Dead by Daylight is one of those games where you initially can’t stop wondering what you’re doing wrong. Why am I always caught by the Killer so quickly? Why can’t I even power one single generator? New players will always commit the most evident mistakes but won’t be able to recognize them due to their inexperience. In this guide, I will give you the best Dead by Daylight tips for Survivors that you should follow if you want to get better at the game. Keep in mind that this guide will only cover Survivor tips. We will leave the best strategies for Killers for another day, so let’s focus on the poor victims right now.
The Best Tips for Survivors in Dead by Daylight
There are several tips you can follow to improve your Survivor matches in Dead by Daylight. Below you can find a list of the most important ones to keep in mind to escape the Killer in the Entity’s trials.
A Good Load-out
First off, the best thing you can do to be prepared for a match is to bring perks and add-ons that you feel comfortable with. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that you will live to tell the story, it increases your chances of escaping a trial. Knowing how and when to use your selected perks is always a helpful way of making the Killer lose some time. If you’re new to the game you will not have many perks at your disposal, so here you have a guide on how to level up fast in the game and unlock anything you need. I have also written a guide explaining my current favorite perks in the game in case you don’t have any favorite perks or don’t know which ones you should unlock.
Unlock as many perks as you can to improve your load-out.
Gen-Rush
Ok, here is the first thing you need to do once the match starts. This is a very basic Survivor strategy in the game and most experienced Survivor teams apply it correctly for their advantage. Gen-Rushing is the name the community has given to the action of rushing to turn on several generators as fast as possible since the very beginning of the match.
While some teams may exaggerate by bringing several toolboxes and add-ons to speed up the process even more, you actually don’t need to be on a team or bring anything to the match to perform this strategy. The most important principle you need to follow is to start repairing a generator as soon as the match begins. Don’t lose time trying to identify the Killer or find anything else that’s not a generator. If all 4 Survivors start working on a generator since the match begins, you will guarantee that at least one or two of those generators will be fully repaired before the first Survivor gets hooked.
If each Survivor is on a different generator and they’re not repairing the same generator, that’s even better. The Killer won’t have time to locate and injure all 4 of you, which will inevitably lead to several generators getting instantly repaired one after another. Remember that generators are the main objective to escape the match alive. If you start focusing more on that before trying to cleanse dull totems or looking for the basement chest, you will notice how easily your performance will improve on each match.
The more Survivors working on generators at the start of the trial, the better.
Know Your Role
Now that you understand the basic concept of Gen-Rush, it’s time to enlighten you about roles. Unlike games like Overwatch or Rainbow Six Siege, you don’t have an established role since the beginning of the match. While you can bring perks to perform certain roles more easily, you can’t actually choose your role so easily. Sometimes you will have to adapt or switch to one role or another depending on the situation. To simplify it, the roles are Repairer, Distraction, and Rescuer.
Repairer
Repairers are, you guessed right, every Survivor that is currently repairing a generator. According to our Gen-Rush strategy mentioned earlier, everyone is a repairer at the beginning of the match. But that won’t be the case throughout the whole match. The Killer will inevitably find at least one of you. Whoever starts getting chased by the Killer first becomes the Distraction.
Repair generators whenever you see other Survivors rescuing teammates or distracting the Killer.
Distraction
Some players (especially newcomers) believe that being chased by the Killer necessarily means that they have to escape the chase. This is far from the truth because the Distraction’s sole objective is to make the Killer waste as much time as possible. It doesn’t matter if they catch you or not, but you have to make sure he takes a very long while trying to do so. For example, a +40 seconds chase is a good distraction, while a 15 seconds chase is not.
Distract the Killer for as long as you can to help your teammates complete objectives.
Rescuer
Once the first Distraction gets hooked, the match gets tighter for Survivors. The Rescuer is the person that will run off to unhook the already downed Distraction. The Killer will usually then find another one of the three unhooked Survivors and start chasing them. This will leave the match with only 2 Repairers, and both of them have to make a decision. One of them has to stay repairing, and the other has to go rescue the hooked Survivor/s, which will leave the current scenario with only one Repairer left. The injured Survivors don’t necessarily need to be healed by the Rescuer.
Unhook and heal teammates whenever you’re the most qualified to do so.
These scenarios have variations and the match won’t always follow the course explained above, but these are the most common ones. You have to know when to try to unhook a Survivor if the Killer is camping a hook, or when to stop repairing a generator. This brings us to our next tip on the list: the timing.
Timing
Timing is very important in Dead by Daylight for both Survivors and Killers, and this will easily be one of the most useful tips on the list. It doesn’t matter which role you choose to do at a certain moment, but when you choose to do them. It is complicated to talk about timing without using examples to explain it, so below you have a few examples of good and bad timing.
Good Timing Examples
- Stop repairing a generator and start running as soon as you see the Killer coming to get you.
- Run off to unhook a Survivor once the Killer is far away from them.
- Hiding whenever the Killer was chasing you but lost your trail.
- Purposefully trying to distract the Killer if they’re near other Survivors that are completing objectives or rescuing hooked teammates.
- Go unhook a Survivor when everyone else is repairing a generator or escaping from the Killer.
- Keep repairing a generator when someone else is distracting the Killer or unhooking a Survivor.
