Deadlock Beginner Guide: How to Learn the Basics Fast

Deadlock throws a lot at you in the first couple of minutes. It's a 6v6 hero shooter bolted onto a MOBA, so you end up shooting real people and pushing a lane of buildings down at the same time. That sounds like a lot at first. The core loop is pretty simple once you see how the pieces fit, though. Souls make you stronger. Lanes are where you earn them. Movement and the minimap decide who actually shows up to the fight. Get those four things and the rest starts clicking into place.

The fastest way to stop dying for free is to understand the lane you're standing in, and that's where to start.

Understanding Lanes, Guardians, and Walkers

The map (the game calls it The Cursed Apple, a chunk of a cursed New York) has three lanes running between the two bases. There's York, the yellow lane. Broadway, the blue one. And Park, the green lane, which everyone actually calls Greenwich. It's a 6v6 game, so you generally have two players per lane at the start, though some heroes like to roam.

Your job early on is to hold one of these lanes and farm it. That's it, more or less. Fights happen, but the lane is what pays.

The structure ladder

Each lane has a chain of defensive buildings you have to tear through to reach the enemy base. You can't skip ahead, since the later ones are protected until the earlier ones fall. The order, from your side to theirs:

| Building | What it does | What you get for killing it | |---|---|---| | Guardian | First defense. Shoots a laser, has a melee swing, and slams the ground for area damage around its base. | Souls, split across the team | | Walker | The big tower in the lane. Laser plus a fireball spray and a slam. | Souls, and the team earns an Extra Slot (a flex item slot) | | Base Guardians | Two of them sitting outside the enemy base. | Souls, and that lane's zipline turns into a fast express line | | Shrines | Two more buildings inside the base, one on each side. They hit back with a curse attack. | Both must fall to weaken the Patron | | Patron | The final objective in the back. Two health phases. | Kill it and you win the match |

When a building dies, the bounty gets split up. About 70 percent goes out to the whole team, and the other 30 percent gets divided among the players standing close by. So you don't have to land the last hit yourself to get paid. You just want to be in the neighborhood when it falls.

The win condition and the Mid-Boss

The Patron is the actual win condition. You have to destroy the Shrines before you can reach it, and the Base Guardians before you can reach the Shrines, all the way back to the first Guardian in the lane. Push the ladder down, crack the base open, kill the Patron, game over.

There's also a big neutral monster called the Mid-Boss living in the sewers under the middle of the map. It's up from the start of the match. Beating it drops a Rejuvenator Crystal, and whoever grabs it gives their whole team a buff that can bring a dead teammate back a few seconds after they fall, three shared charges per kill. It respawns on a timer that drops from about seven minutes down to six, then five, each time it dies. Big fights break out over it, so it's worth knowing where it lives even when you're not ready to contest it yet.

Last Hitting and Denying Creeps for Souls

Souls are everything in Deadlock. They're your money and your experience rolled into one. Souls buy your items, and they also power up your abilities, so the hero with more souls hits harder and casts harder. You pick them up a bunch of ways, but the lane is where the small margins live. The little guys marching down each lane are called troopers, though MOBA veterans just call them creeps.

Why the last hit is the whole job

Waves of troopers march forward and fight each other in the middle of the lane. You do not get souls for chipping a trooper down. You only get paid for the killing blow, the last hit. All the damage before that is free.

This is the thing that trips up shooter players. You're used to dumping a mag into something and getting credit. Here, spraying the wave just shoves it toward the enemy and hands them easy farm. The play is to hold fire, watch one trooper's health bar, and tap in one clean shot the moment it's low enough to finish.

Securing your orb

When you land that killing blow, the trooper doesn't hand you the full bounty outright. About 60 percent of it flies to your team automatically as long as you're standing within 18 meters or so, and the enemy can't touch that part. The other 40 percent pops out as a glowing soul orb that floats above the body for a couple of seconds, and either side can shoot it. That floating orb is the part worth fighting over.

So a clean last hit is a two-step move: kill the trooper, then snap a shot into that orb to bank the last 40 percent before it fades. Skip the second step and you've left good money sitting on the ground. Make the orb shot a habit. Newer players land the kill, feel done, and wonder why they're broke.

Denying the enemy's orbs

It gets nastier. When the enemy last-hits one of their troopers, their orb floats up too, and you can shoot it before they do. That's a deny. You strip the contested chunk of value right out of the kill they just earned, and you pocket a share for yourself on top of it. One good deny does two jobs at once, your gain and their loss.

