Dead by Daylight 10.1.0: unhooking loses 5 seconds of Endurance but wipes your scratch marks for 10 — and MMR no longer just counts kills

Update 10.1.0 of Dead by Daylight, released on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, is mostly being read for its Chorus of Sin chapter. Beneath the new killer, however, it contains four changes to the base game that will apply to all your matches, including those where the Judgment is not present.

The most important one takes up just two lines in the patch notes, and it rewrites the second that follows an unhook.

The unhook loses five seconds and gains a third effect

Here is the exact comparison, as it appears in the official text:

A caveat accompanies the new effect, and it is written into the notes: Elusive no longer applies once all generators are powered. The text only places this limitation on Elusive: Endurance and Haste come with no such restriction.

What Elusive actually does

This is the point most players will discover by playing rather than by reading, since the patch notes simply name the effect. As Behaviour only publishes its patch notes in English, we keep its original name; the game's official wiki provides the full definition.

Elusive combines three removals and one block:

• Pain grunts are removed while you are injured.
• No scratch marks are created.
• No blood pools are created.
• Your aura cannot be revealed.

The effect ends early in three cases: taking a basic attack, taking a special attack, or entering the dying state.

Elusive is not new in itself: it was designed on the 9.2.0 PTB to group stealth effects together, then put into service in 9.4.0, alongside the second Stranger Things chapter and Eleven's perk. What changes on August 25 is that it becomes free and automatic for every unhooked survivor.

Why this trade-off is not neutral

Five fewer seconds of invulnerability against ten seconds of trail erasure: the trade-off is clear, and it targets a specific practice.

The 15 seconds of Endurance were massively used to stay put: taking a hit in place of the rescuer, blocking a hallway, buying time on the hook itself. Five fewer seconds cut that window by a third.

Conversely, no scratch marks, no blood pools, no grunts, and no aura reading for ten seconds: that is exactly what's needed to disappear. An unhook no longer invites you to trade a hit, it invites you to leave in a direction the killer won't be able to reconstruct.

Two practical consequences:

1. The rescuer and the rescued must no longer leave together. The latter leaves no trail, the former does: staying side by side cancels out the advantage.
2. The window is disabled at the end of the match. Once the generators are finished, Elusive no longer applies. End-game unhooks revert to the previous system, with five seconds less than before. This is the only case where 10.1.0 is a net nerf.

The hook timer is split into two bars

Second structural change, and it concerns readability. The hook timer used to be a single bar; it now becomes two, to clearly distinguish the second hook state from the death trigger.

Behaviour specifies that the new presentation also applies to the four situations that function like a hook without being one:

• A hooked survivor.
• A Corrupted Cage, in the 2v8 mode.
• An Executioner's cage. The August 25 patch notes call it Cage of Torment, where the in-game name is Cage of Atonement — we're going with the in-game wording.
• Exile, the one from the Trial.

The gain is real for survivors who used to hesitate over when a rescue becomes urgent: the two thresholds are now visible separately, without having to estimate a fraction of a bar.

MMR is no longer calculated on kills and escapes alone

Third change, and the one with the heaviest long-term consequences. The game's internal ranking system only counted kills and escapes. The notes announce that it now takes into account more actions within a match, on a principle Behaviour explicitly compares to that of emblems.

The text stops there: no list of actions, no weighting is published. So we have to stick to what's written, and be wary of correspondence tables that will circulate in the coming days with no basis other than observation.

What can be said without extrapolating: a killer who let four survivors escape after a match of constant pressure will no longer be rated as a killer who did nothing, and a survivor who escapes through the hatch after spending the match hiding will no longer be rated as someone who repaired three generators.

A section to read up on killer powers before facing them

Fourth addition, purely informational but welcome: a "Gameplay Showcase" section, accessible from the survivor and killer lobbies, as well as by clicking on a killer's power icon. It contains:

• The detailed description of each killer's power, broken down by key aspect.
• An example video for each aspect.
• The complete list of killers, browsable to preview a power.

Just one limitation, explicit: the section is only accessible outside of matches. It won't replace a cheat sheet during a Trial.

In the same move, the old power tooltip has been emptied out: it used to describe a power from start to finish, and now it uses the action-based description already used in the F1 match details section. And the matchmaking button now shows both the estimated wait time and the time already spent in queue, with bonuses moved into a tooltip.

What you need to do with all this tonight

1. After being dropped, run — don't stand still. Ten seconds with no trail is better than five seconds of lost Endurance.
2. Split up from the rescuer immediately. Their scratch marks cancel out your advantage.
3. Generators finished: go back to the pre-patch gameplay, counting 10 seconds instead of 15.
4. Take a look at the Gameplay Showcase before facing a killer you don't know: it's the only place in the game where the power is described in full.

One last note, for those who will go read the patch notes: fifteen perks have been rebalanced in this version — six on the killer side and nine on the survivor side. We won't go through them one by one here — the full list, with before-and-after values, is in Behaviour's own patch notes.