Dead by Daylight rolls back healing system changes after community backlash

After changing the game’s healing system in a recent update, Dead by Daylight developers have rolled back those alterations due to community backlash.

Developer Behaviour Interactive introduced the new healing system in a late March update. The changes meant that the time it took to heal in Dead by Daylight went from 16 seconds to 24 seconds by default.

In a Developer Update blog post, the team explained that such a shift targeted instances wherein highly skilled players could evade the killer for long periods of time.

The update made “each hit more impactful, ensuring that Survivors need to spend longer to heal their wounds,” the post read in part. Naturally, users were less than pleased with the eight-second reduction.

Dead by Daylight reverts healing changes amid fan blowback

Many DBD faithful aired out their concerns in Reddit threads, arguing that the healing nerfs would inflate Killer kill rates and harm play rates for Survivors.

Others believed Behaviour Interactive would quickly reverse course – they were proven correct. Healing in the asymmetrical multiplayer has already returned to its previous state.

The team revealed in a more recent Developer Update that the base healing time had been reset to 16 seconds. Behaviour wrote the following:

“After reviewing player feedback, we found that many of you agreed that the speed [at] which you heal others was already in a good spot prior to the update. 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.”

Behaviour managed to better balance the healing system in other ways, however. All in all, Medkits now have decreased power when activated for self-healing purposes in Dead by Daylight.

But their power is increased when players use them to heal teammates. The hope is that altruistic heals become much more appealing.