Dead by Daylight 5th Anniversary Event Updates & The Bloodweb Grind
I’m going to be honest here. Not much has changed since the 5th Anniversary Event started in Dead by Daylight this month.
In the previous article, I detailed some concerns I had with how rewards were being handled. The community had to earn the specialty 5th Anniversary cosmetics for David King and The Wraith by unlocking the in-game crowns. We blew through those goals easily even with the console experience being quite broken right now. All of the codes are shown below for the charms, heads, torsos, and pants or weapon.
We also unlocked the Blood Hunt. If you recall, I was quite critical of the game for once again refusing to include a Blood Hunt—a special event where all bloodpoint earnings are doubled automatically—as part of the events. The final secret reward for unlocking enough crowns is a Blood Hunt from 29 July to 3 August.
The only catch is the 5th Anniversary Event in-game officially ended yesterday, 22 July. This means that people aren’t getting the event items, like the 5th Anniversary cake that added a stackable 105% bloodpoint bonus to your end game total, in their bloodwebs anymore. Some people will save them for the Blood Hunt, but there’s a finite supply now.
Ok, define finite. I have over 80 saved up on Trickster and Nemesis and I intend to get my money’s worth during the event. But I digress.
The major design flaw in Dead by Daylight right now is how punishing the progression grind is. There are now 66 killer perks and 68 survivor perks in the game. Each character comes equipped with three by default (the ones that were released with their character) and can access 12 non-unique killer perks and 13 non-unique survivor perks in the bloodweb by default. Each of these perks has three tiers to them. That means you need to spend bloodpoints (between 4000-6000 per perk) three times to have the strongest version of the perk. Until level 25, only one perk appears per bloodweb. Levels 30, 35, and 40 unlock the character-specific perks for any character in the game. You can, at most, claim two perks per level after Level 30, and even that’s not guaranteed.
To unlock every killer perk in the game, you have to spend 990,000 bloodpoints; for survivor perks, 1,020,000. That’s not counting all the other items and offerings you have to spend bloodpoints on to move to the next level of the bloodweb. You can, at most, have 1,000,000 bloodpoints in-game unless Behaviour offers bonus points as a reward or an apology to all players.
To be clear, these are the numbers per character. To unlock all killer perks on all killers, you’re spending 23,760,000 bloodpoints; for all survivors, 27,540,000 bloodpoints. And that’s not even getting into the cost of prestiging a character (if you choose to) for the special bloody cosmetics.
Behaviour has to have a reason why they want players to have to spend so many bloodpoints to unlock everything in the game. The grind is tiring. A Blood Hunt event is a huge boost to that; stacked on the in-game events like they used to be, it was a blessing. You could catch up on survivors or killers you didn’t play as often so you had access to more of the gameplay options when you do chose to play them.
Meanwhile, with the 5th Anniversary event granting anywhere from 0% bonus (no offerings) to 525% bonus (five 5th Anniversary Cakes), I finished unlocking all perks on Trickster and Nemesis and brought Felix from level 40 to Prestige III with about 2/3 of the perks unlocked. I wouldn’t have bothered doing that on any of those characters if I wasn’t getting bonus bloodpoints. I had the perks I needed for the builds I wanted to run, and that’s where most of my characters stay now. The grind is too punishing otherwise.
The scale of the 5th Anniversary Event was smaller than usual. The only thing that was bigger than average was the length of the event, and that was only because they extended it due to optimization issues with console. There were no art, craft, or cosplay contests this year. The in-game cosmetics were a new version of the same crown from last year with the same game mechanic to earn it. The event flashlights, medkits, and toolboxes were the same as last year. The cake added 1% more bonus points than it did last year. The loading screens were the same layout with new quotations and splash art. The event felt like an afterthought rather than a celebration.
