If you clicked on this, then chances are you decided to spend a fair amount of time with my favorite killer: The Dredge. If that's the case then I'll give you props right from the get-go: He's a hard killer to play, once you get past the initial cool factor of his design it's difficult not to notice that he suffers from many of the same challenges that other M1 killers in DBD with his own distinct challenges on top. At times this can make him feel miserable, even when you get good with him you will have rough matches you might feel powerless. But this is not without its upsides too, the Dredge has a lot of mechanics that make him unique and powerful in ways that other killers cannot be, when you learn how to leverage those advantages you can make even the strongest survivor teams sweat. You're in this for the long haul but there is, pardon the pun, a Light at the end of the tunnel and I'm here to help you get there.

A question I've considered often that's been asked by a lot of people both big and small in the DBD community is 'What exactly is the Dredge?' even months after his release there's been some struggle to define what he is in the pantheon of Killers. He's generally agreed to be mid to low B tier with some others saying that he's much higher, though this is a minority in the community as of the time of this writing. He suffers where other more basic killers suffer against with healing and bodyblocking, yet some claim that he feels particularly oppressive when played well.

As far as a Killer power goes, he's got a little bit of things we've seen before blended with things we've never really experimented with. He teleports between lockers all across the map which smacks a little bit of Demogorgans portals except more numerous, pre-set up, and faster to use with the caveat that you cannot choose where the lockers are placed. He can be in two places at once with his Remnant at the cost of moving slower which gives him a form of anti-loop that's not really similar to other killers but encourages the same optimal play from survivors to pre-drop and leave pallets rather than try to mind game the Dredge in a chase. Finally, he has Nightfall which has no direct equivalent in DBD where he teleports faster and more often, is invisible to the survivors past twenty meters, can see the survivors with more clarity and has no terror radius.

This tends to lead to the idea that he's some kind of stealth killer like Ghostface or a hit and run killer like Legion, even a killer who can pressure survivors in a one-on-one chase like Pyramid Head. All of which have their own flaws in philosophy: He ambushes people frequently and is hard to predict, but he's also so loud that he cannot reliably sneak up on people unless you're right next to a locker. He gets rewarded for injuring multiple people and moves very quickly, but he doesn't have the innate ability to read where other survivors are after a strike so he can't reliably injure people as rapidly as a Legion can, and finally while his anti-loop is very strong in corners it suffers heavily against many smaller pallets linked together and the lack of range means that holding W against it is even stronger than other anti-loop killers.

So I'm going to take you on a journey with me to defining what the Dredge is by discussing what are his strengths and weaknesses. Once that is done, we'll set about the task of finding out what skills you need to learn to leverage that playstyle to its fullest potential.

So, I'm going to go ahead and get the fun part of this guide out of the way and tell you what I think he is based on the hundreds of matches I've played with him and the time I've spent watching both more and less experienced Dredge players, then I'll defend that point like my Eighth-Grade Thesis paper on why Bulbasaur is a superior Pokémon to Charizard and we'll extrapolate from there. Ready? Here I go: The Dredge is not a hybrid Killer, he is first and foremost a Stealth Killer, not only is he a Stealth killer but he's the best Stealth Killer in the game.

But he doesn't do stealth in the way that any other Killer in the game does stealth, and this a key point that I didn't grasp until I stopped watching my own match footage and started watching footage from the perspective of survivors playing against me in matches. He doesn't go undetectable and quietly approach from the shadows or move so fast that it achieves a similar effect, he doesn't augment his abilities with a more common effect like Oblivious and in fact you will fail against all but the most unaware survivors if you try that because he's so loud. Instead, he skips the approach phase entirely and simply teleports from point A to point B into a pre-set location around objectives with the ability to do this multiple times, and no real indication he is at that point unless the survivor is there to hear his audio cue when the teleport completes, or because he's been in that one locker for too long.

