INTRO TO DEADLOCK PART 2: Intermediate Course (UPDATED FOR CITY…

Steam Community guide by ENKIMOON.

Ongoing Treatment : Intro

If you're here from my original beginners guide to deadlock: welcome back, I pray to god you managed to get something useful out of it, because if you didn't this one isn't going to save you from yourself either.

If you're new - ♥♥♥♥ off! : Seriously go read my first guide, its focused on covering the fundamentals and getting even the stupidest new players up to speed with how to not be a complete burden to their teams.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3505896687

The premise of this part 2 is simple: since I made the first guide, the fundamentals of the game have stayed pretty static but there have been some big changes to itemisation and especially the hero roster, also the dedicated playerbase has grown significantly (although skill-brackets are still a complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess). With all that in mind, I'm making this sequel guide to provide some advice on how players who have mostly grasped the basics of Deadlock can continue to improve and hopefully (not likely) keep enjoying the game, especially as it continues to evolve over the course of development.
Right let's get down to business

Self-Medication : Hero 'Roles'

How do heroes in Deadlock work?

Deadlock currently has no draft / pick & ban system (bans kind of exist but its pretty much a button that does nothing) but it will very likely get one before launch. As such like in most MOBAs and Hero-Shooters, ironing out a set of heroes that you can invest time into mastering/barely being able to play to a respectable level, is a very important part of your overall development as a player.
I feel like I have to say this every time I discuss Deadlock but it bears repeating:
DEADLOCK HEROES DO NOT FIT NEATLY INTO TRADITIONAL ROLES OR ARCHETYPES
You will sometimes hear pro-players and streamers talk about 'position 1, 2, 3 blah blah blah', or M1 this and 'Pick Hero' that, its all pretty arbitrary at this stage but feel free to DM Metro for his thoughts -** just remember to pretend to be a 15 year old girl**.

However, I have taken the liberty of breaking the current roster down into very rough categories that will help you understand and prioritise which characters you want to invest your time into.

Linguistic analysis and reading comprehension are in short supply on the internet so let's quickly define our terms:
Hyper-Carry: A hyper-carry is traditionally defined as a character that has enough innate OFFENSIVE * pressure to dictate the outcome of key fights and consequently games. To be even more specific we're talking about characters that deal enough damage, to enough people, with enough consistency to win teamfights by default unless they are specifically taken out of the equation. Let's make sure to note that SCALING is a separate (but linked) factor that doesn't determine whether or not a hero is a hyper-carry, just because a character like Dynamo scales excellently doesn't mean he's a hyper-carry. You will often see the term equated with 'Solo-Carry', I personally think this is moronic because with how Deadlock is played there aren't really any true 'Solo-Carry' viable characters. This is not League of Legends where a level 16 Kayle with enough items can run it down mid and nuke the entire enemy team before solo-winning the game. Equally just because I don't label a character as a hyper-carry doesn't mean they can't 'carry', a tank who is consistently CCing priority targets, creating huge opportunities for the actual hyper-carries to do the killing is functionally 'carrying'. The distinction is that Hyper-Carries tend to be highly self-sufficient due to their unconditional offensive pressure - the team plays around them not the other way around. Once you've tried to stop a turbo fed Seven from nuking your base you will understand exactly what I mean.
Anti-Carry: This is a term that confuses a lot of people (because like all categoric terminology it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ arbitrary - get with the programme). I'll try to keep this simple; an anti-carry is a character that 'carries' by shutting down the opposing teams carries (you will get sick of me saying carry, get over it). Their job is to stop you doing your job, so that your team loses by default. "How is that functionally different from what Hyper-Carries do?", in many ways it isn't, however when you look at the kits of anti-carries you will see clear patterns, many of them are duelists or disablers with a lot of solo-kill pressure, they can pick out enemy carries, isolate them and get out scot-free. They typically trade some degree of team-wide offensive pressure or surviviability/utility in order to be able to do this e.g Calico doesn't have a real ult but in exchange she gets to zip around like a rat on crack and punch you for 2/3s of your hp. Also I can't overstate how powerful the psychological damage that these heroes inflict is. Remember there is no more sure-fire way to win a game than by making the enemy carries go AFK.

'Supports': The current deadlock roster doesn't really have a traditional support style character, Paige is the closest thing and she's got her own weird stuff going on. For the purposes of discussion I'm considering supports to be heroes that have kits heavily skewed towards team-based utility, be that in the form of healing, defensive peel (shielding, rescuing etc) and buffing/debuffing. Just how 'supportive' any character can be is also very much down to itemisation, several of the characters in this category (CoughcoughIVY*coughcough) have pretty nasty carry builds they can opt into, and some characters from other categories have completely viable support builds. Ultimately it's up to you to choose just how selfishly or unselfishly you want to play but if you load into a game as Ivy or Paige, people aren't going to be expecting you to start fragging out like crazy.

