The Blight has been in Dead by Daylight for six years, he is one of the most played Killers in the game, and almost every page that ranks for his name is currently printing two numbers that Behaviour Interactive changed themselves.
The biggest wiki's infobox for Talbot Grimes still lists his movement speed as 4.6 m/s and his Terror Radius as 32 metres. Both are wrong. Its Change Log for him ends at Patch 8.6.0 from 2 April 2025, and its power description sits under a banner announcing changes for "the upcoming Patch 5.0.0" — a patch from 2021. The live game is on Patch 10.1.2a, and the gap is roughly eighteen months of balance work nobody wrote down. This guide is built from Behaviour's own patch notes instead, and every number below is what the game is running on 26 September 2026.
Quick answer
- Movement speed: 4.4 m/s (110 percent), not 4.6 — cut in Patch 9.6.0 on 28 April 2026
- Terror Radius: 40 metres, not 32 — raised in Patch 8.6.0 on 2 April 2025
- Rush speed: 9.2 m/s, 5 Power Tokens, 2 seconds to recharge each, 2.5-second Fatigue
- The trap nobody wrote down: since 9.6.0, breaking a downed pallet knocks you to 2 tokens below maximum and resets the current token's recharge to zero percent
- Attack type: Lethal Rush is a Special Attack, which is about to matter enormously
- Cost: 4,500 Iridescent Shards or 250 Auric Cells
- Status: untouched by the 10.2.0 PTB as a Killer, but one of his teachables is being rewritten in it
Who is The Blight in Dead by Daylight?
Talbot Grimes is a Scottish chemist who arrived as the Killer of Chapter 17: Descend Beyond on 8 September 2020, alongside the Survivor Felix Richter. His weapon is the Bonebuster. The chapter DLC was retired on 8 January 2024, but he is still sold in the in-game store and in the Macabre Tales Pack.
Mechanically he is a high-mobility momentum Killer. He does not down Survivors faster than an M1 Killer; he arrives faster and he deletes distance at loops that would stall anyone else.
What does Blighted Corruption actually do?
The Blight starts a Trial with 5 Power Tokens. Each Rush or Lethal Rush spends one, and tokens recharge at 2 seconds per Token.
- Rush — sprint at 9.2 m/s for up to 3 seconds. You cannot attack, and turn rate is capped at 0.9 degrees per second.
- Slam — hitting a wall during a Rush causes a Slam and opens the Chain Rush Window for 1.25 seconds. You must strike the obstacle's hitbox at a minimum angle of 45 degrees or you slide past it.
- Lethal Rush — pressing the power button inside that window chains a second rush that can attack and can break dropped pallets and Breakable Walls. Turn rate rises to 1.6 degrees per second while swinging, and the rush extends to 4 seconds if you commit.
- Fatigue — when the window closes, the final Lethal Rush ends, or you miss a Slam, you are locked for 2.5 seconds. Attack cooldowns are 3 seconds on a hit, 2.5 on a miss.
That is the loop every Blight guide describes. Here is the part most of them are missing.
The 9.6.0 changes nobody applied
Patch 9.6.0 landed on 28 April 2026 and did two things to this Killer. Behaviour's notes are blunt about the first:
"Decreased The Blight's default movement speed to 4.4 m/s (was 4.6 m/s)."
That drops him from the 115 percent Killer standard to 110 percent, the same base speed as Huntress or Hag. His Rush is untouched at 9.2 m/s, so the nerf lands entirely on the walking game — approaches, post-Fatigue recovery and lunge range, since lunge distance scales off current movement speed.
The second change rewrites how you play loops, and it is absent from the description that ranks first on Google:
"Breaking a Downed Pallet now reduces Rush tokens down to 2 below maximum, and resets current Rush token recharge to 0%. Includes basic-break and special-break Killer actions."
It is not a cost on Lethal Rush breaks specifically — it applies to basic-break and special-break actions alike, so kicking a downed pallet with M1 punishes your power exactly as much as slamming through it. Before 9.6.0, breaking pallets was free tempo. Now it costs you down to three of five tokens and wipes the progress on the one recharging.
It is also the second half of a two-patch pattern. Patch 8.6.1 on 9 April 2025 had already removed the other pallet freebie: "The Blight no longer recovers fatigue tokens by performing an attack on a pallet." Behaviour spent a year closing the same loop from two directions, and the pages that rank for his name describe the power as it existed before either fix.
