Most Dead by Daylight guides go stale because Behaviour keeps moving the numbers. The Spirit is the opposite problem. We screened all 300 Steam news items Behaviour published between 12 July 2024 and 17 September 2026 for every mention of the word "Spirit" — 41 hits, and not one is a balance change to her power, her movement values or any of her twenty add-ons. They are bug fixes, audio and cosmetic fixes, and perks that share the word. Rin Yamaoka has been functionally untouched for over two years of patch notes.
That makes her the safest Killer in the game to learn from an old guide, with three exceptions: the wiki page documenting her still carries a banner from 2023, her pallet-break perk had its wording quietly superseded in March 2026, and the version of her people have been playing in 2v8 all month is not the version they are about to go back to.
Quick answer
- Movement speed: 110 percent, 4.4 m/s — one of eleven Killers in the 110 bracket.
- Phase-Walk speed: 176 percent, 7.04 m/s.
- Terror Radius: 24 metres, emitted while phasing by the stationary Husk she leaves behind rather than by her.
- Power timings: 5 charges at 1 per second, so a full Phase-Walk lasts 5 seconds. Recharge is 0.333 charges per second, a 15-second cooldown. Activation takes 1.5 seconds, and she keeps the speed boost for 1 second after reappearing.
- Cost: 2,250 Iridescent Shards or 125 Auric Cells, one of fifteen permanently half-price Killers.
- Live patch: 10.1.2a, 17 September 2026. Nothing in it touches her.
- 10.2.0 PTB: none of her three perks are in the 58-perk pass. Two general perks she borrows are.
Who is The Spirit in Dead by Daylight?
The Spirit is Rin Yamaoka, internal character ID K13, released 18 September 2018 as the Killer of CHAPTER 9: Shattered Bloodline. Behaviour lists her difficulty as Hard, which is honest: almost everything she does is an audio read.
Her chapter was retired on 8 January 2024, but retired is not retracted: she is still on sale in-game and inside the Maddening Darkness Pack. Retirement is also why she is cheap. Behaviour said so in a Steam post on 11 September 2024: "From September 12th the pricing of eight of our Original Characters will be reduced, Ace Visconti, Feng Min, Kate Denson, Adam Francis, The Hag, The Doctor, The Clown and The Spirit. These characters will now cost 125 AC/$1.25 USD." At 2,250 Iridescent Shards she is one of the cheapest shard unlocks in the game — part of why she is still so common.
Has The Spirit been changed in 2026?
No. Not once in the live patch corpus we screened, and the wiki gives away how long it has been.
The Power section of her wiki page still opens with the line "This description is based on the changes announced for or featured in the upcoming Patch 6.7.0". Patch 6.7.0 shipped in March 2023. That banner has sat on top of her power for roughly three and a half years because nobody has had a reason to clear it — her Change Log on the same page also stops at 6.7.0. Normally that banner warns you a page is stale. Here it is the opposite: the description is accurate because 6.7.0 was the last patch that changed anything.
One thing on that page genuinely is stale: it introduces her as one of 41 Killers. The current roster reads 44 — 25 original and 19 licensed — so the counter is three chapters behind. Our Dead by Daylight killer tier list for September 2026 ranks the current field against the live build.
How Yamaoka's Haunting and Phase-Walk actually work
Hold the power button for 1.5 seconds and The Spirit enters the Ethereal Plane, leaving a stationary Husk of her body behind. For up to 5 seconds she moves at 7.04 m/s. Then a 15-second cooldown.
While she is phasing, four rules matter more than everything else:
- Survivors are invisible to her. She navigates on scratch marks, which she can still see, and on sound.
- The Husk emits the 24-metre Terror Radius, not her. The heartbeat you hear during a phase is anchored to a spot she has already left.
- She emits a directional audio cue audible to every Survivor within 24 metres. That cue is the counterplay, which is why the Furin add-on — it makes everyone hear the cue regardless of distance — is a trade rather than a straight downside.
- She keeps her speed for 1 second after reappearing. Phases that look like they ended half a metre short did not.
There is also Passive-Phasing: outside of a Phase-Walk she constantly flickers in and out of view, which is what makes her hard to track visually even when standing still. And a detail almost nobody accounts for — perks that track The Spirit cannot track her ethereal form. They track the Husk. If your aura perk shows her parked in a corner, that is furniture, not information.
