Dead by Daylight's 10.2.0 PTB Reshapes 58 Perks Around Diminishing Returns
What changed
When Diminishing Returns arrived in update 9.6.0, Behaviour Interactive deliberately withheld sweeping balance changes — the studio wanted to observe how the feature affected perk selection before acting. With the upcoming PTB for 10.2.0, that patience ends. Fifty-eight perks are changing; 26 are directly affected by the Diminishing Returns adjustments.
The stated design goals are twofold: update effects that sidestep or are blunted by Diminishing Returns, and buff gameplay effects that can safely interact with it — widening the viable build space beyond the usual handful of popular picks.
Two perks were highlighted in the announcement:
- Do No Harm now scales its healing speed bonus with each Hook State on the healing target (30/40/50% faster per tier), adds a scaling Skill Check progress bonus on great checks (3%), and increases Skill Check trigger odds by 5%. The intent is to separate it from flat healing-speed perks and give it a niche among Skill Check-focused builds.
- Knock Out has been reworked into a pallet-punishment tool: when a Survivor drops a pallet and then moves 10 m away from it within 6 seconds, they suffer 20% Hindered for 3/4/5 seconds. The effect ends early if the pallet is broken — including after the Hindered debuff has already been applied.
The source text cuts off before the full list of changes is presented, so the complete scope of the PTB remains undetailed here.
For players who have felt locked into a narrow set of meta perks, the explicit goal of making underused options more competitive is the headline promise of this update.