Game Breaker / Dead by Daylight

Survivors

• Voice Comms (via Discord) for Survive With Friends groups, allowing SWF players to all be completely aware of exactly where the killer is and what the killer is doing at all points, as well as what all other survivors are doing. This allows them to coordinate and work on gens, saving hooked survivors, and juking the killer in ways that are far more efficient than the game was actually designed for.
• Building windows. Usually, the ledges are relatively isolated from other obstacles, meaning that they can provide a way for the survivor to slow the killer down, but a good killer can still catch up to them. However, some buildings have windows very close to each other built into a large wall. This means that a survivor can easily just jump through one window, wait for the killer to attempt to follow, and jump out the other… and then go back through the other window again. Unlike other locations, the killer cannot go around the walls fast enough to pressure the victims away from the window, thus leading to a survivor being practically invincible if he or she stays nearby. Windows have received several balance changes over the game's lifespan, and currently can be "blocked" by the Entity if a single window is overused and otherwise do not usually earn you much distance on the killer.
• The Sprint Burst perk. It allows you to sprint for three seconds once every 40 seconds (at level 3). This perk alone allows you to extend chases, lose killers, and escape in general much more frequently. In community tier lists, it was initially the one and only perk placed in the "S tier". It was later nerfed to recover half as quickly while running, effectively guaranteeing that the survivor using it can only activate it at most twice during a chase. Despite this, it is still played and still considered one of the best perks, but not by as large a margin. It was nerfed again to not recover at all while running. While still a strong perk to this day, Dead Hard has overtaken it as the most popular Exhaustion perk, though some will argue Sprint Burst is better as it lets survivors move around the map far more easily and can be activated even when healthy if managed properly.
• Before it was nerfed, Balanced Landing was considered by far one of the best perks in the game. In addition to its normal ability (a survivor gains a short speed boost when falling from a high enough vantage point), it also would passively do away with the stagger effect survivors would suffer from when jumping down from a great height. This would equate to the survivor being able to prolong some chases, and could be outright abused on certain maps to effectively make them untouchable if played correctly. After the passive stagger effect was nerfed out, like Sprint Burst, it became less common.
• During the beta, stacking all the survivor's tools to increase healing speed allowed for ludicrous levels, allowing you to fully heal a downed survivor in mere seconds. The worst offender was We'll Make It, a perk that grants (at level 3) 100% healing speed every time you unhook someone, up to 300%. Healing is now capped at a 100% increase from any one survivor.
• Iridescent Keys allow the survivors to open the trap door if they find them once they've spawned, even if multiple or even all of the survivors are still alive. This serves as an Instant-Win Condition in a game that otherwise doesn't have one if you don't mind dipping out early, and the rarer the key is the more people can go inside before it re-closes, at the highest rarity, an entire team can dip instantly.
  • This was eventually nerfed in Patch 5.3.0, where the hatch now only spawns when one survivor is left in the trial, and it will take a few seconds to actually open the hatch using a key once the killer has closed it.
  • The same rules, however, don't apply to the mobile version. The hatch in those matches will spawn when there are four generators completed and one death, or three generators completed and two deaths. However, without a key, it will only open automatically when one survivor is left if the exit gates are off, or after all the other survivors in the match have left the trial area, or are dead.
• Boon totems. By blessing a totem, Survivors can generate a large AoE providing certain perk benefits to anyone inside it (and replacing any hex effects if it was a hex totem). However, in the short time since they were released, they've received numerous complaints, centred around preventing hit-and-run playstyles and lack of counterplay:
  • Boon: Circle of Healing not only provides the effect of the Self-Care perk to anybody in range, it also doubles all healing speeds, stacking with all other healing sources. With the right medkit and perks, this allows for near-instant healing whilst still in a chase. Even after the healing speed was nerfed, Circle of Healing still remained a problematic perk that completely shuts down certain killers, as when placed in a safe area the Killer won’t have time to snuff it out without losing. It was eventually given a hefty nerf, no longer providing Self Care and forcing solitary Survivors to use their med kits at the regular rate.
  • The killer has no effective way to find the totems except to get extremely close and hear the chime they make. If it's on another floor, they then need to find the stairs to possibly get to it.