While phasing she hears every sound a Survivor makes, sees environmental reactions such as moving grass, and still sees loud noise notifications. She cannot see you, but she can see what you disturb.
The Spirit's add-ons, ranked by what they actually change
She has twenty. They fall into four groups, and only one group changes how the chase is played.
Phase speed — the ones that win games. Mother-Daughter Ring adds 25 percent phase movement and removes scratch marks from her view, roughly 8.8 m/s on a blind hunt. Muddy Sports Day Cap adds 10 percent, Zori 5, and Katana Tsuba 5 percent while reappearing plus 0.2 seconds of extra invisibility. Yakuyoke Amulet is the inverse: 3.5 extra seconds of phase for a 15 percent speed cut, turning a 5-second dash into an 8.5-second sweep at closer to 6 m/s. That is map control, not chase pressure.
Recharge — the ones that change your tempo. Rusty Flute is 40 percent, Rin's Broken Watch 30, Origami Crane 20. Uchiwa instantly recharges the power after a pallet stun; Kintsugi Teacup does the same after breaking a Breakable Wall or a pallet.
Duration and charge speed. Kaiun Talisman adds a full second of phase, Shiawase Amulet half a second. White Hair Ribbon speeds the charge by 20 percent and Gifted Bamboo Comb by 15 — the 1.5-second activation is the window in which a Survivor decides whether to run.
Information and utility. Mother's Glasses triggers Killer Instinct within 2 metres of the Husk, punishing anyone who body-blocks the statue. Dried Cherry Blossom gives Killer Instinct within 3 metres of her but strips her scratch marks. Wakizashi Saya snaps her back to the Husk mid-phase on the active ability button, her best anti-mindgame tool. Senko Hanabi explodes the Husk when the phase ends, blocking every vault within 4 metres for 5 seconds. Juniper Bonsai cuts her Passive Phasing cooldown by a second and extends its duration by half.
Picking two: Mother-Daughter Ring plus a recharge add-on is the aggressive pairing, Wakizashi Saya plus Kintsugi Teacup the loop-breaking one.
Best Spirit builds for Patch 10.1.2a
Her three teachables are worth knowing exactly, because two are staples on other Killers:
- Spirit Fury — after manually breaking a dropped pallet 4/3/2 times, the next pallet used to stun you is instantly broken by The Entity. The normal stun penalty still applies, and the perk deactivates after use.
- Hex: Haunted Ground — two trapped Hex Totems spawn. Cleansing or blessing either exposes every Survivor for 40/50/60 seconds, and the second totem immediately goes dull.
- Rancor — each completed generator reveals your aura to the Obsession for 5/4/3 seconds and every Survivor's location to you for 3 seconds. Once the gates are powered you can kill the Obsession by hand, and they are permanently Exposed.
Spirit Fury plus Enduring is still the classic pairing, and it touches something most guides have not caught up on. Patch 9.5.0, on 17 March 2026, introduced a new vocabulary for Killer actions — basic-break, special-break, basic-vault, special-vault — and the dev note explained why: "With these new terms, we intend to express with increased accuracy when specific gameplay interactions are intended to work alongside one another." In the same patch, Spirit Fury and the Kintsugi Teacup add-on both appear in the list of descriptions being updated, and Spirit Fury's wording moved from breaking the pallet to destroying it.
Those were description updates, not functional changes. But it means the wording quoted on most Spirit pages, "instantly break the next Pallet", is the superseded text. Whether a Spirit Fury destroy counts as a break for Kintsugi Teacup's instant recharge is a reading of the new vocabulary, not something Behaviour has stated, so test it before you build around it.
The rest of the loadout is ranked in our best killer perks tier list for 10.1.2a.
Is The Spirit affected by the 10.2.0 PTB?
Directly, no. We screened the 10.2.0 PTB notes from 15 September 2026 for Spirit Fury, Hex: Haunted Ground, Rancor, Stridor, Sloppy Butcher, Play With Your Food, Save the Best for Last, Rapid Brutality, Coup de Grace, Enduring, Brutal Strength and Bamboozle. None appear. The only match in the document was Calm Spirit, a Survivor perk.
