly a little concerned about nerfing his zonig abilities. It's an aspect of each ranged killer to be able to do that, and this sounds like it's just taking away a tactical component of the killer (feels borderline like taking away one way of interaction, and each time this happens, it can make a killer less diverse to play).
Basekit BT and speed on cage: sure, anything that discourages hard-tunneling, I'm basically on board - the main feature of the cage is not having to pick up a survivor, and secondary: please keep the feature that hook-perks (both killer and survivor) don't trigger for cages. It's such a nice tactical component in my opinion.On another notice: I don't mind the new equipment (Fog-Jar). I'm sure bhvr will be able to balance them out to make them not feel OP.
However, one thing I find a bit concerning is that it's self-recharging. One aspect of DBD that I really enjoy is that at the start of a match, the survivors have all resources at their disposal, and they just diminish over time (health-states, hook-states, pallets, item-charges). And this jar in its currently planned state break with this. It might feel more like a perk that is available the whole match. No need to keep track of the charges as they will come back.
Might you consider making them charge-based like the other items? you have like 16s throughout the match and can switch it on and off, and when the charges are used up, the item becomes useless, just like all other items
(and on that note: how come even a basic flashlight has so many charges that it suffices for like 10 blinds? can we cut all flashlight-charges in half please? That's been bugging me for years xD)-1 -
I love the way this update looks! I am excited for it! Will there be……*coughs* bug fixes in this update too? :)
Slides over slowly to take a peek at your computer monitor - HoundMommy, are you in there? <3 Haha
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NOOOOO!!! Not my Overwhelming Presence! What are you doing to it?
I mean, I'm probably one of the only Players that uses it, but dang-it, It's crucial to my Anti-item builds! When equipped on Doc or Wesker, with maximum TR, it ensures survivors can't get full use out of their items, meaning Slower gens, Less healing, Less Flashlight blind attempts, etc, instead survivors adopt the counter strategy of either running across the map away from me to try and heal, or simply don't use their items at all… Which is what I want!
Survivors who bring in items tend to have a plan for them, OP is one of only 2 perks that throws a wrench into said plans… And you've listed BOTH for getting changes, while also Buffing Items and Survivors Item enhancing perks?
The "item meta" is gonna go crazy next patch, and I fear, due to the changes to the killers only counter perks, will likely go uncontested… sigh, this is gonna be painful for killer players isn't it?
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Killer spends entire match to get a head pop or just tunnel them normally without tossing the whole match away and people can still just do gens then leave giving them hatch. This is a nonexistent problem in reality.
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Another patch with kidnap tech still existing; and untouched kaneki scamper.. hatch offerings still hidden so good luck trying to get a 4k without slugging
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I’ve been playing Survivor long enough to know when something is actually improving the experience — and this update just isn’t it.
Calling this a “Quality of Life” update feels more like marketing than reality. The new item is a neat idea on paper, but one smoke vial doesn’t change how frustrating the core gameplay still is. Survivors are still stuck in solo queue roulette, dealing with constant camping, tunneling, and overwhelming slowdown — and none of that was addressed.
Instead of tools to help with coordination or more meaningful baseline changes, we get another niche item and a few adjustments to Keys. It feels like surface-level polish when what we really need is structural repair.
If this is what we’re calling QoL now, I worry that the bigger problems are just being ignored.
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That does sound like a best case scenario. Getting trapped and followed early-game till pop, won't get beaten by gen rush, into hatch. Then there's solo survivors not being able to coordinate. Less experienced survivors already find Pig hard to understand. I think countering it consistently would be almost impossible in most cases outside of a strong SWF, or getting trapped late game.
As I said, it's not a common thing to occur. Most Pig players play her because they enjoy her character. Those kinds of players aren't usually into making others miserable. I only referenced it because someone asked how her kit can be problematic, and that's the one thing in her kit that can be an issue.