  • Boon totems only take 14s to put in place and can be infinitely replaced when snuffed. This makes spending any time as killer to go extinguish it free time for the Survivors.
  • Because killers now need to reach totems, some of the areas they're in have been made even more obvious and accessible. This has indirectly nerfed hex totems (some of the killers' strongest but riskiest perks) by making them easier to spot, on top of more survivors immediately searching for a totem at the start of the match.
• The 5.5.0 update significantly buffed Boil Over. As such builds that combine it with Flip-Flop alongside perks that boost recovery speed such as Unbreakable, Tenacity and Soul Guard became common, since this combination makes it nigh impossible to hook a downed survivor unless they're right next to a hook. Occasionally with the addition of buffed Power Struggle.
• Dead Hard, since it has released has been one of the strongest perks in the game. The ability to both avoid a killer hit and gain distance to make it to another strong looping tile means it is not uncommon to see every survivor with Dead Hard in public games, and some tournaments even ban it from use at all. While Dead hard can be baited, the existence of the perk creates lose-lose scenarios for killers where if they don’t hit the survivor and respect the Dead Hard, that survivor will make it to a strong jungle gym, but if they don’t respect the threat of Dead Hard, the survivor will Dead Hard to the strong tile. Due to the immunity frames on Dead Hard on top of the dash, survivors can use it to really mess up with certain killers, Dead Harding through Huntress hatchets, Trapper traps, or Pyramid Head’s Punishment of the Damned to name a few.
  • This got even worse in November 2021, when hit validation (meaning that Dead Hard timing would register on the server’s end and not the survivor’s end) was added to Dead Hard. Before, sometimes the server wouldn’t register the Dead Hard or the killer could sometimes get the hit in before the immunity frames kicked in. But for November 2021 and a couple of months afterwards, the killer would literally hit the survivor and hear their death scream on their screen but the Dead Hard would stop it from happening. This has since been patched out but Dead Hard is still far more generous than before with its immunity frames. This has all but shut down the Sprint Burst Dead Hard debate, and Dead Hard is on every top level survivor’s build now, even overtaking perks like Decisive Strike.
  • The new hit validation also hurts certain killers, for example, if Victor from the Twins hits a survivor in Dead Hard, he will stop at them, allowing them to kick him. Or if Nemesis tentacles a survivor Dead Harding near a pallet, the tentacle will count as hitting the survivor during Dead Hard, and will not break the pallet.
  • In response to the pervasive use of Dead Hard, the perk was eventually heavily reworked in update 6.1.0. Now, Dead Hard no longer grants invincibility frames or a speed boost. Instead, Dead Hard now only gives the survivor a temporary health state for 0.5 seconds, which will allow them to absorb a hit if they time or bait the killer's attack correctly, but they are heavily punished if they fail. Also, the removal of invincibility frames means that Dead Hard cannot allow a survivor to circumvent the environmental effects of a killer's abilities such as Trapper traps.
  • As of the 6.5.0 update, Dead Hard usage has steadily climbed, to the point that it playing around the potential presence of the perk is once again necessary on the Killer side. While it can no longer be used for distance at any point, the window to use it is generous to be used to react to any lunge attack or telegraphed power usage, forcing Killers to spend another 10-15s closing the remaining 6m gap, then wait in case the Survivor uses it immediately, before they can swing—or play assuming every Survivor has three health states. In many cases, this is as strong or more than previous Dead Hard—the time taken to catch up buys distance without using any perk if the Killer won't swing, and if they do the Survivor can just use Dead Hard and extend the chase for another health state or get to a safe pallet or vault. While it has more counters than before and doesn't synergise with other endurance effects, Dead Hard alone continues to extensively distort how the game is played in a way no other perk does. With the 6.7.0 update, Dead Hard would receive another hefty nerf that would require getting hooked to use it, keeping it strong but curbing its King of survivor perks status once and for all.
• Since the extensive changes to Dead Hard mentioned above, Off The Record has utterly eclipsed it as an anti-tunneling tool, as it hides your Aura, silences your pain noises and gives you Endurance for a solid 80 seconds at max rank until you perform a "Conspicuous Action" (Ie, Repairing, healing, or any other major actions that interact with the game world). While it's still not ideal and not at the level of incredible utility that Dead Hard used to be, it generally allows a free escape from all but the most persistent Killers, usually because most Killers will tend to beeline the unprotected person that saved you.
