Quick answer: On 17 September 2026 Behaviour Interactive pushed 10.1.2a, a server-side balance change that needs no download, only a game restart. It reverted the Divine Light curve window while Zealous from 0.8 seconds back to 0.6 seconds, and removed the 0.3-second non-Zealous curve window added nine days earlier in 10.1.2. The Judgment's beam is harder to steer again, and outside Zealous you now have no steering at all after the cast. Everything else, including all 20 Will of the Gods add-ons and the three Chorus of Sin perks, is unchanged. Most wikis and tier lists still show the 0.8-second and 0.3-second numbers, and those numbers are now wrong.
Everything below was re-pulled from Behaviour's own knowledge-base articles on 17 September 2026 rather than copied from a launch-week guide.
What exactly changed in Patch 10.1.2a?
The Judgment has now been tuned four times in 23 days. The full chain matters, because each hotfix moved the same single number and the current value is the second one in that chain, not the fourth.
- 10.1.0, Chorus of Sin, 25 August 2026. The Judgment ships. While Zealous, you maintain control of Divine Light for up to 0.3 seconds after casting. Outside Zealous there is no post-cast control at all.
- 10.1.1, the first hotfix. Behaviour increases the Zealous curve window to 0.6 seconds. Their note: "The decoupling of the curve window from the delay phase was good, but the duration of the window was much too short."
- 10.1.2, 8 September 2026. The Zealous window goes to 0.8 seconds, and a 0.3-second curve window is added for the first time while not Zealous. The same patch also makes survivors liberated from the Exile respawn at least 32 metres away from The Judgment with one second of immunity to Divine Light.
- 10.1.2a, 17 September 2026. Both of the 10.1.2 curve changes are reverted. Zealous goes back to 0.6 seconds, and the non-Zealous window is removed.
Behaviour's wording on the revert is unusually direct: "The Judgment's performance skyrocketed following HF2. We are reverting the changes to Divine Light in order to better evaluate Its performance over a longer period of time."
Note the delivery method. The notes state this "will not require a download but players will need to restart their games", so anyone who has not restarted is still playing the old values, and Behaviour can now retune The Judgment mid-week without shipping a build. The 32-metre respawn and the one-second immunity from 10.1.2 were not touched.
What does Will of the Gods actually do?
Will of the Gods is four linked systems, and the beam is only the entry point.
Divine Light. Hold the Power button and a column of light appears in front of you and travels away, following where you look. During this control phase it does nothing to survivors. If you do not cast within 3 seconds it goes on cooldown. Press Attack to fling the column forward. After a short delay it starts damaging survivors and inflicting Heresy. The longer you spent controlling before casting, the shorter the damage delay and the longer the column stays live. Cooldown is 6 seconds after casting, cancelling, or timing out.
The hard numbers behind it: the column hitbox is a 0.6-metre radius and 16 metres tall, you move at 4 m/s while charging and 3.68 m/s while controlling but only 1.5 m/s while casting, the fling travels between 12 m/s and 35 m/s depending on charge, and a survivor hit by the column has their aura revealed out to 48 metres. A column that passes within 0.5 metres of a survivor without hitting them reveals them by Killer Instinct, a cue you can toggle off in settings.
Heresy. Survivors hit by Divine Light become Heretics, as do survivors who taunt you by crouching or gesturing three times within 10 metres, or standing in an Exit Threshold for 45 seconds. Heretics can be sent to the Exile from the dying state, their Good Skill Checks regress the generator by 3 percent, and gaining Heresy within 32 metres of an Exit Gate blocks that gate to them for 8 seconds. It burns off at a Shrine of Judgment over 30 seconds.
Exile. A dying Heretic can be sent to the Exile with the Secondary Power button. The Exile functions as a hook: the survivor gains a hook stage and burns it at hook speed. Inside, Seeds of Punishment hazards each strip 3 seconds of hook progress on contact, and survivors carry a Searcher's Pendant they point at nearby Exiled Souls. Each of the up to 10 souls collected adds 0.5 seconds to Unhook Protections once rescued, but souls stop extending protections entirely once all generators are done, which is the designed answer to endgame Exile stalling.
Zealous. Sending a survivor to the Exile grants 60 seconds of Zealous: Divine Light is 10 percent larger, cast duration is 50 percent longer, cooldown is 20 percent shorter, and the curve window is the 0.6 seconds restored today. Killing a Heretic on their final hook stage in the dying state also triggers Zealous.
