Deadlock Fundamentals: Everything New Players Need to Master

Hello, mobile gamers! Librarian Husky here, ready to guide you through the exciting world of mobile gaming. With nearly 400 hours of experience packed into this guide, we’ll cover everything from gameplay basics to advanced laning, jungle tactics, and team play strategies. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to sharpen your skills, this guide will help you level up fast and become a true mobile gaming pro. Let’s dive in and conquer the game together!

Introduction to Deadlock Game

Everything is divided into chapters so you can skip around if you want to see something specific. Without anything else, let’s just start.

Understanding Deadlock as a Game

Deadlock is a new 6v6 game best described as a third-person shooter combined with a MOBA. If that reminds you of games like Smite, you’re close but not quite there. While Smite is a MOBA with a third-person perspective, Deadlock leans much more into typical shooter mechanics. This means that aim and movement skills are just as important as in traditional shooters.

Gameplay Mechanics and Movement

On the movement side, Deadlock offers abilities like dashes, slides, jumps, and double jumps. Unlike most MOBAs played on a flat, two-dimensional plane, Deadlock features a relatively vertical play space. You can position yourself above or below opponents, use smaller objects to break their line of sight, and set up surprising attacks.

Shooter DNA and Importance of Headshots

The moment-to-moment gameplay carries a strong shooter DNA. Headshots deal significantly more damage than body shots, making accuracy essential. Many items in the shop focus on enhancing your shooting capabilities. However, the game mode, map objectives, and pacing are firmly rooted in MOBA traditions. While kills are beneficial, winning Deadlock usually depends on more than just player eliminations.

Understanding the Game Objective

The primary goal is to push lanes, destroy enemy buildings, and ultimately reach and destroy the opponent’s Patreon — a central object similar to the Nexus in League of Legends or the Core in Heroes of the Storm. Destroying the Patreon wins you the game.

Character Progression and Strategy

Like traditional MOBAs, your character starts each game weak. Progression is achieved by killing enemy troopers — NPC units spawning along four lanes — to gain strength. As you grow stronger, you become capable of destroying buildings, advancing into the enemy base, and eventually defeating the Patreon. The game offers numerous strategies through different characters, items, and playstyles, making each match unique.

Understanding Laning in the Game

Laning is a core concept in Deadlock that drives much of the gameplay. The map features four lanes: yellow, orange, blue, and purple. To accommodate players with color blindness, each lane is also marked with the first letter of its color, making it easier to identify.

Understanding the Spawn Mechanics

Every 30 seconds, groups of friendly and enemy troopers spawn in these lanes and begin fighting continuously. Your role is to enter one of these lanes and eliminate the enemy troopers before they kill yours.

Game Strategy Overview

Troopers fight endlessly on the lanes, and your job is to control these fights. Successfully killing enemy troopers pushes the map forward by allowing your friendly troopers to advance. The lanes have several buildings with high health and powerful attacks that can damage players directly. However, your troopers act as a shield, soaking up damage so you can safely destroy these structures.

Importance of Teamwork

Team coordination is key. Friendly troopers tank damage and die for you, which lets you focus on attacking buildings without taking unnecessary damage yourself. Maintaining lane control with your team helps steadily push towards the enemy base.

Improving Your Game Strategy

Securing objectives like the first guardian early on can shift the momentum in your favor. Guardians block enemy access to nearby item shops and grant your team extra ability points, both of which are valuable advantages as the game progresses.

Importance of Killing Troopers

Killing troopers is crucial not just for map control but also for earning souls, Deadlock’s primary currency. Each wave has four troopers, each worth 75 souls at the start of the game, totaling 300 souls per wave. Among these troopers, one special healer trooper periodically emits healing waves, which players can utilize strategically to sustain themselves in lane.

Understanding Soul Collection in the Game

Soul collection is often the primary source of sustain for many characters early in Deadlock. It is essential to catch healing from soul orbs whenever possible to maintain your presence in the lane.