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buff demo portals or rework them
-1 -
are mindgames also a fake term to you? you see them drop grenade, they're about to try something, play the game enough to understand what options they might go for and develop a behavior that counteracts to the most amount / most popular ways survivor might play around grenade and use whichever remaining clues there are to get back to chasing asap.
i played the event vs both iterations of the grenades, it's not rocket science to get a decent idea of how survivors might behave.
i swear, sometimes dbd players are just on a whole other level of disconnect from the very game they're playing.
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Knight is already a mediocre killer. There is no point in nerfing him just because you can't play against him. He is not even a popular slugger since you kinda have to depend on survivors being incompetent and getting downed by your guards, which almost never happens against decent survivors.
And no, the rest of the killers aren't abused, or aren't anymore. Pig could only bodyblock jigsaw boxes before they made the spawn default be 5, and that's was a good change. But there is NO reason as to why they nerfed the other aspects of her kit further, even though she was already a bad killer.
Pyramid head tunnels survivors who leave the cage's because that's the point of that mechanic, so they are not abusing it, it is working as intended. Also, you have to walk on the trail for him to send you to a cage, so if you really want to get the base BT then you should prioritize not walking on it. Hence why the best players prefer to go down a bit quicker than to step on the trail. Finally, even if the survivors gets sent to a cage, their teammates can still bodyblock them if the Pyramid decides to tunnel. Come on, there is so much the game can hold the survivors hand without them having to have any skill to play the game.
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To be fair, Pig's received exactly one direct nerf in over five years, and every other changes she's received has either been a direct buff or an indirect buff (with a few QoL things thrown in here and there too). There's only one aspect of her kit that was nerfed at all in that time frame, the box changes were overall a buff.
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So Executioner and Clown who are already mid tier are getting nerfed???
Nerfing Clown's hindered bottles and Executioner's speed while using judgement is really bad for them. This is more of a nerf to them than a buff which they really didn't need.
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Personally I'd be inclined to wait and see for the PTB. Those specific changes are nerfs, but the other changes do look quite nice.
I can't speak to Executioner since I don't play him, but for Clown, faster reload, faster movement speed while reloading, and quicker activation on yellow bottles are all really nice changes. How good Clown is after these changes depends really heavily on the numbers, hypothetically he could be coming out ahead here fairly noticeably.
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The issue is some killers can't afford to kick gens, and it's always the already weak m1 killers who don't have map traversal. Due to this, they usually need to run surge, but surge can lock up a gen excessively quick. I have personally seen a gen lose nearly half of the allotted regressions events within 20 seconds just because of bad survivor play, but naturally the survivors had unbreakable, so only one hook was gained by it all while the gen is already halfway being permanently blocked within the first few minutes of the game.
The regression limit negatively affects the killers who are already weak. They already can't afford to patrol gens super far away. Survivors know this and will lwave those far gens last. This means the only place survivors are, and the only place gens are getting done are in the central part of the map. That means those weak m1 killers with no map traversal are effectively forced to focus on a smaller number of gens, and with perks like surge, have a much higher chance at reaching the limit than stronger killers...even if they aren't even close to doing 3 gen camping which is, per the devs, was supposed to only kick in to punish killers who refuses to participate in normal gameplay by sitting at gens and refusing to do chases and hooking.
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PYRAMIND HEAD ADDON REWORK!!!
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- Adjusted the effects of purple bottles:
- Decreased the Hindered effect
- Decreased how long the Hindered effect lingers after leaving smoke
DEV NOTE: When it comes to The Clown’s power, his purple bottles see much more use than his yellow ones across skill levels. To better incentivize their use, we’ve given the yellow bottles a quicker activation, greater speed boost and wider effective range, coupled with some base speed increases. To compensate, purple bottles have received a slight nerf, requiring a little more throw control to get their full value.
