Deadlock’s latest ‘small update’ yet again remixes basic mechanics and rebalances most of the roster

More than team fights, more than shrewd theorycrafting, and more than map awareness, MOBAs are ultimately games about scaling: get more money than the other guys, and once you’ve got a power spike to leverage, dunk on them as hard as you can.

That means the hardest part of these games is catching up. Each game has its own solutions to make playing from behind more bearable, and in a “small update” released yesterday, Deadlock’s biggest comeback mechanic just got a hell of a lot more hectic.

If you’re unfamiliar, the soul urn is a walking, talking bag of money (or souls, in Deadlockian parlance) that spawns every once in a while. A player on either team can take it, at which point their location becomes globally visible and, before the patch, they had to ferry it to the other side of the map a la capture the flag. The urn’s turn-in location was based on your team’s performance—if you were ahead, it was nearer to the enemy base, and if you were behind, it was nearer to your own base.

It’s great fun, but because depositing the urn is instant, it can be easy to swoop down from a cheeky angle and avoid a fight or bully a losing team by claiming it aggressively while ahead. The new patch experiments with “an alternate set of urn mechanics” where the urn always has to be deposited right in the center of the map, at which point it will transition to a channeling phase.

The time it takes for the urn to complete channeling reduces the further behind your team is, but if the enemy team is nearby, they can punch the urn to add a second to the timer and switch its allegiance to their team. If the urn carrier holds onto it without turning it in for too long, they start taking huge chunks of damage until they deposit or drop it.

Suffice it to say, it should be much harder to avoid a fight while claiming the urn unless you’re way behind and remarkably quick about it. But that’s not the only new thing this patch lighting my brain on fire with possibilities—the midboss, a neutral mob which lets your team resurrect themselves on death a few times once defeated⁠—now spawns as soon as the game starts.

If you’ve played Dota 2, you’ll know heroes like Ursa are notorious for their ability to kill Roshan (that game’s midboss, essentially) all on their lonesome ludicrously early. It’s cheeky, but it can be a huge advantage with some coordination. I’m curious to see if Deadlock will add a hero like Ursa to introduce a similar dynamic… or if such a hero is already in the game.

There’s a shedload of other patch notes to sift through, including some absolutely delightful Doorman nerfs and a universal reduction to base HP. Updates like these are further evidence that the best way to deliver live service thrills is to let people muck around in a game where nothing feels set in stone.