Four lanes become three as Valve sets about simplifying Deadlock for the masses.
After months of minor patches and a dwindling beta playerbase, Valve has issued a major patch and map update for Deadlock with sweeping changes across the board. The big change players will notice right away, however, is a simplified map — the game's four lanes have been cut down to three.
Visuals map-wide have been changed to reflect the refit. Neutral camps, vents, powerups, and more have been shuffled around to accommodate the change, which may even be reversed if Valve developers aren't happy with how the player base adjusts.
From four lanes to three: Deadlock aligned with similar MOBAs with massive map update
Deadlock was already unique in that it was an over-the-shoulder third-person MOBA, but it's fourth lane added significant complexity to the match. For the most part, players went head-to-head in single lanes while a fifth supported an ally or roamed.
We're now likely to see matches play out more traditionally; three dual lanes will most likely be the meta, but there's always room for mid-lane stacking and rotating. We'll have to see how the meta shifts but it's a huge change to the Deadlock we know so far.
The mid boss has remained in his chamber, but it now sits below the center of the mid lane with windows allowing players above to see if the boss is being taken. Sprint speed has been doubled to allow faster traversal of the map, and many of the game's heroes have received adjustments and model improvements.
The map changes aren't all that's new in Deadlock. Players won't need to last hit enemy Troopers to summon Soul Orbs, while changes have been made to make them easier to farm during the laning phase.
The Feb. 25 update comes at a critical time for Valve and Deadlock. Early hype saw the active player base skyrocket last September, but since then it's been all downhill as a lack of big updates or progress had many fearing the worst. 90% of those who played in September have dropped the game with a measly 17,000 active this past month according to SteamDB.
We'll see how many return with the map refresh and a general simplification of the MOBA. There's plenty more that arrived in the update, some of which we're covering below in the full Feb. 25 patch notes for Deadlock. The update is available now via Steam.
Full Deadlock patch notes for Feb. 25
Map Rework
- The map has been redesigned around being 3 lanes rather than 4. This has a large range of accompanying map-wide changes regarding visuals, building layouts, pathways, neutral camps, air vents, breakables, powerup buffs, juke spots, mid boss, etc.
- Added a new feature called "Explore Map" where you can run around an empty city to test movement and navigation. You can find this under the 'Play' menu.
Soul Orb Mechanics
- Troopers no longer need to be last hit by a player in order to generate souls, as long as you are nearby. Troopers no longer have the "near death" flashing behavior.
- Soul Orb lifetime in the air reduced significantly.
- Soul Orb denies changed from 65/35% to 50/50%.
- Soul Orb physical radius increased by 10%.
- Reduced horizontal movement of soul orbs from troopers.
- Gaining souls from kills now shows a visual effect of souls flying towards you.
Sprint
- Default sprint speed increased from 0.5 to 1.0.
- Sprint disable duration reduced from 5s to 4s when dealing/taking damage with heroes.
- Sprint disable duration reduced from 5s to 0.5s when dealing/taking damage with non-heroes.
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Sinner's Sacrifice
- Sinner's Sacrifice no longer grants a random Golden Statue buff.
- Sinner's Sacrifice now has a looping timing window where if you kill it with a Heavy Melee (there are visual and audio cues), you will receive 3 Golden Statue buffs. Alternatively, a last hit with Light Melee will only give 1 Golden Statue Buff.
Game Feel and Optimizations
- Added support for DLSS as an FSR2 alternative for temporal anti aliasing and upscaling. Requires an NVIDIA 2x-class GPU or above.
- For Vulkan users, upgraded FSR2 to AMD's new FSR3 temporal upscaler for sharper and more temporally stable output.
- Enabled NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2.0 for reduced latency.
- Client performance improvements.
- Bicubic filtering for lightmaps at higher shadow quality settings.
- Improve how we preload units to prevent shader compilation during gameplay.
- Hero shader improvements.
- Various netcode improvements
- Increased tick rate from 60hz to 64hz to improve the precision of certain game calculations.
- Improved client reporting to prevent incorrect prediction offsets to the server.
- Improved accuracy of server lag compensation to prevent bullets from reporting false hit detection against enemies further in the past.
- Improved timing of sever lag compensation to engage during the first phase of bullet creation which previously could have resulted in bullets origination from different positions on the server and client.
- Improved accuracy of Soul Orb hitboxes to ensure they are in the correct position during client bullet prediction.
- Improved various close range abilities having casting errors (Sticky Bomb, Soul Exchange, Combo, etc).
Miscellaneous
- Increased post-laning trooper bounty to match the previous 4 lane global economy.
