Dead By Daylight The Spirit Guide
Rin Yamaoka, A.K.A. The Spirit officially joined ranks of DBD Killers on September 18th, 2018 with the release of Shattered Bloodlines free DLC. DBD Spirit continues her reign as one of the best chasers in the game. Through her ups and downs, nerfs and buffs, she remained a consistent Top-tier Killer till this very day.
The Spirit gameplay is heavily based on her power which renders her invisible. Thus Survivors have to often make educated guesses while being chased by her. This makes The Spirit extremely hard to counter in any meaningful way. But before you can enjoy free wins and the MMR points that come with it. You will need to learn her power, outfit yourself with the best perks for the DBD Spirit, and gather the experience needed to play this medium difficulty Killer.
If you are interested in how strong The Spirit truly is when compared to other Killers in the game. Check out our tier list of all 26 Dead By Daylight's Killers!
Step 1: Learn About The DBD Spirit
The first step naturally is to understand the Killer before you even attempt to play him/her. The secret to Dead By Daylight's The Spirit is her power, Yamaoka's Haunting. As long as you hold the power button (right-click by default on PC) you can enter the Ethereal Plane. This turns you invisible for the duration and increases your speed to 176% or 7.04 m/s. You can keep up this Phase-Walk for a maximum of 5 seconds, or end it prematurely.
There is a significant drawback to using the power though. The Survivors become invisible to you too. You can only see the Scratch Marks that Survivors always leave when sprinting. And if you are wondering, no, she cannot see the pools of blood injured Survivors leave on the ground during the Phase-Walk. But you can still hear audio cues that you would normally hear during a match. Leaves and grass creaking and breaking under feet of Survivors. Their tired breaths and the grunts of pain of injured ones. Using sound to your advantage is standard stuff for Killer gameplay in Dead By Daylight. But when playing DBD Spirit, it is extra crucial to use a headset and a damn good one at that.
One of the more unique elements of Spirits gameplay is a passive attached to her power called Passive Phasing. This is noticeable only from Survivor's point of view, so you will never even know your Killer is doing it. This passive makes it so that The Spirit becomes invisible for like 0.25 of a second at random intervals. This doesn't sound like much. But it can happen when The Spirit is making a sharp turn or lunging at someone. And it makes it impossible at times to guess what she is doing from the Survivor perspective. It is literally impossible to harness this power since it is completely random and you will not know about it when playing DBD Spirit. But you should know, that during a standard chase you have an ace up your sleeve despite moving 5% slower than the standard chase Killers.
Step 2: Prep Your Spirit Before Going Into A Match!
As is with any other Dead By Daylight Killer, you need to be prepared way before your match actually starts. The Spirit naturally has to follow suit if you want to perform in the match. I will break down perks you want to have to play DBD Spirit into categories and give you some pointers as to which you would want. In the case of add-ons, I will just list some of the better ones. But The Spirit in general has almost no useless add-ons. So no matter what you pick, you will be better off than not.
Best Perks For Dead By Daylight's The Spirit
As with most “Chaser”-archetype Killers, you need some information about the Survivors position. Because the sooner you find them, the sooner you can get into a chase. Needless to say, that is what you want to make the most out of her scary power. So the first group is information gathering perks. Just remember to not stack too many! Pick 1 or 2 at most!
The best information gathering perks for DBD Spirit are:
The next category is slowdown perks. I would say that Chasers like The Spirit benefit greatly from perks that slow down the progression of The Survivors. But at this point in the meta, there is not a single Killer in Dead By Daylight that does NOT benefit from having at least one slowdown perk at all times. Especially with perks like Prove Thyself (Increases your Repair speed by +15 % for each other Survivornear you) being very popular among The Survivors.
Without further ado, here are the best slowdown perks for Dead By Daylight's The Spirit:
And I would like to make a special shout-out to the perk Stridor (Increases the volume of Survivors' Grunts of Pain by 50 % and the volume of regular breathing by 25 %). I dislike using the perk on basically any other Killer. But DBD Spirit benefits soooo much from it. Like I wrote before, The Spirit must often tune in to the sounds of Survivors around her when Phase-Walking. And Stridor makes locating them a breeze.
And now we finally move to add-ons for Yamaoka's Haunting. Like it was already mentioned, The Spirit really has no bad add-ons. There are better and worse ones, but none of them are a “trap” per se. Which is a rare case for Dead By Daylight Killers, as there always seems to be at least one add-on which makes your gameplay actually worse per Killer.
Here are her best add-ons to consider:
Step 3: Start Playing!
The DBD Spirit requires a respectable amount of experience to play her at a higher skill level. So you need to play and experiment with The Spirit's add-ons and different perks to get a good grasp on her. Remember to utilize her power in a sensible manner.
You should not empty your power bar and go for the full-length Phase-Walk all the time. The longer you phase, the longer it is on cooldown. Use the power in short bursts to get around the map, or when you are approaching a generator. Only burn your whole bar when you are sure it will down someone. Because then you have a lot of downtime of hooking them anyway. So your power can recover in peace. Believe me, you do not want to come out of a Phase-Walk, miss, and then chase a Survivor with your 110% movement speed for 15 seconds before you can phase again!
With all of this knowledge, you should become a top-tier DBD Spirit in no time!