A lane where you confirm every one of your orbs and steal half of theirs snowballs fast. The other player falls behind on items, and pretty soon they can't trade with you anymore. Denies are worth almost as much as your own last hits, so treat them the same way.

Melee last hits and the jungle

There's a clean trick that skips the orb entirely. If you finish a trooper with a melee attack instead of your gun, you bank the full bounty instantly and no orb spawns at all. Nothing for the enemy to deny. A light melee also one-shots low troopers and costs zero ammo, so it's the cleanest last-hit tool up close. The catch is the wind-up on the swing, which you can get punished during. Learn to cancel out of it if the trooper dies early or someone steps in.

When the lane goes quiet, the jungle camps scattered around the map are free money. Nobody's fighting you for them. Easy camps open at two minutes and come back about every 85 seconds, medium camps show up at five, and the hard camps plus the vault machines arrive at eight. Clearing one between waves keeps your income climbing without giving up your patch.

A few cheap items make all of this way easier. Monster Rounds adds bonus weapon damage against troopers and neutrals, and it's pretty much the standard farm pickup. Close Quarters helps up close, and Extended Magazine keeps you from running dry mid-wave.

Using the Rope and Zipline Movement System

Deadlock's map is tall and spread out, so getting around fast is its own skill. The two main tools are the ziplines (the game calls them transit lines) for crossing long distances, and the ropes for going up.

Riding the ziplines

There's a zipline running down each of the three lanes, color-coded to match. Yellow for York, blue for Broadway, green for Park. You spawn riding yours at the start of the match. To hop on during the game, look up at the line until the connection lights up and jump toward it. Switching lanes shuffles you onto that lane's line.

Travel speed on a line is fixed at about 18 meters per second on the inner lane and 21 on the outer ones, no matter how fast your hero normally runs. Riding a line also refreshes your air dash and double jump, which is handy when you hop off near a fight. To get off, press the down or crouch key and you drop, but you keep your momentum for about two seconds, so you keep sailing past where the line ends.

The speed boost and express lines

There's a speed boost you can trigger while riding (the F key by default). It cranks your travel speed up by 80 percent for 32 seconds, with a six-minute cooldown, and it doesn't even unlock until six minutes into the match. Save it for a rotation that actually matters.

Finish a lane off, though, and you get a lasting bonus. When your team destroys both Base Guardians in a lane, that lane's zipline permanently turns into an express line with that same 80 percent boost baked in. Taking the base opens a fast highway straight into enemy territory, which is a real reason to push a lane all the way instead of wandering off.

Combat rules on the line

Ziplines have rules around fighting, and they matter a lot. If you take damage from an enemy hero or an enemy objective, you can't attach to a line for three seconds. You can't just zip away the instant someone shoots you.

It gets worse if you're already riding. Take enemy damage while you're on a line and you get knocked off. You lose 15 percent of your max health, you fall straight down, and you eat a 2.5-second stun that doesn't even start until you hit the ground. That's a death sentence if you're low, so don't ride over a fight you might lose.

There's a window of safety, though. After you've been on a line for three straight seconds, a blue particle effect pops up around you and you become immune to getting knocked off. If you have to cross a hot lane, get on early and ride until that protection kicks in.

Ropes, jump pads, and teleporters

Ropes are the vertical tool. They dangle off rooftops and inside buildings, and you climb them to reach high ground, extra floors, and good angles over a lane. High ground is huge in a shooter, so ropes matter more than they look. Grab one when you want to shoot down on people or escape up and away.

Jump pads are little vents that launch you through the air when you stand on them, handy for crossing gaps. And there are pairs of teleporters that fling you left and right across the map for a quick reposition. There's no fall damage in the game either, so don't sweat the high drops.

Reading the Minimap and Rotating Safely

The minimap sits in the corner and it's easy to ignore, which is a mistake. Deadlock doesn't show you the whole enemy team. You only see what your team can actually see, so reading that little map is how you avoid walking into three people.

How enemies show up, and when they don't

An enemy is only visible if a teammate has line of sight on them, or if they're shooting your troopers or your structures. Firing gives their position away. If nobody can see them, they're just gone from the map, and that usually means they rotated somewhere.

So a missing enemy is information, not a blank. If the person across from you vanishes, assume they left. Either back up or ping it. Walking forward into fog when the map has gone quiet is how you feed.