So, I'm a main clown and have 300-400 hours on it, well, let's kill a tier 4 killer, because why should developers play their own game if they can look at useless statistics and make changes to the killers based on them? Yellow bottles cannot be used and no one will ever use them unless they dissipate almost instantly, namely 0.5 seconds maximum after they hit the ground, they cannot be used in pursuit in any way, if a survivor sees that a clown throws a yellow bottle under himself, he immediately begins to drag himself to another structure, and considering that the clown still needs to wait for the yellow bottle to dissipate + switch to a purple one and throw it, the survivor runs to another structure in 8 out of 10 cases. I don't know what will happen with the percentage of the purple bottle slowdown deterioration, but if it's higher than at least 3 percent, this killer will be officially recorded in the tier list "the developers don't play their game and make changes to useless statistics".In general, the change looks like the clown is simply breaking his main ability (purple bottle and the slowdown from it) by adding useless improvements like fast walking during reload and reducing the reload, you can understand that if the clown can't slow down the survivor enough, he doesn't need a quick reload, he doesn't have the main ability to catch the survivor. Give him at least an instant reload, he won't catch faster because of the small slowdown. I don't know why I wrote this considering that it most likely won't change anything.....
-5 - Adjusted the effects of purple bottles:
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- Adjusted the effects of purple bottles:
- Decreased the Hindered effect
- Decreased how long the Hindered effect lingers after leaving smoke
In short, the clown was simply nerfed without giving him ANY improvements, since the improvements to fast reload and fast walking while reloading will not help him catch a survivor in any way, just like yellow bottles that NO ONE will use anyway, the patch note about the clown should simply look like this: "Hello everyone, we are nerfing the main ability of a tier 4 killer without giving him ANYTHING useful
-2 - Adjusted the effects of purple bottles:
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a bit sad that killers get to kill off genrushing with nerfing BTL and "reworking" streetwise
but kaneki is left nowhere to be seen with a nerf with every survivor begging for springtrap then a ghoul, makes sense.
if you think the "item changes are for survivors", not really, they still need to buff chests perk and chests in general to spawn ideally grouped together in basemet and have maps be more useful like revealing the aura of ONE gen for an unlimited amount of time for x charges.
the smoke bomb was boring in halloween and 2v8, this wont change when it comes to the base game, unless they make it busted on release with addons (DOUBT), it will probably be 4th in item used by survivors, its basically another side-grade for the flashlight.
i hope the walking dead survivors dont have complete ######### perks or get gutted by killer mains whining to get it gutted post ptb.
let it be the meta for a week and then nerf it if you really have to.-7 -
Maybe wait for the full numbers first instead of panicking. If purple bottle is losing 1 or 2% then it overall is a buff. If it's losing 5%/1sec or more then yeah it's likely an overall nerf.
-2 -
How is the killer supposed to see the fog vial drop, if the killer is getting ambushed by a teammate? The person being chased isn’t dropping the first fog vial. If they drop a vial, they would be dropping a 2nd vial, to make the concealed area larger.
-10 -
oh no something you also need to learn to be able to expect and adjust to and then play around accordingly.
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The same as they currently work in the game, Pyramid Head's cages will not trigger hook/unhook perks.
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My thoughts exactly. Unless the new survivors introduce some game changing perks (which they most likely won't) this update isn't really changing anything about the survivor experience.
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They said they're gonna buff Franklin's.
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will there be a forum post about the changes in specific coming in the Quality of Life Initiative Phase: 2 like how Mandy made one for the Phase 1 Initiative?
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Played clown for years, probably my 5th most played killer, in all those years i've thrown 1 yellow bottle! (I realise he didn't have them on release)
After 1 yellow bottle it was blindingly obvious I should play as I always did & just pretend they don't exsist! (Easy to do why waste time & bottles switching!) If these changes go through i'll drop Clown & be down to only 4 main killers.
I already play what most consider the weakest killers in the game, buffing yellow doesn't make them more viable, nerfing purple makes clown less so!