This bypasses the pitfalls of a scuffed approach on a stealth killer entirely, because he's eliminated the ability for people to tell where he's coming from and where he's going altogether. He still hears you: What crows you disturb, your breathing, grunts of pain, tinkering on a gen, healing in a corner, cleansing a totem, even the footsteps you are making but you can't tell because while he's moving through you, he's a totally invisible entity that if he's attentive will make a mental note of where you are and factor that into his strategy at the same time as you're wondering where he is. Is that banging on the locker him or is he just making a pit stop? is that gen by the locker safe or did he drop by their less than seven seconds ago and he's waiting for you to touch it? and if it's Nightfall are you running away from him or into him because you can't even see him past twenty meters? Did my Spine Chill go off because he's here or is he just passing by again? No way to tell until it's happening, and when it's happening, he's already on top of you.

He's a Killer that employs stealth through information denial. He negates what the survivor is seeing entirely and makes them unsure of what location he's in, where he's going, what he's doing, and with a few exceptions even what Add On's he's running. Fittingly for his design as a fear of the unknown and paranoia over what's around you, he is a killer that is in a constant state of flux throughout the match. Schrodinger's Killer if you will, and this even extends to his Remnant. Is he going to keep chasing you or is he going to teleport to where he was? No idea, and so you either have to take the 50/50, run to another loop, or force him to make a mistake.

This is partially why people sometimes get this perception that the Dredge is really strong, it's because information denial is not really something any other Killer can do on this scale. Before now the most you can do is deny information about yourself through undetectable, but even that's not quite as good because no matter how good of a Ghostface you are they can still see your physical location and try to avoid you. In the matches I watched callouts didn't matter, often survivors would state where my location was but wouldn't know where I was going. If I teleported in the middle of chase or they briefly saw me the best they could do is estimate where I might be by the direction I was facing when the teleport happened but even then I can do it three times so it didn't matter much, sometimes people who thought they knew for sure where I was going would outright get their teammates killed because I would just be somewhere else and could be somewhere else at almost any time I chose.

This is why I've termed the Dredge as being the 'Giantkiller' of DBD, in a David vs Goliath situation versus a SWF the Dredge can sometimes punch above his actual weight class by being unpredictable and clever with his power usage. The Chess analogy I like to use is that if you're fighting a Nurse, you're fighting against a board of all Queens and obviously that match is going to be super difficult. But if you're fighting against a Dredge you might have an opponent's board that's nothing but pawns, but it's also really hard to do because your opponent doesn't actually let you see where the pieces are on the board, you have to guess.

This isn't to say that the Dredge is on par with Nurse, who is a balancing blackhole from which no light escapes. But rather to say that a good Dredge can compete with an average Nurse vs a Survive with Friends because he removes some of their best tools. With the right perks and Add Ons he can also keep pretty good tabs on where everyone is and what they are doing, allowing him to succeed where other more mechanically stronger Killers might fail because they are limited to being in one space at a time.

This part is just as important, if not more so than it might be for other Killers. At the end of the day, you're not a Trickster that can focus really hard on your strengths and ignore or circumvent your weaknesses when it comes down to it. If you bring nothing but information perks and try to be unpredictable you might get an easy grab or two, inflict some injuries, but you will ultimately suffer heavily when survivors start bodyblocking, rapidly healing with items, and just loop effectively and give you few opportunities to use your power to chase them. Survivors can be strong individually without anything to go off of, if they start focusing on what they do know rather than what they don't you'll be in for a bad time.

The most consistent Dredge builds I've seen focus on providing one or two perks to shore up his weaknesses and then the other perks play into his strengths. Sloppy Butcher, Nurses, Franklins, even Forced Penance can be invaluable to punish or prevent healing which is probably what the Dredge suffers from the most. He snowballs hard in situations where everyone is injured and a Nightfall trigger but it's difficult to get there when everyone and their mother is packing a kitted out medkit. I've even seen some of the best Dredge players in the world as of this time of writing use Corrupt Intervention to give them more time to get that Nightfall Engine running. That might seem unintuitive for a high mobility killer especially since the perk deactivates when someone's downed, but it makes a twisted kind of sense if you view injuring or pressuring multiple survivors as similar to setting up hag traps or a Pig putting on their first reverse beartrap. Because it boosts your Nightfall economy it's essentially an investment into future gains that let you pressure all the generators consistently because everyone is bleeding or that first hook puts other survivors into bad positions later.

