The Evolution of Dead by Daylight’s Meta! (2016 – 2022)



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Hey everyone, today we’re going to be looking through Dead by Daylight’s history, assessing the meta of each of its years. From year 1 to year 6. For Year 1 and 2 I’ve mostly taken a look at forum posts from back then and tried to judge the most accurate meta build, as I only started playing in 2019. So, if you have a differing assessment of the meta from then especially, please do drop it down below. Also note that the way DbD years’ work is from June to June, as that’s when the anniversary is. We’re going to be looking at the best survivor build for each year, the best killer, and the best killer build. Let’s get into it.

Chapter 23 has been announced! It’s Ringu, a licensed chapter releasing in March of 2022. For now we have no further details.

Check out my 2nd channel for content on other games: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnz3TK9TLt6BhKh-P66srtQ

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Music used from YouTube Audio Library:
The Emperor’s Army – Jeremy Blake
Clean and Dance – An Jone

Hope you enjoy!

Dead by Daylight Wiki (very helpful and a ton of cool stuff and secrets on there): https://deadbydaylight.fandom.com/wiki/Dead_by_Daylight_Wiki

Intro 0:00
Year 1 (2016 – 2017) 0:35
Year 2 (2017 – 2018) 2:37
Year 3 (2018 – 2019) 4:22
Year 4 (2019 – 2020) 6:04
Year 5 (2020 – 2021) 7:49
Year 6 (2021 – 2022) 10:00
Outro 10:59

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37 thoughts on “The Evolution of Dead by Daylight’s Meta! (2016 – 2022)”

  1. in year 2 pop wasnt that popular since the curtain call dlc got released a few days before the aniversary and it was onyl 30 seconds and in year 3 i enduring bbq ruin(pop) and spirit fury was a popular 1 since pop got a buff from 30 seconds to 60 seconds

    Reply
  2. I hope they make something like BT basekit for survivors and corrupt intervention for killer. It would help a lot with balancing and a lot of issues people have with the game.

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  3. slightly unrelated, but the laurie(s?) in the first match were ass. steal ur medkit and don't even bother helping at any point. hope they stub their toe every day for the rest of their life

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  4. I feel like survivor perks are really dull, and there arent many good ones if you want to win, but there are many good and cool perks for killer which allowed for a much better experience not running the same perks all the time. I feel like the community is based of alot of people who play only killer or only survivor because of this

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  5. I currently run borrowed time, dead hard, D strike and self care on survivor. Self care is one of those works where if I unequip I feel vulnerable.

    For killer I think your meta was spot on however blood favor, no Ed, and rancor are also extremely good!

    Love your vids!

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  6. I don’t think all meta perks are boring just most can be (except for Bt that’s a must) mainly because a meta in Dbd doesn’t really promote originality in perk builds or perks that people would personally like to use, my go to perks are perks I love to use which for survivor would be Head On, Bond, BT, and iron will. I don’t really like using meta stuff but I do like using perks that are fun for me to use and sometimes people that use meta perks don’t even know they’re meta so there’s that to and it could be that they just using those perks.

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  7. Legion was never even worth mentioning, even in Year 3. Even when moonwalking was viable, even when FMT + SWS was worth running, Legion was never even close to the top spot. It worked, yeah, but it took too long to down survivors to come even close to anything like Spirit or Nurse. Both strats were pretty much just for salt mining or pubstomping.

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  8. maybe things would have changed if old legion was kept around longer and developed more but i don't think they should have been an honorable mention as a good killer. the general opinion was that they were incredibly weak and while they did have ridiculous things about them like the double mending slowdown addons or franks mixtapes stab depleting mending effect or the general bloodhound playstyle of looking down and following blood to not initiate chase(which is what paused mending timers before) in the end legion was basically a 110% killer with a decently long power cooldown that just had many ways to get guaranteed but very slow downs and you basically chose which one you'd go for with add ons.

    they weren't particularly strong and i do think the community started to figure out the dumb ways you could play them by the end of their release form but not a very strong killer over all

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  9. I myself started playing during the end of year one, and wow, just kinda looking back, the game seems to have changed dramatically, even with a rather stagnant meta, just because we as players started to improve. Honestly, I was suprised to see Urban Evasion wasn't really mentioned, as I myself was a religious user of it, and most of the people I met agreed. I would argue that for a while, Urban was a rather common perk that kinda creeped into the meta for a while, just because stealth was how alot of people played the game then. Obviously not everyone, but I would argue it still was meta personally

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