Use the bottom left corner of the screen to check your teammates status and current activities.
Bad Timing Examples
- Start running away from the Killer when they’re practically behind you.
- Trying to unhook a Survivor when the Killer is camping them or patrolling the area.
- Hiding without a purpose.
- Trying to distract the Killer when they weren’t even close to finding you or anyone else.
- Go unhook a Survivor when someone else is already doing it.
- Keep repairing a generator when the Killer has already spotted you or nobody else is going for the hooked Survivor.
As you can see, it doesn’t matter how you choose to help your team. It matters when you decide to do so. Some actions are particularly helpful in certain situations while others aren’t. Take good decisions for your team and you will drastically improve your performance in every single match.
Evading
We could probably do a whole other guide for Survivors with several tips about evading the Killer in Dead by Daylight. Running from the Killer isn’t just simply trying to zigzag in hopes of them losing your trail. Evading requires certain planning, you have to know what you’re doing.
To make it short: what you want to do whenever you get spotted by the Killer is to create distance between you and them. Remember that all Killers are slightly faster than Survivors. So if you choose to run in a straight line for 15 seconds, you will eventually get hit no matter how hard you press the run button.
You want to use your environment to slow down the Killer. Pallets and windows are the best options. Survivors can vault pallets and windows much faster than Killers, so these are definitely your best friends during a chase. Don’t just throw down pallets or vault windows randomly though. During the chase, you have to stop for a moment and think: “if I do this, will it slow down the Killer for a few seconds and allow me to keep running for a little longer?”. If the answer is yes, do it. If the answer is no… you’re going to waste a pallet or your precious time.
Use pallets to your advantage and create distance between yourself and the Killer.
Hiding + Be Aware of Your Scratch Marks
Another basic principle to escape the Killer is hiding from them. This basic concept is incorrectly used by new players because many people think that if they hide and the Killer hasn’t been able to find them for a while, they’re automatically doing something good. Which is not always the case.
You want to hide whenever it’s likely that the Killer is going to lose their time trying to find you. If you were repairing a generator and you hear the Killer coming to get you, or if you were running away from them and found a good spot to make them lose your trail… that’s the right moment to hide. If they’re not able to find you when you hid in those situations, you just slightly increased your chances of surviving the trial. Don’t just stay hidden for too long after the Killer gives up on you though, you want to keep being productive for your team. Go back to that generator or hooked Survivor as soon as you can to keep making progress.
Also, keep in mind that whenever you run, you leave scratch marks that are visible to the Killer and ease the chases for them. Use your scratch marks to confuse them. Run towards lockers and then walk away from the area. They’ll believe you hid there and they’ll waste time opening an empty locker. You should do this only if they aren’t watching you but following your scratch marks. This strategy also applies to windows and even rooms. Don’t just hide exactly in the same spot you stopped running, it’s going to be easy for them to assume you’re there.
You can see your own scratch marks if you use the Self-Aware perk.
The Last Three Generators
A nice strategy that always works to ensure you escape alive is making sure you repair generators that are very close to another one. When there is only one generator left to power the exit gates, there will only be three possible generators to repair on the map.
By repairing generators that are too close to one another, you’re going to make sure these last three generators are separated, which is going to be an authentic nightmare for the Killer to patrol them. If these three generators end up being too close to each other… the Killer will have an easy time patrolling the generators and will probably sacrifice all four of you to the Entity.
Opening the Exit Gates
There aren’t many pieces of advice to give regarding the exit gates other than not trying to open them if you don’t know where the Killer is. If you manage to hide near an exit gate and see the Killer patrolling it and then going in the opposite direction, that is your chance to open the gate. If you’re lucky enough you’ll have enough time to open the gate and escape before the Killer comes back to check on the gate!
Try to open the exit gates if the Killer’s far enough.
Looking for the Hatch
Whenever you’re the last Survivor in the match, the hatch will randomly spawn on the map and allow you to escape. The hatch does a deep sound whenever you’re near it, so you should hear it if you’re 32 meters away from it or less.
That said, the best way to look for the hatch is by using your hearing. Don’t just run around sticking to the borders of the map in hopes of not being spotted by the Killer, because you’ll be wasting too much space to cover. Run as far away from the map borders as you can, because the hatch can’t spawn there (in most maps, anyway). Run around the biggest building on the map keeping a certain distance from it and you should eventually hear the hatch if you’re near it.
If you’re having trouble with this, you can use Bill Overbeck’s Left Behind perk, which allows you to see the aura of the hatch from a 32 meters distance whenever it spawns. It’s not the best perk in the game, but it’s helpful when you’re not experienced in finding the hatch.
Make sure to find the hatch before the Killer does! They can close it and you won’t be able to open it again unless you have a key.
That was my guide of advanced tips for Survivors in Dead by Daylight. which is available for PC on Steam and the Epic Games store, PS4 & PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. Tome 14’s Level 2 has been unlocked with new challenges, so jump back into the game and complete them to claim more rewards and cosmetics from this rift!
Level 2 has unlocked.
Witness the origins of uncompromising strength. The Knight’s story begins in Tome 14: BETRAYAL. pic.twitter.com/kzBJEN8jAL— Dead by Daylight (@DeadByBHVR) February 8, 2023