Secondly bringing perks that focus on the one-on-one chase can be an excellent idea to make his daytime chases easier and snowball into more brutal scenarios later. Chasing, downing, and hooking one survivor ultimately provides less Nightfall points in the long run then chasing everyone and injuring them constantly but it has the benefit of the hook itself. Unhooking can be a dangerous prospect for most Killers, but it's even more dangerous for a Killer that can teleport across the map and has multiple tools in the form of add ons and perks to predict the movement of other survivors. A good hook can force one or more survivors out of position and essentially function as a form of generator slowdown with the potential to end a game outright if the rescue is botched badly enough. The hook only disables lockers in a sixteen-meter radius around itself which gives you a lot of playspace, and since the lockers instantly unblock with an unhook that also means at Night you can be right on top of them when you're moving 36 meters a second.

Fearmonger, Dissolution, Brutal Strength, I'm All Ears, Bamboozle, and of course the classic Enduring/Spirit Fury combo can be invaluable in both depriving Survivors of resources to use in current and future chases. At a certain point for the Dredge time can shift towards your side because even though survivors can pre-lock every locker they come across they can only do so once, which means the map is getting increasingly dangerous every second they aren't slamming gens. Since you can teleport so fast consistently hindering them from doing exactly that while breaking pallets or making windows unsafe can be lead to long term problems or even virtually unwinnable endgames.

Now there are a lot of different kinds of Dredge and even with my experience I'm not going to pretend I know all of them inside and out. Some players lean into the information aspect of him, some like to focus on gen slowdown and use his mobility to grind it to a halt, some hit and run constantly to force a point where no survivor is safe and Nightfall is triggering constantly, some do nothing but focus on the one-on-one chase and use his Anti-loop to systematically dismantle teams from their weakest link up, some run pure endgame builds that are as stacked as possible to kill all four survivors in two minutes, and some like to meme with Worrystone and Darkness Revealed to grab silly survivors who are prelocking everything. All valid playstyles and all things I've seen work, it helps that he has a diverse selection of add-ons that do weird and interesting things in a match. That said there are some skills that are universally useful, and you must know to get the most out of him.

The most useful skill is unfortunately one that can't really be taught, it's your game sense. Your ability to predict the movements of survivors, analyze their behaviors, determine what perks they have, and their designated roles is what divides a successful Dredge from a Dredge struggling to get two hooks in before the exit gates open. You need to be able to tell where Survivors most likely are going to be to best leverage your power both in and out of chase, if you injure someone you need to know where they are most likely going to heal, if they are going to heal themselves or be with friends and adjust your strategy accordingly.

This is because of how your power works, when you're experienced enough to narrow down a survivor's location to two or three guesses it means you will always without fail find that survivor before your power runs out. Likewise, this extends to your ability to know when to go in for the kill, because often the harder Dredge games aren't won because a single chase goes really well, but because you were able to coordinate a dozen micro interactions that cascade into a larger problem that the survivors have to deal with.

Too many people bodyblock for someone on death hook which leads to a Nightfall cycle they can't break out of, one half of the map had its locks all broken and the generators are stuck on that side, everyone is injured, and Nightfall just triggered so cycling targets is a really good way to put survivors against the ropes. The Dredge is probably the only killer who I would unironically say has to know when to slug as a skill, because where for other Killers slugging tends to happen when survivors are out of position or the Killer forces them out of position, the Dredge can get to anyone anywhere during Nightfall and chain downs in a way that's very hard to get back from even with multiple unbreakables.