Why his Terror Radius is 40 metres, not 32
Patch 8.6.0 raised it on 2 April 2025, and Behaviour explained why in the March 2025 Developer Update a month earlier:
"Killers with high mobility that can zip across the map at high speeds have had their radiuses increased to give Survivors a greater chance to react to their approach."
Hillbilly was raised to 40 in the same patch; Pig, Ghost Face and Skull Merchant went down to 24. If you build Blight around stealth perks, an eight-metre larger heartbeat changes the maths on every one of them.
The Blight's perks, and the 10.2.0 PTB problem
He teaches Dragon's Grip, Hex: Blood Favor and Hex: Undying. Undying alone is one of the most-run perks in the game and the main reason people buy him even if they never play him.
We screened the 10.2.0 PTB notes, published 15 September 2026, for all three plus The Blight himself. The Killer, Dragon's Grip and Hex: Undying are all untouched. Blood Favor is not. Behaviour spells it Blood Favor; the wiki files it as Blood Favour.
The PTB rewrites it to: whenever a healthy Survivor becomes injured by your basic-attack, upright pallets within 32 metres of them are blocked for 13/14/15 seconds. Behaviour lists the live values it is replacing as "any damage and 24/28/32m and 15s". The dev note names the target directly:
"We found the combination of Dissolution or Blood Favor and Killers that can use their power to quickly get an injury to be unhealthy."
Here is the detail worth carrying away. The Blight's Lethal Rush is a Special Attack, not a basic attack. It is classified alongside Nurse's Lethal Blink and Huntress hatchets, which is why Save the Best for Last never gained tokens from it. Under the live wording, "any damage" includes his power, so his own teachable triggers off his own rushes. Under the PTB wording, it would not.
Treat that as a PTB reading, not a promise — Public Test Build values change before they ship, and this one has not shipped. Our full breakdown of the 58 perk changes in the PTB has the rest of the list.
One more carve-out from the same era: the basekit hook rewards added in the August 2025 Developer Update are explicit: "These effects are slightly lessened for The Blight, The Dark Lord, The Ghoul, The Hillbilly, and The Nurse." High-mobility Killers get a reduced version of the post-hook Haste and generator-damage bonus everyone else receives in full.
Best Blight add-ons in 2026
Good news here: we cross-checked all eighteen Blighted Corruption add-ons against every patch Behaviour has shipped from July 2024 through Patch 10.1.2a, and not one of them has been changed. The values below are safe, even though several wiki entries still carry stale "upcoming Patch 7.5.0" and "7.7.0" banners on descriptions that went live years ago.
The ones worth running:
- Alchemist's Ring — extends Rush duration by 20 percent for each consecutive Lethal Rush. Still the strongest chase add-on he owns.
- Adrenaline Vial — plus 2 Power Tokens, plus 5 percent Rush speed, plus 20 degrees of look angle, minus 0.5 degrees per second of turn rate. The high-skill pick.
- Compound Twenty-One — reveals auras of Survivors within 8 metres of a Slam for 3.5 seconds.
- Blighted Crow — stacking plus 3 percent Rush speed per consecutive Lethal Rush, with Blighted Rat as the plus 2 percent version.
- Canker Thorn — minus 0.5 seconds of Fatigue, a 20 percent cut to your worst moment.
- Rose Tonic and Pustula Dust — plus 1 second and plus 0.75 seconds on the Chain Rush Window. The beginner picks; they make otherwise frame-perfect chains merely difficult.
Placebo Tablet trades 15 percent Rush speed for 100 percent bonus Bloodpoints on Rush score events — farming, not play.
Priority has genuinely shifted since 9.6.0. Anything that shortens Fatigue or speeds token recharge — Canker Thorn, Foxglove at minus 0.25 seconds of Fatigue, Shredded Notes at minus 0.33 seconds per token — is worth more than it was two patches ago, because you will sit at three tokens far more often than the old guides assume.
Best Blight builds
He does not need a gimmick loadout. He needs slowdown that survives a chase he cannot immediately win.
Standard Blight is Hex: Undying paired with a second Hex plus two regression perks; the mobility does the rest, and our killer perk tier list for 10.1.2a ranks the current regression options properly. Information Blight runs Compound Twenty-One with aura perks, turning every Slam into a scan. Anti-pallet Blight is now genuinely worth building: with downed-pallet breaks costing tokens, perks that destroy pallets for you are saving power rather than a couple of seconds. Full loadouts are in our builds guide.