Pings and missing calls

You can ping stuff to talk to your team. Ping a lane and your hero calls out that they're heading there. The big one is the missing call: open the scoreboard (Tab) and middle-click the enemy's portrait to tell your team that hero is gone from their lane. Do this every time your opponent disappears and you'll save a teammate's life sooner or later.

It goes both ways. When you see a missing ping from another lane, treat it as a warning that someone might be heading your way. Pull back, hug your Guardian, and wait to spot them.

What the icons mean

The map is littered with icons worth knowing. Neutral camps show up as little markers, and they light up the chain of easy (two minutes), medium (five), and hard (eight) camps as the game goes on. Powerups spawn at two spots at five minutes and again every five after that, and grabbing one gives you a temporary edge. The Soul Urn drops into the middle at ten minutes and every five minutes after, and it's a big teamfight magnet.

The Mid-Boss has its own marker down in the center. When teams start grouping for it, you'll see them pile into that spot on the map, which tells you a fight's about to break out whether you want one or not.

When it's actually worth rotating

A rotation is just leaving your lane to go do something else, and most new players do it way too much. The rule of thumb is to stay put and farm unless one of a few things is true. Your wave is already dead or shoved safe, so you're not giving up farm. A teammate is about to die and you can genuinely reach them in time. Or there's a soul urn, a powerup, or a camp right on your path.

If you can't clearly see how leaving wins something, you're just jogging across the map for no income while your Guardian takes free damage. Every second spent rotating is zero souls. Use the teleporters when you do go, since they cut the trip way down. Farm first, rotate with a purpose.

Common Early-Game Mistakes to Avoid

Most games lost early aren't lost on aim. They're lost on a handful of quiet habits that bleed away small edges until the enemy is knocking on your Patron. The fixes are about discipline, not fancy mechanics.

Leaving your lane too much

This is the big one. You see a fight two lanes over, you run to help, and by the time you arrive it's already over. Meanwhile your own lane sat empty for 20 seconds, your troopers died for nothing, and your Guardian took free hits. A cross-map rotation into a coin-flip fight almost never pays for what you gave up.

Treat your lane like a job in the laning phase. Only leave when your wave is handled, a teammate genuinely needs you, or there's a free objective on the way. Otherwise, stay home and farm.

Fighting when you should farm

Deadlock feels like a shooter, so new players brawl constantly, poking and dashing and trading shots for the fun of it. But this is a game where souls decide the late game, and every trade you take is time you're not last-hitting. A missed trooper is gone for good. Those souls never come back.

Worse, winning a duel but taking 60 percent of your health usually means you have to walk back to base and miss the next wave anyway, a net loss. Make last-hitting and denying your real job and let fights come to you. If a trade doesn't clearly win a last hit, a deny, or a kill, skip it.

All-damage builds

It's tempting to pour every soul into damage and picture yourself deleting the enemy team. What really happens is you turn into a glass cannon who dies in one scrap and hands over a fat bounty. The shop splits items into Weapon, Vitality, and Spirit for a reason, and the Vitality row is what keeps you alive long enough to use all that damage.

Grab a cheap sustain item early. Something like Healing Rite gives you an out-of-combat heal so you can shrug off pokes and stay in lane instead of walking home and missing waves. As the game opens up, layer in health and resistances. If the enemy carry is shredding you with bullets, buy bullet resist. If a spirit hero is bursting you, buy spirit resist. Reactive defense wins way more games than a locked-in dream build.

Forgetting the win condition

New players tunnel on the enemy in front of them and forget the game is won by destroying buildings. Getting three kills means nothing if nobody takes the objective those kills just opened up. When you win a fight, look up. There's almost always a Guardian or a Walker sitting there for the taking.

This is the one that closes games out. A won fight turned into a dead Walker is real progress. A won fight turned into you chasing one more kill into their base is a throw. Take the building, then reset.

Hoarding souls for one big item

There's a trap a lot of new players fall into: sitting on a pile of souls waiting for one expensive item, then dying before they ever buy it. Death hands the enemy a bounty and costs you farm time, so dying with a fat bank is the worst of both worlds. Spend steadily. A slightly cheaper build that's actually on your hero beats a perfect build you never finish.

The common thread here is the same. Discipline beats flash at low ranks almost every time. Stay in your lane, farm your wave, buy a little defense, and turn your kills into dead buildings. Do that and you'll already be ahead of half the lobby before you learn a single fancy trick.