Key Aspects of Soul Collection

Killing an enemy trooper grants you 75 souls, but there are nuances. You must perform a last-hit to receive any souls. If a trooper dies without your or a teammate’s last-hit, no souls are awarded. Upon last-hitting, you get half the souls immediately, and the other half spawns as a soul orb above the trooper.

The Importance of Soul Orbs in the Laning Phase

Soul orbs appear for 3 seconds after a trooper dies. If you shoot the orb early or collect it after it appears, you gain the remaining souls. However, enemy players can also see and shoot these orbs to steal the souls, an action known as denying. Denying soul orbs from opponents while securing your own is a key part of laning strategy and can severely hamper enemy progression.

Maximizing Soul Collection Efficiency

Troopers can be last-hit with a melee attack, which grants the full amount of souls instantly and does not spawn a soul orb. This prevents opponents from stealing your souls and can give you a safer, more efficient way to collect resources.

Troopers and Melee Attacks

Troopers visibly change color when damaged, signaling they are close to dying and ready for a last-hit. They perform a brief animation just before death, giving you a small window to react. Both normal and charged melee attacks can be used to last-hit, with charged melee dealing more damage. However, charged melee has a longer animation that can be punished by opponents, either through a well-timed parry causing a stun or by shooting you while you’re vulnerable.

Soul Scaling and Gameplay Changes

Soul rewards from troopers and orbs gradually increase during the laning phase. While the increase is subtle, a significant change occurs at the 10-minute mark that impacts how the game should be played strategically, requiring players to adapt their approach accordingly.

Changes to Troopers and Souls in the Game

The major shift at the 10-minute mark is that troopers no longer grant souls immediately upon death. Instead, the soul orb that spawns now contains 100% of the souls. This change makes securing and stealing souls much more impactful and essential for gaining an advantage.

Sharing Souls with Teammates

Also starting at 10 minutes, the souls from orbs are now shared among all nearby teammates. Before this, if a trooper was killed by you or a teammate, every nearby player received the full soul amount. After 10 minutes, however, the souls are divided, so standing together in the same lane will reduce the individual soul gain.

Optimizing Soul Sharing in Gameplay

If two players share the lane after the 10-minute mark, they split the souls from each orb, effectively halving their individual gains. This means that for maximizing soul income, it’s better to avoid having multiple players soak souls in the same lane for long periods. Grouping is still useful for coordinated pushes or quick kills, but for farming souls efficiently, spreading out is generally more beneficial. We will explore alternative strategies for soul farming later.

Understanding In-Game Boosts

Boosts are simple mechanics that transport you quickly from the base to assigned lanes. Mastering when to use these boosts—and when to hold off—can significantly influence your early game laning effectiveness.

Optimal Boost Usage

A common mistake among new players is using the boost immediately at game start to rush their lane. While this can sometimes offer minor advantages, it is usually not worth it because boosts have a long cooldown of over 300 seconds. Saving boosts for critical moments often yields better results.

Understanding Boost Cooldown in the Current Patch

In the current patch, the boost cooldown is approximately 340 seconds. Early troopers take some time to arrive in the lanes because they use the transit lines and spawn shortly after the player does. Therefore, it’s crucial to use your boost wisely. If you want to quickly check your boost cooldown without hopping back onto the transit line, you can see it displayed right next to your map as a small indicator.

Strategic Use of Boost in Laning

This guide won’t dive deep into laning matchups or strategies to win from behind — that will come in a future article. However, here’s a key tip about boost: it’s often best saved for when you are low on health in the lane and need to heal. Being in your base allows you to regenerate fully, and the boost on the transit line lasts for 30 seconds, so you can use it both when traveling back to base and returning to your lane.

Respawning in the Lane

There’s usually enough time to use your boost this way. Moreover, if you die early in the lane due to a mistake, having your boost ready on your first respawn is invaluable for quickly getting back into action.

