Dead by Daylight Chapter XIX: All-Kill Review (DLC, 2021)
Dead by Daylight’s new paid DLC Chapter XIX: All-Kill came out on 30 March. Buying the DLC gives you the new killer, The Trickster, and the new survivor, Yun-Jin Lee. Their stories, appearance, perks, and power are inspired by K-Pop. I say it all the time that anything can be horror, and Behaviour Interactive created one of the most terrifying set of backstories in the game in All-Kill.
This is the first time in Dead by Daylight that the new killer and survivor in a chapter are directly connected to each other in lore. The killer, Ji-Woon Hak, is a K-Pop idol managed by the survivor, Yun-Jin Lee. Both fought hard for their careers, and their determination paid off. Yun-Jin took a struggling boy band, NO SPIN, and turned them into the newest stars by bringing in Ji-Woon.
Ji-Woon quickly grew tired of sharing the spotlight and embraced an opportunity to be a solo star. He left his bandmates to burn alive in the studio and played the role of the sympathetic victim. Yun-Jin seized the opportunity as well, helping to promote Ji-Woon’s new persona as The Trickster. The Trickster was an even bigger success than NO SPIN, but Yun-Jin quickly learned that she didn’t really have control over her new star.
As The Trickster, Ji-Woon developed a taste for blood, murdering his fans around the world and recording their deaths to mix into his music. In his final act, he murdered every studio executive at his label who came to a listening party for his new album. Only Yun-Jin was spared for taking a chance on him, but the Entity saw fit to bring both into the realm of Dead by Daylight.
The Trickster feels like a cross between The Plague and the original version of The Nightmare. He carries 60 knives that he can throw in rapid succession at survivors. These are his Showstopper power and you refill them at lockers. After hitting a survivor eight times within a certain time period, they become injured or go into the dying state. When The Trickster fills his Event Meter, he launches the Main Event. This throws an even faster barrage of unlimited blades for the length of the Main Event. If survivors are hit with a basic attack or you don’t use the blades fast enough in either version of the power, their Laceration Meter decreases. This means you’ll have to hit them more than eight times to change their health state.
I’ll say it right now: I love playing The Trickster. I think he is such a fun character. The sound design is incredible. The default sound is Trickster’s breathing, which grows faster and faster when he uses his power. Then he starts this giggle that turns into a maniacal laugh as he hits survivors and starts to injure them. I honestly can’t think of another killer whose sound design actually plays into the lore of the character. Ji-Woon is a performer putting on a show and a depraved killer obsessed with injuring others. The whole package works.
Right now, he is harder to 4k with. His power snowballs over time, just like Plague and Old Freddy (Nightmare). With Plague, you have to keep hitting survivors with your Purge attack to break them, which takes time. With Old Freddy, you had to put the survivor to sleep to be able to hit them, a process that took seven seconds. Only then did you have the advantage over the survivors.
I was a Freddy main before they redid his power in patch 3.1.0 and I still play a lot of Plague. I like the challenge of having to outthink survivors on their pathing and tracking where they all are on the map. With this kind of killer, tunnelling one person out of the game will cause you to fail very quickly. You have to split focus, keep players injured, and spread out your hooks so you can knock them out one after another towards the end of the match. The big downside is this kind of character is add-on reliant to make them more competitive.
I don’t even want to go too far into The Trickster’s weaknesses right now because they’re all being addressed in an upcoming patch. The Trickster’s movement speed isn’t going to slow as much when he uses his power. The recoil and spread of the knives is going to be reduced. The Main Event is getting buffed. The Laceration Meter will take longer to decrease. His windup time on Showstopper and his cooldown time on Main Event are decreasing. A few add-ons are getting nerfed to account for his increased speed and accuracy.
Trickster 🎤 buff 💪 soon ⏱️
— Dead by Daylight (@DeadByBHVR) April 8, 2021
Read: https://t.co/fmSoQK6c2J 📖 pic.twitter.com/AL6ESd0t3p
Let’s go into his perks.
Hex: Crowd Control is a new hex perk that punishes survivors for using windows. After performing a rushed vault, the window will be blocked for 10/12/14 seconds depending on the level of the perk. I’ve already written about my love a good “delete everything” build in my review of The Blight’s chapter, and I’ve had fun slotting that in as a way to control survivor movement.
