Dead by Daylight Reverts Healing Changes After Backlash

Dead by Daylight creators Behaviour Interactive walked back a controversial change this week that affected the game’s healing system following backlash from Survivor players who felt the change was unwarranted. The change in question announced as part of the March Developer Update made it so that Survivors would take a whopping 24 seconds to be fully healed which was almost 10 seconds more than it took previously. Behaviour has taken the community’s feedback into account and has reinstated the 16-second baseline for healing, though changes are still being made elsewhere in regards to the way healing works.

The previous healing changes only went to the game’s test servers and hadn’t made it to the live game yet, so if you didn’t hear about them before, that’s likely why. Announced in the same Developer Update from March that introduced things like a new time-saving Bloodweb feature, a swathe of healing changes were made with the most impactful one being the increased time to heal. Med-Kits were rebalanced to offer 24 charges by default which allowed for one full heal per item.

Other changes were made, too, but the increased healing time was the one players were stuck on. Players were so quick and adamant in their responses about these changes that Behaviour has decided to revert them.

“After reviewing player feedback, we found that many of you agreed that the speed which you heal others was already in a good spot prior to the update,” Behaviour said. “This change also had knock-on effects elsewhere in the game, making effects like Mangled and Hemorrhage stronger and making ‘slugging’ (leaving Survivors in the dying state) even more effective.”

“Therefore, we have reverted the base healing time to 16 seconds.”

So, instead of changing that, Behaviour will now be adjusting Med-Kits further. They’ll still retain the 24 charges granted by the old PTB update, and now, they’ll heal faster when one player uses them on another Survivor. The catch, however, is that Med-Kits will now come with a penalty when they’re used on for self-healing. This penalty makes it so that the healing duration will again take 24 seconds to run its course.

Med-Kit add-ons, perks, and other factors will continue to affect the healing times of different Med-Kit variants, but this and other changes like the one for the Circle of Healing perk continue a trend which Behaviour says will hopefully make items and perks “more appealing for altruistic heals.”