Two general perks in the pass do change how a Spirit build is assembled. Machine Learning goes to 10 percent Haste, up from 8, can compromise up to three generators instead of one, grants Undetectable for 40/50/60 seconds, and adds a new line: "Other Generators lose compromised." Whispers has its range cut to 28/26/24 metres, down from 48/40/32, and gains 5 percent Haste while you are outside that range. The dev note is explicit about the trade: "We want to give Whispers a new benefit to distinguish itself from being exclusively about information. The intention behind the added Haste is to help better traverse the map while looking for Survivors. While the reduced range is to allow more opportunities for the Killer to gain Haste."
Killer-side discussion after the PTB landed on the same conclusion: a stronger Machine Learning lets Spirit builds that were stacking Haste perks swap some out for regression. Patch 10.2.0 has no published live date, so all of it is provisional — the full list is in our breakdown of all 58 perk changes in the 10.2.0 PTB.
The 2v8 Spirit is not the same Killer
This is the trap this week. The Spirit is one of the 16 playable Killers in 2v8, and the current iteration runs from 8 September to 29 September 2026 — it ends in two days.
When Behaviour debuted her in the mode, the developer update listed three changes against her 1v4 kit: "Increased phase duration to 8 seconds (was 5 seconds)", "Increased phase recharge rate to 0.66/second (was 0.33/second)", and "Increased phase movement speed to 1.8 (was 1.6)". The dev note adds the part that changes how she is played: "The other killer is visible while phasing and cannot collide with The Spirit while phasing." No revised Spirit values have been published in any later 2v8 update.
An eight-second phase on a half-length cooldown is a different Killer. If you spent September learning her in 2v8, recalibrate before a standard trial: your 1v4 phase is 5 seconds with a 15-second recharge. Current rotation details are in our 2v8 guide for September 2026.
How to counter The Spirit as a Survivor
Her power is built on information she does not have, so the counterplay is subtraction.
Stop making scratch marks. They are the main thing she can see while phasing, and they only appear while you run. Walking mid-chase is unintuitive and it is the single strongest thing you can do against her.
Stop making noise. She hears everything. Iron Will removes grunts of pain and is close to mandatory in a Spirit lobby.
Read the Husk. The Terror Radius during a phase comes from the stationary Husk. If the heartbeat is not moving, she is not there.
Listen for the phase cue. It is directional and audible inside 24 metres. With Furin equipped, you hear it everywhere on the map.
Count to fifteen. Full recharge is 15 seconds, activation costs her 1.5, and the first second after she reappears she is still at phase speed. Do not commit to a vault in that window.
Do not pre-drop pallets. Spirit Fury plus Enduring turns your saved pallet into her free hit.
Map size swings this matchup hard. Our list of every Dead by Daylight map and realm shows which ones give her the open ground she wants.
Frequently asked questions
How fast is The Spirit in Dead by Daylight? 4.4 m/s at 110 percent base, and 7.04 m/s at 176 percent while Phase-Walking. Mother-Daughter Ring pushes the phase to roughly 8.8 m/s.
How long is The Spirit's Phase-Walk and cooldown? 5 seconds of phase from 5 charges at 1 per second, then a 15-second recharge at 0.333 charges per second. Kaiun Talisman adds a second of phase; Rusty Flute cuts the recharge by 40 percent; Uchiwa and Kintsugi Teacup refill it instantly on a pallet stun and on a break respectively.
Can The Spirit see you while phasing? No. Survivors are invisible to her during a Phase-Walk. She tracks scratch marks, sound, environmental reactions such as moving grass, and loud noise notifications.
What is the Husk in Dead by Daylight? The stationary copy of The Spirit left behind when she enters the Ethereal Plane. It emits her 24-metre Terror Radius, and any perk that tracks The Spirit reveals the Husk rather than her real position.
How much does The Spirit cost? 2,250 Iridescent Shards or 125 Auric Cells. Behaviour halved the price of eight original characters on 12 September 2024 and she was one of them.
What perks does The Spirit teach? Spirit Fury, Hex: Haunted Ground and Rancor. The first two see regular play on other Killers.
Has The Spirit been buffed or nerfed recently? No. Across the Steam news archive from 12 July 2024 to 17 September 2026, every mention of her is a bug fix, an audio or cosmetic fix, or an unrelated perk. Her last functional change was Patch 6.7.0 in March 2023, which also removed the old flashlight interaction that dispelled her Husk.
Is The Spirit different in 2v8? Yes. Her phase lasts 8 seconds instead of 5, recharges at 0.66 per second instead of 0.33, and moves faster. The other Killer can see her while she phases and cannot collide with her.
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