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I love how petrified killer mains become the second survivors have anything added that might bring the escape rate closer to 50%. it's like they're so used to having their hand held with the forced kill rates that the thought of the average match being well balanced terrifies them.
that said, I hope deja vu don't get nerfed. it's the king of breaking 3 gens and though it does get used a fair but it's underrated due to unconditional repair speed increase, cut down time locating gens and quickly breaking 3 gen clusters from the beginning of the match without needing to run around the map to see hidden gen spawn locations
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The executioner is a good killer that didn't need to be touched. Adding range but slowing him down is terrible. Also adding endurance to a cage that is supposed to not have hook properties. Literally took away the essence of the killer.
The clown is a good killer but not a great one. I survive most of the time against clowns. Playing clown is fun cause these bully survivors always want to loop killer shack or some loop on the map. We need more hindering killers to be honest. Instead we reduce an effect that already barely exist in the game. Freddy Krueger is a better version of clown anyways so I don't care much.
Slowing down the carnifex makes it pointless cause it's only used to destroy pallets.
Fog Vial looks miserable on paper. You don't even have to play the game to see the problem. I don't think the game is sided either way right now but I will say SWF's are on top. There is nothing you can do about background player, sabateur, flashes, and everything. Can't even pick up a survivor and if you try slugging then they spread and pick up the survivor. Mind you it probably took a minute to down the survivor. 2 gens done without a single hook. I can only imagine a stack of fog vials just making a chase practically impossible. Built to Last is about to flourish. Imagine going to damage a generator, getting blast mined and when you aren't blind anymore, stare into fog with no indication as to where to go.
I have a really high kill rate and survive rate so i'm not saying things I don't know. Not liking this update at all. We'll see how it goes, though.-4 -
Any competent 4 man SWF should easily have a 50%+ escape rate. Soloqueue and SWF will always have a divide, the idea that the game should be balanced around 4 soloqueues who can't communicate, make constant mistakes and often don't even bring a full load out, having a 50% escape rate makes no sense. In addition to making no thematic sense, competetive games like dbd should be balanced around people trying to win. Yeah, we should balance for casuals too, but not at the complete detriment for, not just top level play, but even just high MMR play.
Currently if both sides are strong the game is relatively well balanced.
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yes there will most definitely be bug fixes, the details of everything will be on the patch notes
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high MMR 4 stacks have only an average 48 percent escape rate so that's not even true as even the most competent 4 man swfs average below 50. I don't even expect the devs to balance around solo q, but balancing around 50% average escape rate with swf and solos combined, the entire survivor player base, is perfectly sensible
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xD, I repeat do NOT nerf the Clown's purple bottle… I will not use yellow I refuse to switch bottles mid chase
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Nerfing knight, an at maximum B tier killer just doesn't make sense. Carnifex standard taking longer to spawn means nothing, you need him for pallets you aren't using him for hunts.
Assassin and jailer standard spawning quicker makes using guards for hunts a pointless action. You already waste more time getting in range and setting up the hunt, than a survivor does just running in a circle with the garbage guard A.I and grabbing the standard, and you're making that quicker. So then in an attempt to make the double team scenario weaker, you're just incentivizing people to do the double team scenario since the only thing the standard spawning quicker does, is make hunts worse, when the knight is off chasing someone else.
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I mean, this is up to you if you want to play a Killer worse than he is… Go for it. I also dont use Blinks for Nurse.
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I'm incredibly happy that I switched to being a survivor main. This is gonna be a great 2nd half of 2025!
-10 -
On the one hand, I 100% agree with you that not fully utilizing a Killer's kit is generally a bad idea.
BUT
Clown was and always has been a slowdown killer primarily and that's how a lot of people have played him and like to play him. People feeling like they are getting punished for their playstyle/to force them to use the yellow bottles is a pretty understandable frustration to have.
Making Clown a haste centric killer first instead seems like a bad move.