How to counter The Blight
Counterplay against this Killer is geometry, not reflexes.
- Hold open space. He needs walls to Slam against. In an open field he is a 4.4 m/s Killer with no chase power at all, slower than most of the roster.
- Break line of sight early. His Rush turn rate is 0.9 degrees per second. He commits to a direction before he can see where you went.
- Use the Fatigue. 2.5 seconds is a long time. Every failed Slam and every chain that runs out hands you distance to spend on a window or a pallet.
- Make him break pallets. This is new, and it is the most valuable habit to build in 2026. Every downed pallet he clears drops him to three tokens and resets a recharge. Force two breaks in quick succession and he is functionally powerless.
- Respect the 40-metre heartbeat. You hear him eight metres earlier than a 32-metre Killer. Start the loop before he arrives rather than reacting when he does.
- Dodge on the swing. A Survivor within 1 metre of a missed Lethal Rush registers as a dodge, and that miss costs him 2.5 seconds of cooldown on top of everything else.
Map choice matters more against him than almost any other Killer. Our map list with all 46 maps ranked by size shows which realms hand him free momentum.
The 2v8 version is a different Killer
If you have only played Blight in 2v8, your instincts are calibrated to numbers that do not exist in 1v4. When he was added to the mode in the November 2024 update, Behaviour gave him 10.5 m/s Rush speed instead of 9.2, a 2-second Slam duration instead of 1.25, and a turn rate of 1.1 instead of 0.9. The dev note is one line: "The other killer can be bounced against." The mode hands him a teammate-shaped wall, so he got a faster, more forgiving power to use it. Details on the current rotation are in our 2v8 guide.
Is The Blight still strong?
Yes, with an asterisk about how old the evidence is. The most recent Killer numbers Behaviour published in text were the January to March 2025 stats, where "The Mastermind and The Blight were both winners, leveraging their high mobility to land in the top 5" on pick rate across both MMR brackets, with Blight also named among the high-MMR kill rate leaders. That snapshot came with an average kill rate of 60 percent across all MMR and 63 percent at high MMR, where high MMR means a rating of 1800 or higher, "approximately 18% of the playerbase".
That data predates the 4.4 m/s cut and the pallet token penalty by a full year. He is still top-tier in skilled hands — but he is measurably weaker than the version those numbers describe.
FAQ
What is The Blight's movement speed in 2026? 4.4 m/s, or 110 percent. Patch 9.6.0 on 28 April 2026 cut it from 4.6 m/s. His Rush and Lethal Rush are unchanged at 9.2 m/s. Any page still showing 4.6 has not been updated in over a year.
What is The Blight's Terror Radius? 40 metres, raised from 32 in Patch 8.6.0 on 2 April 2025.
Does breaking pallets cost The Blight tokens? Yes, since Patch 9.6.0. Breaking a downed pallet reduces your Rush tokens to 2 below maximum and resets the current token's recharge to zero percent. It applies to both basic-break and special-break actions, so kicking a pallet normally costs the same as slamming through it.
Is Lethal Rush a basic attack or a special attack? A Special Attack. That is why effects keyed off basic attacks, such as Save the Best for Last tokens, do not trigger from it.
How much does The Blight cost? 4,500 Iridescent Shards or 250 Auric Cells. Chapter 17: Descend Beyond was retired on 8 January 2024, but he is still sold in-game and in the Macabre Tales Pack.
What perks does The Blight teach? Dragon's Grip, Hex: Blood Favor and Hex: Undying. Undying is the reason most players buy him.
Is The Blight being changed in Patch 10.2.0? Not as a Killer. The 10.2.0 PTB notes from 15 September 2026 do not mention him, Dragon's Grip or Hex: Undying. Hex: Blood Favor is being reworked to trigger only when a healthy Survivor is injured by a basic attack, which would stop his own Lethal Rush from activating it. PTB values are not final.
How do you counter The Blight? Stay in open ground where he has nothing to Slam against, break line of sight early because his Rush turn rate is only 0.9 degrees per second, punish the 2.5-second Fatigue after every miss, and force him to break pallets, since each one now costs him power.
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