Dead by Daylight shared details for its next big patch and there are some surprising quality of life changes.

In brief players can expect lots of changes for Survivors, a healthy nerf for The Nurse, and some other minor tweaks and balances.

First off is the Survivor “buff”. Survivors aren’t mechanically changing or getting any numbers tweaks, rather Survivors can now finally tell what each other are doing. Dead By Daylight has no in-game voice or text chat outside of the post-game lobby.

This means that if you’re not queueing with friends in a Discord call, you can literally have no clue what your teammates are up to. This lack of communication leads to situations where players feel their team hasn’t contributed as much as they have, or worse that they’ve just been hiding the entire time.

Now survivors can see little visual effects around their team mates’ icons when they’re performing an activity or being chased. This will provide helpful information to bring random teams closer to pre-made teams with comms.

Is a team mate being chased? You know you’re free to work on a generator without being interrupted. Are you the one being chased? You can tell your teammates are working on a generator and not just being lazy so it feels more worthwhile to waste the killer’s time. Behaviour has side-stepped the issue of voice comms while giving Survivors the information they need to cooperate.

The Nurse meanwhile has been nerfed. The Nurse has always been one of the strongest killers in Dead by Daylight whose power allows her to teleport short to medium distances at the cost of her walking speed which is slower than even a Survivor.

Part of what has made her so dangerous is her ability to close gaps and hit the player while taking full advantage of perks that work strictly on “Basic Attacks”. Now attacks made shortly after a blink count as “Special” attacks, meaning they will no longer benefit from Exposed and other perks that alter Basic Attacks.

This might sound like a small change on paper but the actual effects are huge. Starstruck, Hex: No One Escapes Death, Hex: Devour Hope, Make Your Choice, etc. The Nurse can basically no longer instantly down players.

There have also been some adjustments to The Knight Killer, The Eyrie of Crows map, and in-game challenges. You can read the full patch notes here.

Dead by Daylight is available now on Windows PC (via Steam), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Android, and iOS. In case you missed it, you can find our review here (we recommend it!)