People of the Fog,

Decisive Strike is one of Laurie Strode’s unique perks, which was released with Chapter II: HALLOWEEN in October of 2016. We introduced Decisive Strike as a perk option to help give Survivors a second wind, and an opportunity to escape their inevitable demise.

Over the course of the last few years, Decisive Strike has been a point of contention amongst our community, and as a result, the perk has had an interesting journey since its inception.

Decisive Strike has gone through some minor changes to arrive at its current state. Additionally, we have also prototyped entire reworks of the perk, some that we previously spoke of with the community. Ultimately, most of these ideas were shelved as we felt that they did not retain the essence of the perk, nor did they provide an overall improvement to the current version.

Identifying Community Frustrations

To find a solution through which Decisive Strike would be valuable to our gameplay, we had to better understand our players’ irritations towards the perk. Here is a summary of our findings:

• Up to four Decisive Strikes in a match: This perk can take a lot of the Killer’s time and completely break their momentum. In combination with other frustrations, this often comes back as a point of resentment for most Killers who face a Survivor team with Decisive Strike.
• Risk/Reward: Not much of a downside using the perk, yet a huge advantage when used successfully.
• Dribbling: This is when the Killer intermittently drops a Survivor to avoid the Decisive Strike trigger.
• Obsessions: With only a handful of Survivor obsession perks available, it was often clear when at least one Survivor was running Decisive Strike. Killers would tend to actively avoid the obsession, or alternatively tunnel the obsession, forcing them to burn the perk early in the match.

The New and Improved Decisive Strike

For the new iteration of Decisive Strike, we have introduced certain conditions and outcomes for using the perk, while retaining the core concept of providing a second chance at survival for those who successfully use it.

The trade-off for using Decisive Strike comes at the risk of suddenly becoming the Killer’s latest obsession. The concept of changing the obsession while a match is in progress is something completely new to Dead by Daylight and is sure to create some interesting situations when combined with other obsession perks.

• Perk starts inactive: No longer usable from the start of the match on a first down.
• New condition: In a trial, any Survivor that has the perk equipped can activate and use Decisive Strike if they meet the condition - being saved from a hook or unhooking themselves.
• Decisive Strike will only stay active for 40/50/60 seconds after being unhooked. This window of opportunity (gag) gives the Survivor only a limited time frame in which to trigger the perk after escaping the hook.
• Decisive Strike skill checks will trigger during the pickup. This decision was made to help avoid dribbling and reduce the amount of time wasted for the Killer.
• The skill check area will be slightly larger to make it considerably more accessible to those who occasionally struggle with hitting skill checks.
• Stunning the Killer with Decisive Strike will result in the Killer dropping the Survivor.
• After successfully using Decisive Strike, you will immediately become the obsession. This will remove the obsession from any other player, and any perks that refer to the obsession will now refer to you.

We believe these changes should help enrich the player experience for both Killers and Survivors. We’re excited to get your feedback regarding our new and improved Decisive Strike perk.

These changes will be implemented in the next update.

See you in the Fog.

The Dead by Daylight Game Design Team