This also involves knowing what kind of players you're facing. Who is the guy whose clicking his Flashlight and always wants in chase? who is the team medic with a stacked medkit and several healing perks? who are the gen jockies using sprint burst just to live a little longer but mostly focusing on slamming out the objective as possible? You move so quickly and have so many perks and add-ons that let you pick out individuals that it's easy to find one very specific person that you either want dead or occupied most of the match. Most Killers can't pick and choose their targets, but with certain perk/add on combinations and some awareness it's perfectly viable to just find that one dude with a Medkit and make sure he dies.

The tough pill to swallow is also just the plain and simple fact you need to know tiles and you need to know how to loop. This goes for every Killer but for you especially, even your Anti-Loop relies on you having some knowledge of the tile you're on and how survivors typically run it. You can take perks to make these easier, and you should, but at the end of the day you're still an M1 Killer and so you have no shortcuts to end the chase quickly besides just hitting them. Especially true since getting your first Nightfall is so important and so is making the best possible use of it, if you whiff early in the game that has lasting consequences for your engine and in the end will turn what would otherwise be a 4k into a 1 or even a 0k just because one chase went really badly, and you could have been spending your time pressuring gens elsewhere while building your power.

Friends can help with this in custom games, and I would highly recommend learning each individual loop with a buddy, so you know both how to secure effectively but also which Remnant placements work, and which don't. It's very rewarding to pull off what's basically an old standing still Spirit mind game with your Remnant when you get really good at knowing what to do or starting and immediately cancelling your power when you know someone is going to immediately go to the next loop. Know when someone's looping unsafely and when to disengage from chase, that is so crucial to making the most of your time and I guarantee you will win more matches when you understand that.

You need to learn how to absorb information quickly and use it to set up future plays. The Dredge is the only Killer that can determine from the get-go where the Basement is without an offering, if someone is working on key points like the center or three gen, even can guess where the exit gates are on maps like Autohaven and Mothers Dwelling based on Locker placements. That much information is overwhelming, but it's also important because it never stops, you're constantly learning new things even as you're teleporting between lockers because you can hear the sounds between that physical space as though you were there. There's so much complexity to the information that you need to digest fast or risk missing game winning plays.

The one that's also tricky to understand is the idea you can mind game with your lockers, not just with loops. Remember you teleport three times, if you hold still for a couple seconds it's entirely possible a survivor will think you're somewhere else before you start emitting smoke. Some games are won and lost just by deceiving someone into thinking you're gone into a different locker in a Jungle Gym, gone to another area entirely when you're still there, or misdirecting survivors into believing that you're patrolling a gen/hook that you aren't. Do not be afraid to be patient before moving on to the next area, or to try and tackle a loop from an unusual angle, it's both profitable to do this and makes your Survivors extremely paranoid about your behavior which can translate into future mistakes.

Finally, is a skill that's unique mostly to the Dredge and to Plague as far as Killers go, and that's internalizing the micro and macro consequences of your actions simultaneously. You're playing two games at once with Dredge, you have the chess game of injuries and your Nightfall economy as well as your hold on gens going on in the background, but you also have the moment-to-moment ramifications of your current chase and the consequences of your success and failure with it. When you're playing the Dredge you're always assessing the worth of every individual play, the hard part of being a Killer that can be almost anywhere at once is you have to weigh the cost of being in any one of those places.

This is a hard skill to teach because it's so divorced from a lot of Killers who either focus on the gameplay in the moment or do setup for plays well in advance of when they happen. You're doing a bit of both at once, the cost of breaking every locker, chasing every person, kicking every gen should be weighed against doing something else and that can be very overwhelming. Like I said, the Dredge is hard even though he can be very powerful, but once you start compartmentalizing these skills and putting them to use you can be a force of nature.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. I will likely work on more Dredge content in the future, but I felt something like this was important for aspiring Dredge players to learn from and master the Killer. I'm not the best Killer by any means but I love to teach, imparting both knowledge from myself and others.

My final piece of advice: Never give up. You will have hard games with this Killer, he can struggle from the smallest mistakes, but he is so rewarding when a plan comes together. Those hard games never stop no matter what your skill level is, but don't let them impair your determination, you always have a chance to win.