Few sounds strike more fear into the heart of a survivor in Dead by Daylight than the signature scream and sigh of the Nurse. Widely considered the best killer in the game, the Nurse is an absolute monster in a chase as well as the game's lore, capable of teleporting through walls, pallets, and other obstacles, and even between floors to catch her prey.
No power is better than Spencer's Last Breath when it comes to cutting off survivors and leaving them no hope of escape. The Nurse has one of the highest learning curves in Dead by Daylight and a playstyle like no other, making her difficult to master. Yet those who remain diligent in their pursuit of learning Sally Smithson's nuanced mechanics will become some of the game's most dangerous players.
Spencer's Last Breath
With a movement speed of just 96.25 m/s, the Nurse is the only killer in Dead by Daylight with a base speed slower than survivors. To compensate for this, the Nurse possesses Spencer's Last Breath, the ability to execute Blink, teleporting through objects and covering territory extremely quickly. By default, the Nurse can Blink twice before needing to recharge, and can even chain those Blinks together in order to make last-second adjustments or cover the final few meters between her and the survivor she is chasing.
The longer the Nurse charges her Blink, the farther she will travel, up to her maximum distance. The Nurse can Blink through walls, pallets, obstacles, and even floors and ceilings, granting her unparalleled potential in a chase. Nowhere is safe from the Nurse. After the last Blink in her chain, the Nurse experiences fatigue, causing the screen to darken and her POV to shift downwards, giving survivors a brief chance to hide or flee from her sight. Shining a flashlight at the Nurse prevents her from charging a Blink, and detonating firecrackers or flash grenades next to the Nurse in mid-charge will cause her to abort the Blink and immediately enter fatigue.
The Nurse's Teachable Perks
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Though the Nurse's teachable perks aren't outstanding, they can be useful in the right hands:
- Stridor (Level 30) increases the volume of survivors' grunts of pain by 50% and the volume of their regular breathing by 25%.
- With Thanatophobia (Level 35), for each injured, dying, or hooked survivor, all survivors suffer a stackable 5% penalty to repairing, sabotaging, and cleansing speed, to a maximum penalty of 20%.
- ANurse's Calling (Level 40) reveals the auras of any survivors healing or being healed within 28 meters.
Stridor used to be a favorite perk for Spirit mains due to its obvious value as an auditory tracking perk, but after some buffs and nerfs it is considerably weaker and used only infrequently. Thanatophobia is a good general slowdown perk, especially for killers like Legion who excel at injuring multiple survivors in a short period of time and keeping them injured. Of all of her teachable perks, the one best suited for the Nurse is likely A Nurse's Calling. Breaking line of sight is one of the only reliable methods of escaping what is otherwise the certain doom of a Nurse on one's heels, so aura-reading perks such as Nurse's are particularly potent. Making rash decisions about when and where to heal against Nurse is not uncommon, given the killer's ability to reach and down injured survivors almost at a whim.
General Strategy
It is in the Nurse's mechanics that most of the killer's complexity lies, as strategically she is (for the most part) simple. It is almost never necessary for the Nurse to break pallets since she can teleport right through them, and her Blink makes window vaults equally useless. Survivors' only salvation lies in breaking line of sight, allowing them to either make distance, hide, or quickly change direction thereby tricking the Nurse into a misplaced Blink. The Nurse can use her Blink for traversal across the map, but it's best to use only a single, fully-charged Blink when doing so, to avoid long fatigues.
When in a chase, the Nurse should always Blink to the survivor's last known location, and then use her second Blink to quickly reposition and hit the survivor. The Nurse can fake a forward Blink by looking downward as she teleports, fooling survivors into running into her and getting hit. The edges of the map can be powerful against the Nurse, whereas the Killer Shack can be easily dealt with by always taking the middle and Blinking outwards from there. Predicting survivors' movements and Blinking to where they will go rather than where they are is extremely powerful but demands many hours of game experience, considerable practice, and a bit of luck.
Recommended Build
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The following perks arguably best support the Nurse's unique style of chase:
- Hex: Ruin (Hag Level 35) causes generator progress to regress when a survivor stops working on it.
- Hex: Undying (Blight Level 40) acts as a second life for other Hex totems, disappearing in lieu of them when another Hex would be cleansed or blessed.
- Lethal Pursuer (Nemesis Level 30) reveals the auras of all survivors for 9 seconds at the start of the Trial.
- Starstruck (Trickster Level 30) all survivors within the killer's Terror Radius are Exposed when the killer carries a survivor and for a short time afterward.
When it comes to add-ons, the Nurse has some excellent options, but these two are among her best:
- Torn Bookmark (Ultra Rare) grants one additional Blink but increases the recharge time by 50%.
- Fragile Wheeze (Rare) reduces recharge time by 0.6 seconds per Blink token used.
The goal of this build is to maximize the Nurse's lethality while passively slowing generators. Hex: Ruin provides some of the best passive slowdown in the game, regressing progress every time the Nurse pushes survivors away from them. Hex: Undying increases the chances that Ruin will still be functional in the mid or even late game. Lethal Pursuer allows Nurse to enter chase as soon as the Trial begins, maximizing early game pressure. Starstruck provides overwhelming lethality, especially on small maps, since survivors have very few options to escape the Nurse before their Exposed status ends. Having a third Blink thanks to Torn Bookmark makes mind games and Dead Hard far less effective against the Nurse, and Fragile Wheeze mitigates the recharge penalty caused by the former add-on.
Dead By Daylight was released in June 2016 and is available on PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and Stadia.