• Rebecca Chambers' new perk Hyperfocus increases skill check bonuses by up to 30% if you consistently land great checks, earning tokens that stack up to six; doing the math, that's a potential maximum boost of 180%. This pairs almost unreasonably well with David Tapp's Stake Out, which converts good checks into great ones and stacks up to four uses. Used in conjunction with toolboxes and other repair boosting perks, and survivors have been able to repair generators in as fast as 20 seconds. To put things in perspective, the default repair speed for a generator is 90 seconds.
• Made For This has quickly gained a reputation as one of the most insanely strong survivor perks in the game. If you were to quickly glance at what the perk does, you might not see why; the main effect of the perk makes it when you’re not Exhausted, you run 3% faster. 3% doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, until you realise that the games’ loops and maps are all designed around survivors moving at 4 m/s, and even then, against good survivors a lot of loops are really hard to catch survivors in. Increase that to 4.12 m/s, and suddenly a lot of loops become absolutely unfeasible to catch survivors in, in a timely manner, without some kind of killer power to get on top of them. It also lets survivors ‘hold W’ far easier, especially since this speed boost stacks with the speed boost gained from taking a hit. On top of this, the perk stacks with other speed boosts such as Hope, meaning that in end game, survivors can be moving at 4.4 m/s (which granted, means the killer will already have lost most of the game), as fast as Huntress or Spirit, making survivors near uncatchable as most killers. All of this wouldn’t be so bad, but there are 4 survivors to the 1 killer, meaning that for killers to stand a chance, they need to be able to catch survivors in a timely manner before gens get done. On top of all of this, Made for This also gives Endurance for if someone is injured and heals another survivor fully, meaning it also has strong utility attached to stop killers interrupting resets and slugging! So it’s essentially two very strong perks at once.
• Buckle Up got changed in the Nicolas Cage patch to now give 10s of Endurance to both survivors when a survivor heals another from the dying state. So overall, a great anti-slugging perk, but nothing too crazy. The problem is that this will also apply when a survivor running Buckle Up uses For The People, a perk that lets a survivor ‘give’ health state to another survivor. This means that as soon as a killer downs a survivor, during their cool-down animation, a survivor can dive in, use For The People, and the killer can’t do anything about it for 10s, by which time survivors can probably reach a pallet or window. While this combo takes co-ordination, the sheer level of hook denial this provides with absolutely no warning, timing or ability to mess it up mechanically required can absolutely ruin games. And the killer can’t even punish the person going for the save, unlike with For the People and Soul Guard, because Buckle Up also gives the healer Endurance.
• In Patch 7.3.0 Background Player, a perk that would allow you to activate a Sprint Burst-like speed boost for when another survivor is picked up, had its speed boost doubled to a 200% movement speed boost (8m/s, that's almost as fast as Blight's default Rush speed) for 5 seconds. This allows Survivors who normally wouldn't be in range for a flashlight/pallet save under most circumstances to be in range within almost a fraction of a second because of the absurd speed boost provided.
• The All Things Twisted chapter brings forth a new kind of survivor perk: Invocations. By interacting with a salt circle in the basement, the Survivors can cast a powerful effect that gives them a boost, but incurs a penalty.
  • The first-and so far only-example is Sable Ward's perk Invocation: Weaving Spiders. By completing the invocation, the Survivors casting the perk immediately and permanently reduce the amount of progress required to complete every generator by 10%. This may slip into Awesome, but Impractical however, as it not only locks the caster out of the Healthy state for the rest of the trial but also takes two entire uninterrupted minutes to perform by yourself. For comparison, completing a generator alone takes 90 seconds. If you're interrupted partway through - say, by the Killer seeing your aura down there and coming to say hello - the progress toward casting depletes so rapidly it's almost impossible to resume without starting over completely.