Transit Line Strategy

There are important limitations to remember: you cannot jump on a transit line while in combat. Specifically, after taking damage, you must wait 2 seconds without being shot before boarding. Also, when first boarding, you can be knocked off, which stuns you and causes significant damage.

Understanding Transit Lines in the Game

Awareness of enemy positions is vital before using transit lines, as poor timing can lead to heavy punishment. After 3 seconds onboard, a protective light appears around your character’s hands and body, signaling immunity to knockoffs. You can still take damage and be slowed, but you cannot be dismounted from the line.

Limitations of Transit Lines

Lastly, transit lines only carry you as far as your team has pushed the lane, usually ending near the middle of the map, since lanes reset to a neutral position after destruction.

Understanding Transit Lines in the Game

Depending on how the game progresses, the transit lines might take you all the way to the enemy base by the end, or in some cases, barely move you outside of your own base. As a bonus, if you manage to break the two opponent’s guardians at the end of their lane near their base, the transit line will grant you a permanent boost, removing the cooldown entirely. This makes the transit lines a critical factor in fast rotations and map control.

Exploring Souls and Player Levels

Now that you understand laning, let’s dive deeper into how souls and player levels work. Souls collected throughout the game from various sources contribute to leveling up your character. Leveling up provides numerous benefits, such as increased weapon damage, higher base health, unlocking new abilities, gaining ability points to upgrade those abilities, and sometimes special character-specific stats with each level gained.

Leveling Up in the Game

The number of souls required to level up is consistent across all characters. You can check the exact soul requirements by visiting the character menu and viewing the detailed level chart. This helps plan your progress and understand when key power spikes will occur.

Tracking Souls During Gameplay

In-game, you can monitor your soul count and progress toward the next level by looking at the flask logo next to your health bar. This indicator shows how many souls you need to level up and what new benefit or ability you will unlock at that point. Early in the game, when your soul count is zero, you can only unlock one of your four abilities. The next abilities become available at 400 and 500 souls, with the ultimate ability unlocking at 3,000 souls.

Keeping track of your souls—and especially those of your opponent—is crucial during the laning phase. Unlocking new abilities is often a major power spike that can determine the outcome of your lane.

Improving Your Ultimate Ability

For example, securing more souls than your opponent means you’re likely to unlock your ultimate ability earlier, granting you a significant advantage. The ultimate can often be a game-changing power spike that shifts momentum in your favor.

Managing Troopers for Success

Conversely, if you miss troopers and fall behind in souls, especially when your opponent hits that 3,000 soul mark first, you need to play more cautiously and position yourself further back until you can catch up.

Understanding In-Game Information

You can easily track everyone’s total soul count at the top of the screen, along with their ultimate cooldown. The ultimate cooldown is shown as a circular indicator that clearly displays how close each player is to unlocking their ultimate ability.

Strategic Decision Making

Keeping an eye on this information is crucial not only early in the game but also in later stages to decide whether you should engage in a fight or hold back. As you progress, you’ll accumulate a lot of ability points from leveling up, destroying buildings, and delivering the urn (which will be covered later). Upgrading abilities requires multiple points — two points for the second upgrade tier, and five points for the final upgrade.

If you accidentally upgrade an ability you didn’t intend to, there’s a handy way to undo this.

Ability Upgrades and Points

You have a brief window of time to undo an upgrade, but this only works if you haven’t used the upgraded ability yet. To undo, hold Alt and click the specific upgrade tier you want to revert. This refunds all the points spent on that upgrade, giving you a quick way to correct mistakes.

Souls and Inventory Management

Souls you collect also accumulate in your inventory bank. You can see the amount of souls you currently hold in the bottom left corner of your screen—this is what you can spend in the shop. At any point during the game, pressing B opens the shop menu, which features several tabs and categories of items that enhance your character in various ways.

Thank you for diving into our guide! Discover our exceptional Deadlock boosting services and elevate your gaming experience with our top-tier boosts.