Opinions on the state of the Killer role in DBD now?

Hello there DBD community!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of killer within the past three months and thought that I would throw my hat into the ring as to what I believe people’s opinions on the state of killer of DBD is like and how I have been viewing it from my lens as a killer main.

To quickly answer the question of whether killer has become more difficult or not; I believe that there has been a pretty intense difficulty spike, for a decent amount of killers. (this will become important to formulate my full opinion later). Ironically enough, I have been closing in on my personal Trapper win streak with 19 wins in a row, but why is that? Why would a killer, especially Trapper be able to perform as efficiently as he has lately? Well, I’m going to pick three of my recent matches and use them to elaborate the points that I have regarding killer difficulty and explains why generally, killer has a much more difficult time overall to get decent killing results.

Exhibit 1A: Trapper 4k on Dead Sands

(Excuse me in advance for my inability to get a half-decent screenshot of my matches, I typing the majority of this on phone and the screenshot looks HUGE on my end).

Now this was a Trapper match I dreaded the moment I saw myself load into it, a sand map with Trapper, the middle decently open with a shack in the center, how the hell did I manage to do it? I managed to win because I learned that Trapper ( and Hag to an extent) bypasses an important part of modern Survivor gameplay; that being tile chaining/pre-running! I knew I could not set up on all of the Dead Sands jungle gyms, so I opted to trap the center killer shack (which had a generator inside), a few jungle gym windows, and most importantly, tiles that bridged between said jungle gyms. What I found is that after a basic attack survivors often did three things while I was chasing them. They would either greed the current jungle gym they were at, use the speed boost to go to a filler, or use the injury boost to hold w to another jungle gym. With the latter two options resulting in a subsequent trap in their leg because they did not expect the setup killer to lock down joining tiles. Me denying the center of the map also meant that the survivors HAD to play more unsafe sections because their theoretical pallet/loop chaining potential went to nil because I maintained the center of the map (killer shack). Which allowed me to inch a win against a pretty strong coordinated team in a already hellish map for most killers. If I were any other killer I would have struggled due to being directly unable to stop survivors in their tracks.

Exhibit 2A: Dead Sands survivors and loadouts for reference:

Exhibit 1B: Dead Sands with Twins

As you can probably tell I do not run the most meta or strong killers/loadouts when playing DBD but here is an excellent example on how an inability to lock down chaining tiles/jungle gyms can really hurt the gameplay of certain killers, take this Twins match for example which took place on the same map as Trapper, both have a capability to set up but Twins is much more limited due to the size of the map and how it is laid out. though there is less information to go off of by stats alone I can say as much that I struggled to even manage two kills, the team utilized resources effectively and due to the nature of the killer and the current survivor meta of quick healing, I lost pressure really quickly during unhooks and the early/mid game. Twins currently is my third most played killer and I know I am not the best Twins player but I know what I am doing enough of the time to pressure a survivor team. I bring this match up as an example because killers that struggle to maneuver a map quickly or bypass being healthy through insta-down, maintaining injury, or other methods (like trappers traps or hag's phantasms) are truly struggling in DBD at the moment, making the average match for the killers that are incapable of doing either or OR both fall considerably behind.

Exhibit 1C: Hag on a stupidly large map, but a build to demonstrate my points.

And here we are, the penultimate game I want to share, I remember this one being an intriguing struggle to win, but I managed to kill three survivors and I let the last one get the hatch. But with this match I am going to relate my earlier points with this match here. Despite me being a 4.4 killer initially I went into this match with the waterlogged shoe addon, increasing my speed significantly paired with Rapid Brutality to keep up with survivors. Though I couldn't go across the map easily with my power now I knew i could set up hindering chokepoints with my addons and force double-back through mind gaming (egg especially helps with feats like this) to make survivors lose distance and the voila! A down. The fact I was so fast coupled with my power to create traps for both information and survivor hinderance allowed me to deny loops that would make most other killers struggle, even insta-down killers. The difficulty came in from the survivors ability to quickly heal within a span of 5-10 seconds during unhooks.


Exhibit 2C: Pale Rose Survivor Loadouts

In Conclusion: Thank you to whoever took the time out of their day to read my ramblings! There are many, many reasons why the modern DBD player will struggle in this game but through these points I have outlined, I hope to help people make more sense as to what might be contributing to their struggles in DBD. As usual, I would like your thoughts, experiences and opinions to see whether they align with mine or hell, you could completely disagree with my sentiment! All in all, thanks for your time and a good rest of your day/night!