Deadlock, Valve’s first competitive game announced since Artifact’s failure back in November 2018, is a testament to how groundbreaking the company still is, a quarter of a century after Half Life’s original release.
Embodying the role of Dr. Frankenstein, Valve decided to create life from the unconventional mixture of two genres that are beyond over-crowded: MOBAs and Hero-Shooters.
How much of its DNA is one or the other is and will remain up for debate, but the importance of items and builds is as crucial here as in any MOBA you might’ve played, and the complexity that they come with is just as daunting.
With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know to begin your own journey into understanding how items work in Deadlock, and how you can start creating your own builds for your favorite heroes.
In Deadlock, items are divided into three categories:
Inside these categories, they’re then split into four price brackets, based on how many Souls they cost:
On top of their individual effects, these items will give you passive bonuses based on their category and price brackets:
These bonuses scale with the price bracket the item you bought is in. For example, 500 soul items will boost your Weapon Damage by 6%, your Base Health by 11%, and your Spirit Power by 4.
If we go down into the 3,000+ bracket, those numbers become 14% for Weapon Damage, 17% for Base Health, and 12 flat for Spirit Power.
Although the first two categories are obvious, Spirit Power is a weird stat specific to Deadlock. Its effect will heavily depend on which hero and items you have, but Valve’s own description of the stat is as follows:
“Spirit Power increases the effectiveness of your Abilities and Items”.
This is technically correct, but only partially. Spirit Power also boosts the base stats of specific heroes. Two examples are Grey Talon and Haze, who get completely different benefits from the same stat.
Grey Talon’s Bullet Damage and Move Speed increase with his Spirit Power. On the other hand, Haze’s Spirit Power boosts her Ammo, essentially her magazine size. These bonuses apply on top of the default ones that the stat gives to their Abilities and Items, so characters like these benefit even more from Spirit Power.
Items can scale off of Spirit Power, even if they’re not a part of that category. For example, Mystic Shot, a Weapon Category item that costs 1,250 Souls, gives some of your bullets Spirit Damage. That damage scales off of Spirit Power.
Most Items in Deadlock offer passive effects. More damage when in close range, bonus stats, situational benefits, etc. Some of them, though, give you additional abilities or alter the way your base abilities work.
Active items are marked as Active in your shop, and they’ll be assigned to one of four slots, which default to the Z, X, C, and V hotkeys. Just like one of your base abilities, they have a cooldown and have a specific effect when you use them. Additionally, they also come with passive effects.
Healing Rite, for example, has an active ability with a 64 second cooldown that grants Regen and Sprint Speed to its target. That can either be one of your allies, or yourself. On top of that, the item also gives you Bonus Health and Spirit Power.
Alongside Actives, Deadlock brought in Ability Imbuing items, something they’d done previously in DOTA 2. These give you a choice of an Ability when you buy them, and they’ll affect that specific ability, on top of buffing other things.
Using Quicksilver Reload as an example, the 1,250 Souls Spirit item, imbues one of your abilities with bonus Spirit Damage on its first hit, and gives you an instant reload when you use it, while also buffing your Fire Rate after the ability is used.
Lastly, we have item components, a standard of MOBAs, but one that is much rarer in Deadlock that in other games of the genre. A few items in the game are components of better, more expensive ones.
You can identify these at a glance by searching for items that have smaller icons of other items inside a white circle, like shown in the following image.
These come with the benefit of saving you a slot, as they replace the component that was used to buy them. With that being said, though, they’re more expensive than items that are bought without components.
Let’s take Point Blank as an example. To purchase Point Blank, you need to first buy Close Quarters 500 Souls. Doing so allows you to buy Point Blank for 3,000 Souls, the same cost as all other items in the same price bracket.
Your inventory is split into four separate spaces. The first three are divided by item category, while the fourth is a flex space.
The category spaces contain four slots that can only hold items of that category. The four weapon slots can only contain Weapon Category Items, and the same goes for Vitality and Spirit.
On the other hand, Flex slots can take items of any category, but they need to be unlocked. Here’s how to do that:
With all these prerequisites completed, you can have 16 items equipped, considerably boosting your hero’s power.
Like DOTA 2, Deadlock comes with an in-game build guide system. All heroes come with a Valve-chosen Default Built, telling you which items to buy when. These are quite simple, but will do the job at first, without overwhelming you.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of the very basics of item building, we highly recommend taking advantage of the Public Builds. These are created by other players, go into detail on how you should be building and give you your Ability Point Order.
Choose one of the most popular ones, ideally one which explains the order of your purchases and, for example, which abilities to imbue or when to buy situational items, and you’re good to go.
Eventually, you’ll be comfortable enough with the item and build system to create your own, or even multiple ones depending on match-ups and team compositions.
Like any other MOBA, Deadlock’s items and builds are beyond overwhelming at first, but the depth of these systems is what will keep you engaged with this game for years to come.
Do your own experiments, conduct your own research, and, above all else, have fun out there.
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