How to Play Deadlock: A Complete Beginner's Guide

You installed Deadlock, hit Play, and thirty seconds later a Trooper wandered past you and vanished into gold sparks you had no idea you were supposed to grab. That's normal. Deadlock hides a full MOBA economy underneath a third-person shooter, and nobody explains the rules to you. This Deadlock beginner guide walks you through a single match start to finish, so by the time you're reading it you'll understand how to play Deadlock the way an experienced player already does: not as a list of tips, but as one continuous game with a beginning, a middle, and a Patron dying at the end.

The shape of a single match

Almost every game follows the same arc. Knowing the arc is half of Deadlock for new players, because it tells you what you should be doing at any given minute instead of wandering the map hoping for a fight.

1. 0:00
   Queue and load

   Pick a hero, load into the map, and buy your first cheap item at the shop before the barrier drops. Walk to your assigned lane.

2. Laning
   The lane duel

   You and usually one teammate hold a lane against one or two enemies. This is where most of your early Souls come from. Last-hit your Troopers, deny theirs, and try not to feed a kill.

3. Mid game
   Lanes break open

   Once a lane Guardian falls, players roam. You start clearing neutral camps, grouping for fights, and contesting map objectives like the Soul Urn and the mid-boss.

4. Objectives
   Sieging the base

   Teams stack up to break Walkers and the Shrines guarding the enemy base. Fights get bigger and death timers get longer, so a single lost teamfight can lose the game.

5. Win
   Kill the Patron

   The Patron becomes vulnerable, then killable. Burn it down while your team holds off the defenders, and the match ends.

Before you queue: pick a hero you can actually pilot

The roster is deep and it's tempting to lock the flashiest character. Don't. For your first ten or twenty games you want a hero who forgives mistakes and doesn't fall apart if your aim is shaky. Abrams is the classic answer: he's a durable brawler with built-in lifesteal and a charge that sticks enemies in place, so he punches above your mechanical skill and survives the fights you shouldn't have taken. If you want something with more range and a healing kit that also helps the team, McGinnis lets you build turrets and a wall, which quietly teaches you about map control and positioning.

The hero to avoid on day one is the one that looks the coolest in highlight clips. Haze, for example, is a fantastic carry with a sleep dagger and a spinning ultimate that shreds whole teams, but she's made of paper early and needs a lot of farm before she comes online. Pick a hero like that before you understand souls and positioning and you'll spend most of the match dead. Learn the map on something sturdy first, then branch out.

The laning phase: last hits, denies, and staying alive

This is the part new players skip and then wonder why they're broke all game. Troopers spawn in waves and march down your lane. When you land the killing blow on an enemy Trooper it drops a glowing Soul orb, and here's the catch: the orb is not yours until you shoot it. Confirm it and the Souls are banked. Leave it, and after a moment it starts floating up where the enemy can deny it by shooting it first, splitting the value. So laning is really two jobs at once, done every few seconds.

1. 1
   Last-hit the Trooper

   Time your shot so you land the final hit rather than chipping the whole wave down early. Overeager damage just pushes the wave and hands tempo to the enemy.

2. 2
   Confirm the Soul orb

   Immediately shoot the orb that pops out to secure the Souls. If you don't, you get a reduced share and the enemy can steal the rest.

3. 3
   Deny theirs

   When an enemy Trooper dies and its orb rises, shoot it before they confirm it. A good deny is worth as much as a good last-hit because it's Souls you took away from your opponent.

4. 4
   Sustain and repeat

   Trade shots when it's safe, back off when it isn't, and buy a cheap heal so you don't have to walk all the way home. Losing lane is usually about running out of health, not losing a duel.

That cheap heal matters more than it sounds. Grabbing a Healing Rite as one of your first purchases lets you top off between waves without leaving the lane, which means you keep confirming and denying Souls while your opponent has to walk back to base. Small edges like that compound. Win the last-hit war for ten minutes and you'll walk into the mid game with a real item lead.

Mid game: leave your lane and take the map

Once a lane Guardian goes down, the guardrails come off. Now the whole map is a farm. Scattered around the terrain are neutral camps full of creatures that drop Souls when cleared, and clearing them is how you keep your income up between fights. This is also where an item like Monster Rounds earns its keep: it boosts your damage against non-hero targets, so your Troopers and camps melt faster and you farm the map at double the speed of someone who skipped it. Efficient farmers are always richer than good fighters.

• Use the zipline network to rotate across the map fast instead of walking everywhere.
• Clear the nearest neutral camps whenever your lane is quiet, so your Souls never stop climbing.
• Contest the Soul Urn when it spawns, it's a big lump of Souls for whoever delivers it, and a free reason for a fight.
• Watch the minimap and ping missing enemies, a hero you can't see is often flanking a teammate.
• Group up before you push, one lonely hero pushing a lane is free food for a coordinated enemy team.

Souls and the shop: the economy that decides games

Souls are both your money and your power, and the shop turns them into items across three colors. You don't need to memorize the whole catalog, you need to understand what each color is for and buy the cheapest thing that solves your current problem. Losing trades? Buy Vitality. Can't kill anyone? Buy Weapon or Spirit depending on whether you fight with your gun or your abilities.

A simple habit beats a perfect build: spend your Souls. Sitting on a fat wallet does nothing, and unspent Souls are Souls the enemy is out-leveling you with. Buy cheap early items that fix immediate problems, then upgrade or replace them as your Souls pile up. Most items have flex slots and can be improved later, so early purchases aren't wasted.

Objectives: from Guardians to the Patron

Killing enemy heroes feels great but it doesn't win the game. Destroying the enemy base does. The structures come in a rough order of importance, and you peel them back layer by layer.

1. 1
   Guardians

   The first defensive towers in each lane. Drop these to open the lane up and let your Troopers push deeper. They shoot back, so bring a Trooper wave to soak the fire.

2. 2
   Walkers

   Big walking towers deeper in. They're tanky and dangerous, so you usually break them as a group after winning a fight, not while the enemy team is alive and defending.

3. 3
   The mid-boss (Rejuvenator)

   A powerful neutral objective. The team that kills it earns a major team-wide buff that can turn a slow game into a base race, which makes it worth fighting over.

4. 4
   Shrines and the Patron

   Break the Shrines protecting the base, and the Patron becomes vulnerable, then killable. Kill it and the match is over. Defenders will throw everything at you here, so make sure you have the fight won before you commit.