No Way Out is an end game slow down perk. Every time you hook a unique survivor, you get a token. When the last generator is completed, the exit gates are blocked for 10 seconds. You earn an additional 4/6/8 seconds for each token, blocking the gate for up to 26/34/42 seconds total. The Trickster is a killer who benefits from slowing down the match, so No Way Out can really turn a game around in the final moments. I’ve run it with Remember Me (earn tokens each time you hit the obsession, adding an additional 4 seconds of time to open the gate for a max of 8/12/16 seconds) and it is…nasty. Survivors don’t like when that happens, but I sure do.
Starstruck is The Trickster’s best perk. When you pick up a survivor, any survivor in your terror radius is exposed for 26/28/30 seconds. Meaning, the survivors go for a body block and you knock them down in one hit. After you drop or hook the survivor, the timer restarts for 26/28/30 seconds for anyone still in your terror radius. Find the lurkers and you might have a whole team of survivors in the dying state in half a minute. One particularly effective combo is Starstruck and Mad Grit (while carrying a survivor, you have no cooldown if you miss an attack; hitting another survivor pauses the wiggle progression for 2/3/4 seconds), which lets you take a few more risks taking down exposed survivors before resetting the timer with the hook.
My Trickster build right now consistently gets me 3Ks/4Ks without too much effort. For Add-ons, I run On Target Single (to give me more time before the Laceration Meter decreases) and Caged Heart Shoes (to increase movement speed while throwing blades).
The Trickster does well with slowdown perks, so I run two. Corrupt Intervention blocks the 3 generators furthest away from me for 120 seconds at the start of the match. I also run No Way Out, which can add 42 seconds to the end of the game with the blocked exit gates. I use I’m All Ears for tracking (rushed actions reveal survivors auras for 6 seconds) and Starstruck to punish altruism.
The rest comes down to understanding how survivors run tiles and knowing when I have enough time to get those eight blade hits in before the map blocks survivors. I’ll typically only go for one health state with the blades. That means I either m1 the first chance I get then start throwing, or start throwing from a distance and play catchup later to m1. Going for both health states usually depletes all the knives in one chase, so I avoid it unless I’m really lucky with where a chase starts.
Now let’s look at Yun-Jin’s survivor perks.
Fast Track is a generator perk. Every time another survivor is hooked, you gain 1/2/3 tokens, up to 9/18/27 tokens total. When you hit a great skill check, you gain an additional 1% progression bonus for each token you have. I’m not a big fan of perks that reward you for your teammates being hooked and dying, and this perk is basically “finish one generator 27% faster by letting your teammates die.”
Self-Preservation is a stealth perk that will actually help really altruistic players. Whenever another survivor is hit with a basic or special attack within 12m of you, you leave no scratch marks, have no grunts of pain, and don’t bleed for 6/8/10 seconds. If you’re the kind of player who likes to get close during a chase and go in for a flashlight save or pallet drop, Self-Preservation will help you sneak into the perfect position without being as easily noticed. This would pair well with Breakout, a perk that gives you haste within 6m of a survivor being carried and increases the survivor’s wiggle speed by 20%.
Smash Hit is a pallet and exhaustion perk. After dropping a pallet on the killer, you sprint at 150% movement speed for 4 seconds. You’re then exhausted for 60/50/40 seconds. This is another perk I don’t think is particularly useful. Pallet stuns really don’t work right now and they’re harder to get anyway. I’d only run this if you want a challenge.
For me, I’m not using any of the new survivor perks because they don’t match with my playstyle. I think Self-Preservation could be interesting to experiment with, especially if you typical Survive With Friends in the game. Communication would be key to make the most of that perk.
Chapter XIX: All-Kill is a lot of fun. The biggest downside is we did not get a map inspired by this story, but Behaviour Interactive have hinted that we might get one in the future. Their focus now is balancing the existing realms with their map team, which is the reason why our last new map was Chapter XVI: Silent Hill.
Dead by Daylight is available on PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series S/X, Nintendo Switch, and Google Stadia. You can get the game and various DLCs for 55% off using my Humble Bundle link for the next few days.