Killers

• Prior to being nerfed, The Ebony Memento Mori offering. A killer would only have to down the survivor (the Hillbilly and the Cannibal have it easiest because of the chainsaw) and then the correct input would allow them to instantly kill the survivor without the need for sacrificing. Post-nerf, it will allow a kill on any downed survivor that has been hooked at least once. Not that it stops some griefing killer players from targeting the same person again... This one got nerfed again to only be usable after the second hook, effectively killing the debate.
• The No One Escapes Death perk, which allows for instant-downs after the gates are powered. It can be countered by cleaning all five totems on the map before the gates are powered — but good luck figuring out if the killer's brought it or not.
  • Nerfed in the 6.1.0 Patch. Now, once the first instant-down has been triggered, the totem powering it reveals its aura in a steadily increasing area, up to 24 m. This is to give Survivors a chance to find it and remove it in a timely fashion.
• The Pig's Bag Of Gears and Crate Of Gears add-on. It increases the time it takes to search the Jigsaw Boxes. If combined together, or one is combined with the Tampered Timer, the Survivor is basically doomed if they don't luck out on the first Jigsaw Box.
• The Shape's Scratched Mirror add-on, on Lery's Memorial Institute or the Gideon Meat Plant. The mirror lets the killer track the survivors when they're nearby, but locks him in Evil Within I. The reduced line-of-sight in those two maps, combined with Michael's tiny terror radius, turns him into the perfect ambush predator.
• Similarly, the Black Incense add-on for the Plague. Whenever a survivor pukes, their aura is shown to the Plague. Problem is, when at maximum sickness, the survivors are constantly puking, giving the Plague what amounts to endless wall-hacks. And considering that at maximum sickness, the survivors become a One-Hit-Point Wonder unless they cleanse, this gives the Plague a nasty advantage.
• The Clown's Pop Goes the Weasel Perk and the Hag's (pre-rework) Hex: Ruin Perk both buy Killers significant time while trying to hunt down and kill Survivors. The former lets you inflict a percentage-based regression on a generator all at once after hooking a Survivor, while the latter once activated a Hex Totem on the map that turned Great Skill Checks on generators to just Good Skill Checks with no bonus towards repairs, and Good Skill Checks became silent failures that caused a small but significant regression penalty. Many Killers, especially at higher levels of play, swore by these two perks more than any other, and for good reason, as they were universally useful.
  • Hex: Ruin was eventually reworked to cause generators to regress automatically when Survivors step away from them, but remains a popular perk, especially when combined with the Pig's Surveillance perk to notify Killers of regressing generators and the Blight's Hex: Undying perk to keep the totem up for longer.
  • In Update 6.1.0, Pop Goes the Weasel and Hex: Ruin were completely gutted. Pop Goes the Weasel was changed to only remove 20% of the generator's current progress, meaning even in the incredibly unlikely scenario you strolled up on a generator that was literally microseconds away from completion you'd still only buy yourself 20 seconds. Hex: Ruin had the power of its regression effect halved to baseline regression, making it almost completely negligible. With changes to Totem spawns to account for Boons, Hex totems were also made significantly easier to find, leading to situations where it could appear directly next to a generator if the Survivors didn't just spawn on top of it. It also disabled itself when a Survivor was killed, though by that point, you'd either already won or already lost.
  • This would not spell the end for Pop Goes the Weasel, however, which received a buff up to a hefty 30% of current progression in the 7.0 update. While still usually less than its peak, it nonetheless still provides Killers with a lot of valuable regression, especially on nearly-completed generators. It thus remains one of the strongest, most popular Killer perks.
• Barbecue and Chili. While its actual effect (Showing an aura on survivors a certain distance away after a hook) is useful on its own, what a lot of killers bring it for is its second effect of increasing the post-match bloodpoint reward by 25% for every unique survivor you hook, meaning a particularly successful match can give you bloodpoints well into the 60k-100 thousand per match. For both the effect and the currency gain, it's generally considered that BBQ (which requires buying Leatherface and raising him to level 30 so it shows up in other bloodwebs) is a must-have trait for killers looking to develop at a good pace.
  • The blood point bonus was eventually removed in update 6.1.0.
• Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance has become a new staple of the killer arsenal, able to prevent Survivors quickly finishing a generator while one of their teammates is hooked. Coupled with Dead Man's Switch, it can easily negate all the progress made and revert it to a much lower value.