- Changed flex slot requirements:
- 1st flex slot changed from 3 Guardians down to 2 Guardians.
- 2nd flex slot changed from 2 Walkers down to 1 Walker.
- The last 2 flex slots are unchanged.
- Small Neutral Camp respawn time reduced from 4 minutes to 3 minutes.
- Mid Neutral Camp respawn time reduced from 6 minutes to 5 minutes.
- Neutrals soul values reduced by 10% (overall camp count and frequency has been increased).
- Side Walkers HP increased from 5,175 to 7,000.
- Mid Walkers HP increased from 8,000 to 9,000.
- Mid Boss HP and HP growth increased by 30%.
- Outer Zipline speed increased by 15%.
- Breakable soul values reduced by 5%.
- All juke spots now have veils (the dead end closets with the mystery man infront).
- Gun Powerup min/max Fire Rate increased from 10/30% to 15/35%.
- Fixed Gun Powerup not scaling Ammo to 60% as intended.
- Added a new Mid Boss Rejuvenator Symbol with three visual states (not spawned, under 1 min from spawn, and spawned).
- The new large amount of breakables in the mid boss middle area now initially spawn at the same time as mid boss.
- Holliday:
- Bounce Pad damage reduced from 120 to 90.
- Holliday: Bounce Pad T3 stun duration reduced from +1.25s to +1s.
- Holliday: Spirit Lasso damage reduced from 120 to 90.
- Superior Stamina:
- No longer gives 7% fire rate.
Damage Report
- Now visualizes the amount of damage reduced by resistances or shields.
- Incoming Damage UI now visualizes general damage reduction and amplification.
- Now shows the number of instances of damage done by each ability.
- Damage Report no longer clears immediately upon respawn, but instead will keep the data from your previous life with an added "(Last Life)" label.
- Breaking secondary stats out in the client Damage Report. (i.e. Shiv Serrated Knives now shows damage from initial hit and damage-over-time).
- Defaulting damage report to compact mode when you initially take damage.
- A variety of UI bugfixes and polish changes.
Quickbuy
- Added the ability to right click on the header of a build category to add all items in that category to your Quickbuy queue.
- Quickbuy's default behavior is going back to showing purchase prompts when the item is actually purchased. A settings option has been added to show purchase prompts when the item is queued.
- Fixed a bug where you could queue an item that was a component of an item you already own.
- Fixed several bugs that caused items to be skipped when purchasing items with the Auto Buy option enabled.
Builds & Shop
- Fixed a bug where purchasing an item would clear the item search box in the shop.
- Fixed Steam profanity filter not being consistently applied to user-authored text in builds (names, descriptions, annotations).
- You can now create builds on the dashboard.
- You can now create ability builds by clicking on the ability icons in the skill build area (which is the only way you can do it on the dashboard) in addition to skilling them up in sandbox mode (where both work).
- Fixed a bug where dragging and dropping items while editing a build would remove the annotation from the item.
- Reworking default builds to assume items are bought in specified order.
- Updated Hero default builds.
- Added Suggested AP path for Haze, Paradox, Shiv, and Yamato.
General changes
- Ziplines are now curved.
- If a player abandons a match before the 5 minute mark, the game will now bring up a green hud message: "This game will not be scored. It is now safe to leave." If the abandon occurs after 5 minutes, the hud message will be: "This match can be abandoned without a penalty, but leaving will result in a loss.".
- Updated the Heavy Melee vfx.
- Gun audio system updates attempt to balance powerful feel with ear fatigue more skillfully, also added some experiments for early reflection acoustics in weapon reports.
- Updated regular damage and headshot damage sounds; damage dealt to NPCs is now quieter.
- Players no longer collide with Bosses to prevent some unintended interactions.
- Crouch toggle now ends on a failed dash.
- Added positional tier 1 Guardian death sounds.
- Added sounds for tier 1 Guardian melee swing, melee slam, and melee hit.
- Added sounds for tier 1 Guardian activate from idle and deactivate to idle animations.
- Added positional Walker death sounds.
- Added sounds for Walker beam attack.
- Added sounds for Walker stomp attack.
- Added sounds for Walker rocket barrage attack.
- Adjusted what counts as a headshot when shooting through non-head hitboxes.
- Reduce duration of buff effect for gaining Ability Points.
- Button hints now update when changing keybinds during a match.
- Made bots better at purchasing and upgrading items.
- Made bots better at not getting stuck in walls.
- Adding row indicator if you're on the global leaderboards. Also auto scroll to your position on the global leaderboards.