Shrines of Judgment. Seven spawn per trial. Heretics use them to repent, and when a survivor is Exiled the two shrines nearest The Judgment activate as rescue points.
Which add-ons are worth running after the nerf?
There are 20 add-ons for Will of the Gods. The revert shifts value toward anything that widens the beam or buys steering back, because raw curve control is now scarcer.
The steering group is where the nerf bites hardest. Koenrad's Gauntlet increases maximum control duration by 25 percent at the cost of 10 percent controlled speed, the closest thing to a direct patch-back for what was taken away. Electric Torch does the opposite, adding 25 percent controlled speed and 10 percent movement speed while controlling, which suits players who aim before casting rather than after. Prayer Kneeler drops an obstructed controlled column's speed by 99 percent, effectively letting you park a beam behind a wall.
For hit consistency, Mark of the Adherent widens Divine Light by 10 percent while not Zealous, which is now the state you spend most of the match in. Order of Inquisition starts the cast 25 percent smaller then grows it 50 percent larger over one second, trading early precision for late width.
The Exile-economy add-ons scale with how often you actually get Exiles, so they reward a snowball build over a chase build. Magnetised Manacles grants a token, up to 5, each time you Exile the survivor with the fewest hook states, with each token extending Zealous by 10 percent. Improvised Detonators shares that condition and, at 4 or more tokens, explodes the highest-progress generator for 20 percent.
Among the four Iridescent add-ons, Chains of the Heretic is the aggressive one: while Zealous, the cast column always steers toward you, the damage delay is fixed at 0.35 seconds, controlled speed doubles and cast speed rises 50 percent. Mirror of the Creators bounces the cast column off the first two obstructions with a 0.4-second pause per bounce, which makes it the add-on most likely to feel unreliable while the beam-jitter bug persists. Obsidian Feather removes your ability to cancel or manually cast, auto-firing on timeout, in exchange for 100 percent extra movement speed while controlling.
Two more change survivor behaviour rather than your aim. Confessor's War Horn inflicts Exhausted for 10 seconds on anyone who gains Heresy, and Superheated Glass trades 20 percent Zealous duration for a beam that breaks every pallet and breakable wall it passes through, screaming and infecting survivors within 12 metres.
Are The Judgment's perks worth taking to other killers?
All three come from Chapter 41 and are already in the Shrine rotation cycle, so this matters even if you never buy the Killer.
Celestial Witness. Every 30 seconds, if the Obsession is at least 40 metres away, you see their aura for 2, 2.5 or 3 seconds by tier. Otherwise the farthest survivor becomes the Obsession. It is a self-correcting tracker that either shows you a distant target or repoints itself at one, and it slots neatly into the wider aura-reading perk pool.
Hex: Under Your Thumb. The first time any survivor gains a hook state, a Dull Totem ignites. You are alerted whenever a running survivor gains Haste within 32 metres, and running survivors cannot gain more than 25, 20 or 15 percent Haste at a time. It is the first Killer perk that caps survivor Haste outright rather than punishing it afterwards, which aims it straight at Hope, Adrenaline and sprint-burst endgame plays.
Lay Waste. Whenever you damage a generator, it regresses 2 percent faster for each Charge it currently has, on a 55, 50 or 45 second cooldown. Because the bonus scales with stored progress, it hits hardest on the generators survivors invested the most into, making it a different tool from the rest of the generator regression stack.
How do you counter The Judgment as a survivor?
The beam is the loud part of the Killer, but the Exile is where games are actually lost.
Do not taunt near an Exit Gate. Crouching or gesturing three times within 10 metres hands over Heresy for free, and standing in an Exit Threshold for 45 seconds does it silently. Gaining Heresy within 32 metres of a gate blocks it to you for 8 seconds, which is exactly long enough to lose the chase you were about to win.
Move sideways, during the control phase. The column is 16 metres tall and only 0.6 metres wide, so vertical cover is worthless and lateral cover is everything. It travels at 12 to 35 m/s once live but only 7 to 12 m/s while controlled, so the window to reposition is while it is still harmless and you can see exactly where it points.
Punish the cast. The Judgment moves at 1.5 m/s while casting, slower than a walking survivor. After today's revert it can no longer bend a non-Zealous cast at all, so a committed cast is fully predictable and free distance.
Watch your Skill Checks as a Heretic. Good Skill Checks regress the generator by 3 percent while you are afflicted. Repent at one of the seven Shrines before a long repair, and expect danger on rescues: when a teammate is Exiled, the two shrines that activate are the two nearest the Killer.