  • Blocked Gens do not regress, but it is still a powerful combination because it allows a Killer to contest a generator that is nowhere near them. Also, unlike Pop, Jolt/Surge, and Eruption, Pain Resonance is essentially a homing missile that will always strike the generator with the most progress.
    • In 6.1.0, Pain Resonance no longer causes a scream and interruption, so it physically cannot trigger Dead Man's Switch. It also means that while it still removes progress from the most-completed Generators, Killers have no idea which one it hit unless running a complementary perk like Surveillance. The scream was brought back, however, to prevent abuse with Merciless Storm.
• Franklin's Demise forces Survivors to drop items that they're holding when hit, which already makes it a decent perk to slow down healing and repairs, as well as prevent Flashlight use. However, prior to 7.0, Pinhead was able to make the perk shine due to one specific reason: The Lament Configuration once counted as a droppable item, so it could be knocked out of their hands and solved, rather than having to down them in order to do so. This nearly guaranteed a knockdown on said Survivor (as picking up the cube stuns everyone), revealed everybody's locations, and immediately started the Chain Hunt. Unless the Survivors co-ordinated appropriately or were lucky with when they tried to solve the box, this could result in Chain Hunt being nigh-permanently active if the Pinhead player was sufficiently skilled. However, as of 7.0, this combo is no longer possible, as Killer-unique items such as as the Configuration are now held in a separate inventory slot, which Franklin's Demise cannot affect.
• The Nurse in general is widely considered the most overpowered killer in the game, due purely to the utility of her main power, which allows her to teleport short distances extremely quickly. This allows her to completely circumvent the primary tactics survivors use to shake off killers in a chase, such as dropping pallets, vaulting windows, or running through houses. While the Nurse has a rather high skill floor, experienced Nurse players can practically dismantle an entire survivor team within a few minutes of the match starting.
• Eruption. Dear Lord Eruption. Its massive buff in the 6.1.0 patch turned a subpar gen defense perk into an absolute monster capable of holding down inescapable 3 gens by itself. When Eruption went off it would not only take off 10% of the maximum progress and reveal the survivors working on it as it does now, but also slap survivors with a 25s incapacitated status effect where they could not do ANYTHING. And did I mention this worked on multiple generators? Because it did. Granted, the gen needed to be kicked for this to really make an impact, but enter Call of Brine and Overcharge, which make a gen regress at massive speeds when kicked! And combine this with a Pain Resonance or Jolt that will apply through the generator regression, and yeah. Thankfully, it got hit with a huge nerf in the patch with the Skull Merchant, removing the Incapacitated, though still finding its place on builds since it synergises so well with Call of Brine and Overchage.
• Sadako, while a rather weak killer by nearly every metric due to her crippling long teleport cooldowns, lack of chase power and iffy stealth, has a combination of two addons that can let her bypass the hook system entirely. The Iridescent Video Tape and Ring Drawing allow Sadako to quickly stack Condemned on survivors by spam teleporting with hit and run tactics, due to the Tape, and leaving survivors on the ground so they have to be healed by their teammates, thus stacking Condemned. While this undeniably takes skill and precision to pull off, relies on Sadako actually getting the down and can be beaten by very competent teams, this strategy can let Sadako kill survivors without even hooking them, sometimes as early as 4 gens.
• The Skull Merchant. Like Sadako, a weak killer by every metric, except that a Skull Merchant has the ability to place drones at a tight 3 gen. And skull merchant can see when people are on gens because of these. And she can infinitely put them back up if survivors try to disarm them. And she can expose people and reveal them if they don’t disable the drone. This has led to her being able to literally hold games hostage until the servers time out, including once being able to hold a game hostage for 50 mins against the best survivor team in the world. This frustrating strategy has led to the majority of survivors giving up the moment they see it’s a Skull Merchant to avoid being in a very long game.
  • This has since been nerfed two-fold: not only was Skull Merchant reworked to make her a more chase-oriented Killer (for better or for worse), but 3-genning as a whole was removed. Each generator can now only suffer 8 "regression events"; once that upper-limit is reached, the generator can't be kicked or affected by regression Perks or add-ons.

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