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Yeah I'm confused by this move as well tbh.
I'm excited for this as well. Even if it doesn't buff her in a practical sense I'll be happy for Pig to just feel a bit better to play.
Bro what? Game sense is 100% a real thing. Like when you look at the state of things and can predict which gen the survivor is on. Or when you anticipate the killers next move. It's literally just describing you picking up on how your opponent tends to play.
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No it's not.
Game sense is a fundemental part of DBD as a whole, how can you just say it's not a thing. That's ridiculous.
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KBM support on console is great, but now every console (killer) player is encouraged to go out and buy new hardware. Which feels kinda lame. Really need controller settings still.
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BHVR really hates Spirit, don't they? Got nerfed the hardest out of all of the old S tiers, Quiet Mode, and now Fog Vials. Fun.
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They already confirmed it's not getting a buff and it's from the bottom of the perk bit that said and I quote "DEV NOTE: We’ve adjusted values on a few perks that had low pick rates to help buff them up. In addition, we’ve adjusted perks that affect items to make sure they’re compatible with this update’s Survivor item changes."
I couldn't think of a way it interested with the maps/keys at the time so went with the only other option of them "help buff them up" which considering they buffed vigil the other patch which was is seen about as much as Deja, led me to believe it would be buffed.
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I do hate the blurring effect as it hurts my eyes. That said nerfing the purple bottles is a massive hit to Clown. I hope they realize that and revert/never push that to live.
That's quite the edge case. Not really something that demands a full rework. They could simply add a timer pause based on proximity.
Well it doesn't say any unhook perks work on cages so I doubt it. That said I think they should work with the exception of Scourge Hook perks.
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I don't like the nerf to clowns purple bottle....
It's the only thing he really has going for him...
The yellow bottle isn't good because it helps survivors too.
And the knight changes make him weaker...
And why make pyramid head slower?
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I think too many people underestimate the yellow bottle. There are ways to utilize the yellow bottle that doesn't benefit the survivors, but it takes more skill than just throwing purple bottles at the survivor. Utilizing both bottles can turn many safe loops into downs.
However, the nerf to purple bottles is still bad because the reason doesn't justify it. Behavior sees that many clowns don't use the yellow bottles, because yellow bottles take significant more effort to make work. Buffing yellow bottles so they are easier to use while leaving purple bottles alone is all that needed. It's unnecessary to nerf purple bottles just to make yellow bottles better.
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When solo q survivors ask for more information on what their teammates are doing, why aren’t you telling them they should just use their game sense?
When BHVR added a Survivor HUD, why didn’t you tell everyone it was unnecessary, because solo q survivors could use their game sense to know what their teammates were doing?
And why aren’t you asking for Windows of Opportunity to be nerfed, because survivors should be using their game sense to find windows and pallets?
Why it is that whenever people say to use game sense, it’s always saying the killer should be having it?
-6 -
I am most looking forward to the bump up to 7 customization presets AND labeling. I am a cosmetics junkie, so this is appreciated.
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As someone who plays the Clown a lot and uses both bottles, having the yellow bottles activate faster is detrimental for him. The activation time prevent the survivor from accidentally gaining haste.
And no need to say that the nerf to the purple bottles is totally random and unnecessary. To try to get one of the bottles to be used more, you are hurting those who already use both. Those who didn't play around the yellow bottles will simply play something else.
This logic is as absurd as pretending to make people use more Freddy's pallets by nerfing his snares.
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Is there like any chance the Nurse / her add ons will be fixed soon? This has been basically ignored for 6 months at this point. She is completely broken with her random teleports after blinking. I am confused how it even came to this and why it has not been fixed for 6 months now, although it was reported in January right away. As a Nurse main this is extremely frustrating and does look like you simply don't care? Nerf's and buff's everywhere all the time.. but a completely broken killer ability is ignored for 6 months? How can you guys even explain this?
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