- Taskbar icon only flashes once when you're about to respawn.
- The Walker's area buff now shows up on the hud's active stats section.
- Adding support for pinging Ability 1-4 to be "almost ready" with supporting vo.
- Hooking up generic "Item is Ready", "Item is almost Ready", and "Item is on cooldown" vo.
- Added missing unique death vo sounds for: Fathom, Trapper, Wrecker, Raven, Sinclair, and Wraith.
- Updated voice lines for having many souls to trigger at 6k, instead of 6.2k.
- Base attack music now starts immediately when an enemy enters the local player's base (previously only when damage was dealt to an objective).
- Damage audio does not play loudly if the player's health is not changing.
- Elevated ability hit confirmation sounds in the mix.
- Players can no longer shoot or reload their weapon while climbing a rope.
- Mix updates to deprioritize NPC, currency, and other sounds in base.
- Protections added to low audio frequencies from building up and clouding the mix.
- Updated volume for Paradox and Viscous' Select/Unselect lines increased to match the rest of the roster.
- So as not to create unintended situations where you give away your position while hiding from combat the "you can't hide from me" vo lines now only play for the speaker.
- At the beginning of a match certain heroes will now chat with each other as they ride to battle. If a hero does not have a recorded conversation the patron will speak to them as they did previously.
- Minor vo bug fixes that address things like missing ability lines, wrong names being called out in pings, etc.
- Ping Update:
- Pre-match, if you press the ping button your hero will play a random taunt. Not every hero has these lines yet.
- Certain heroes now have several new options that can be added to the ping wheel including "Come with me", "Rejuv's Dropping", "Cover Me", "Nevermind", "Press The Advantage", "Not Ready To Teamfight", "Let's Hide Here", "it's Dangerous Here", "I'll Clear The Troopers", "Let's - Meet Here", and "I'll Flank 'Em".
- The Green lane is now alternatively referred to as "Park" instead of "Greenwich".
- Added an effect for when you break bridge Powerups.
- Sprint effects revisions to reduce noise.
- Window materials now feature imposter interiors and improved glass reflection.
- Added new signage to the world.
- Added new railing smartprop to the world.
- Added new oracle building model.
- Added new buildings for the city backdrop.
- Added under construction suspension bridge to yellow lane.
- Improved blending of character and world shadows.
- Improved lighting on city backdrop.
- Added Bull/Bear statues to the jungle lane street for landmark callouts.
- Ability Point effects revisions to reduce lingering noise.
- Powerup spawner gained effects revisions to reduce lingering noise.
- Zipline speed effect revisions.
- Stunned debuff effect revisions.
- Update last hit effects so that it reflects what is shown in the UI.
- Changed minimum bot difficulty for some heroes.
- Added chimes and bird sounds behind park gate.
- Added looping sound to jump pads in the world.
- Added neutral camp spawn sound.
- Added permanent powerup spawn sound.
- Added a global spawn sound for bridge buffs.
User Interface
- Changed all language around 'Hero Sandbox' to 'Hero Testing'.
- Moved Private and Co-op bots to be bucketed under a single "Play Bot Match" button that splits into private vs co-op via selection modal.
- Added a News Post popup panel to the main menu.
- Added a link to Patch Notes to the main menu.
- Commends are now right-aligned.
- Enemy commends now auto-dismiss after a short duration.
- Fixed both "Leave Match" and "Leave Spectating" showing when you hit Esc while watching a match.
- Fixed a bug where abilities showed their imbued item multiple times.
- Adding Status Effect Panels next to healthbar and in the bottom left to display certain modifier icons in these areas. You can hover them to see what the status effect is.
- Adding Rejuvenator icon in the bottom left next to healthbar when you have the Rejuvenator.
- Adding powerups to the bottom left hud area and removing the progress bar in the middle left of the hud.
- Adding player speaking indicator on the minimap icon.
- Changing default minimap values to make ziplines smaller and other minor adjustments to player icons.
- Adding Health regen to active player stats on the left.
- Updating images on the zipline prompt UI to match new colors.
- Fixing wash-color on new inline glyphs for active items.
- Adding logic to make default build categories double height when they go over 9 items in one category.
- Matches that are safe to abandon now use the "Leave Match" label rather than "Abandon Match" in the escape menu.
- Settings for Custom Matches (such as Enable Cheats, Bot Difficulty, etc.) now default to whatever was last used.
There's plenty more in today's patch including an extensive list of hero content improvements, bug fixes, hero lab updates, and more. Head to the official patch notes for more!
That's all for now! For more Deadlock news, stay tuned to esports.gg.