Race the souls clock. Exiled Souls stop extending Unhook Protections once all generators are complete, so stalling inside the Exile loses its value in the endgame. On the last generator, finishing beats an early rescue. Our survivor perk tier list covers which information and endurance perks actually hold up against that snowball.
Why is The Judgment different from every other original killer?
It is the first original Killer entirely designed by the community as part of The Grimoire, Behaviour's community design programme. Players voted on the design, the name and the perk set, which is why the wiki documents rejected alternatives that never shipped: The Apocalypse, The Exalted and The Messenger as names, and Run Down the Sinner, Hex: The Flesh is Weak and Desolation as perks. Behaviour also, at one point, announced the second-place design as the winner by mistake.
That origin is also visible in the tuning history: a community-designed power arrived without the years of internal iteration a normal Killer gets, which is a reasonable explanation for four balance passes in 23 days on a single number. The Judgment is also the first Killer whose power can be directly modified by a game setting, since the near-miss Killer Instinct cue is toggleable.
In fiction it is a member of the Celestial Echelon enforcing the will of The Creators, and it razed the world of Terra Primus for the sin of aspiring to godhood. Aurora Stardotter, the chapter's survivor, appears in that scripture as "Stardotter the Deceiver": the heretic whose survival is framed as a test of the faithful.
What is still broken?
The most-reported Judgment issue right now is not a balance number. Players report that the Divine Light beam jitters while charging, visibly cutting its effective range, and 10.1.2a does not mention it — the notes list only the two curve-window reverts. Anyone testing the Killer this week is testing a jittering beam at reduced steering, which is why early post-nerf impressions read harsher than the numbers alone suggest. Treat tier-list placements published this week as provisional.
Behind this hotfix, the 10.2.0 PTB patch notes carry 58 perk changes plus two Judgment items: a fix for Loud Noise Notification spam from survivors running Made For This, and Divine Light gaining the ability to detect survivors hiding in lockers.
FAQ
What changed in DBD Patch 10.1.2a? Two things, both to The Judgment. The Divine Light curve window while Zealous was reverted from 0.8 seconds to 0.6 seconds, and the 0.3-second curve window while not Zealous, added in 10.1.2, was removed. It is a server-side change that needs a game restart rather than a download.
Do I need to download 10.1.2a? No. Behaviour's notes say the update "will not require a download but players will need to restart their games." If you have not restarted since 17 September 2026, you are still playing on the old values.
Is The Judgment still good after the nerf? It is back to its 10.1.1 state, which was strong enough that Behaviour buffed it twice before deciding it had gone too far. The Exile, Heresy and Zealous systems were untouched, so the snowball build is unchanged. Only the beam's steering got worse.
What is The Judgment's power called? Will of the Gods. It combines Divine Light, the Heresy affliction, the Exile as an alternative to hooking, the 60-second Zealous mode, and seven Shrines of Judgment.
How do survivors get Heresy without being hit? By taunting: crouching or gesturing three times within 10 metres of The Judgment, or standing in an Exit Threshold for 45 seconds. Both are avoidable.
Which Judgment add-ons are the Iridescents? Eyes of Gerhardt, Improvised Detonators, Mirror of the Creators and Obsidian Feather.
Did 10.1.2a fix the beam jitter? No. The patch notes cover only the two curve-window reverts. The charging-beam stutter players have been reporting is still present.
Which chapter is The Judgment from? Chapter 41, Chorus of Sin, released 25 August 2026 alongside survivor Aurora Stardotter.
Sources and how to verify this yourself
- The 10.1.2a revert and its developer note: Behaviour's 10.1.2 knowledge-base article at forums.bhvr.com, edited on 17 September 2026 to append the hotfix
- The 10.1.1 curve-window buff and note: the 10.1.1 bugfix article on the same knowledge base
- Perk values at every tier and the launch-day power spec: the 10.1.0 Chorus of Sin release notes, plus the 10.2.0 PTB notes for the queued Judgment fixes
- Power numbers, add-on text, Grimoire trivia and rejected designs: the Dead by Daylight Wiki page for The Judgment at deadbydaylight.wiki.gg
One caveat worth repeating: the wiki's power section still shows the 0.8-second Zealous window and the 0.3-second non-Zealous window, because it documents 10.1.2 and the revert landed the same day this guide was written. Behaviour's patch notes are the authority until the wiki catches up. Where the Killer lands against the rest of the roster is a separate question our killer tier list will revisit once the beam bug is fixed.
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