'Tanks': In my Billy guide I did a pretty exhaustive breakdown of how broad and stupid the term 'tank' is, especially in Deadlock so I'll keep this fairly brief. In my eyes, dedicated tanks are the heroes that can/should be frontlining for extended periods of time and have kits and statistical profiles that benefit most from this exact kind of pressure. It doesn't matter if they're more utility focused (Mo & Krill/Viscous), damage focused (Abrams) or sheer survivability focused (Victor), what matters is that they should be able to soak up consistent enemy pressure (cc, damage, resources) without massively jeopardising themselves. I don't care if you build 8 green tier IVs on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Warden, he is not outlasting a properly built Victor when they go nose to nose. That's what defines a tank, they can be near immortal without having to gimp their playstyles to do so.

'Bruiser': This is admittedly a pretty nebulous ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ category but just use your imagination ok? A bruiser is a character who can function similarly to a tank but on a conditional basis, they typically have forms of innate survivability that allow them to frontline very effectively in short bursts (Shiv's bloodletting, Yamato's Ultimate, Billy's passives, Warden's ultimate and stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shield). In exchange for the conditionality of their tankiness they often have a measure of flexibility and offensive versatility that their true-tank counterparts do not have. Yamato has excellent mobility and poke, Shiv has a "just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ die" button with resets, Warden is a pedophile stat-check nightmare, Billy gets to cosplay Abrams and Haze at the same time. The tactical flexibility and often highly-situationally dependent itemisation and playstyle demands of bruisers makes them deceptively hard to play, so be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ careful, there's a reason you will see so many Shiv and Billy players going 0/5.
Think of it like this; If a tank is a bear then you are a wolverine.

If that didn't melt your troglodytic brains then we can move on to talking in depth about heroes worth playing.

Self-Medication Cont: How to build your hero pool and find mains

Ok so I understand how the roster works but which characters should I actually be playing?
Let's get the obvious ♥♥♥♥ out of the way: "play who you find fun blah blah blah", if you need someone to tell you that you need to work on your self-esteem...

Yes, actually enjoying the character you're playing is the secret sauce for enjoying the putrid meal that is MOBA gameplay, however I do have some general advice:
In my first guide I recommended several heroes for beginners, I stand by pretty much all of those picks and think that they all scale pretty decently with overall player skill; so if you find yourself loving Seven or Abrams or Ivy, by all means ride them until the wheels fall off, but let me offer a few alternatives as well as some characters that the entire community would collectively prefer if you ignored...

Ideally you should have a pick pool consisting of a few heroes that can fulfil a variety of roles. That said Deadlock is complicated enough as is, you can overwhelm your fragile little brain by trying to learn too many different playstyles at once, so it can be a good idea to have things in common between the few characters you play. I would also advise against being a strict one-trick, with the current lack of a draft system, it is inevitable that you will end up loading into games as someone other than your top priority hero sometimes, you also cannot ban out problematic matchups so you can and will end up in lanes that make you want to tear your hair out.
If you are one of those autists who really insists on spending all their time on a single character; the best one-trick options in my opinion are:
Seven :

I went over him fairly extensively in my first guide but the gist of it is that Seven is the prototypical hyper-carry, his sheer offensive pressure is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ absurd, he has great build diversity, he's straightforward to play and he scales into a walking hydrogen bomb. He also has a lot of built-in utility which allows him to provide consistent value outside of just raw damage. There is a reason that he gets nerfed every patch and still remains top of the tier list.
Infernus:

Infernus is very similar to Seven but he has a few key differences that might make you want to play him over Seven. Firstly Seven's biggest vulnerability is his fairly weak laning pressure and strictly conditional mobility. In contrast Infernus is a strong laner, able to dish out vicious poke, control waves and make aggressive plays with fairly low-risk. Infernus also has more innate mobility with his flame dash. The contrast extends to their mid-late game playstyles too, Infernus doesn't scale quite as hard as Seven from a pure damage perspective although he has an easier time building survivability items, which is necessary because unlike Seven,** Infernus tends to play teamfights at a closer range and focus on melting down single targets one at a time**, rather than pissing out damage across a whole team (although he can certainly do that with flame dash). In short pick Infernus if you want a more stable laner who has to be a little more proactive with his playmaking late.
Dynamo:

The support king. Dynamo is a self-sufficient playmaker who can opt for high-risk high-reward spirit builds or more stable supportive builds, excelling with either. Unlike some of the other support picks I think that his skill floor is a little lower but his skill ceiling remains very high, so he rewards consistent playtime.

Self-Medication: Heroes cont.

Ok now lets talk about the heroes I think are worth learning for intermediate players for use within a small but versatile hero pool:
It's always good to have at least one hyper-carry that you feel confident on, especially if you are going to solo-queue and as such won't be able to rely on your teammates having functional internet or prefrontal cortexes. As stated above Infernus and Seven are both great options but I'm also going to throw out a wild-card (against my better judgement)...
Vindicta:

Vindicta is an innately less stable pick than some of the more conventional hyper-carries however what makes me recommend her is her mastery curve and how useful I think her playstyle is for developing as a player. Vindicta has very clear weaknesses: her waveclear is horrendous early, forcing you to think very carefully about choices you make in lane; if she gets behind you have to make further choices about whether to prioritise a utility focused build and play as a facilitator and opportunist or whether to go all in on looking for big snipes to recover your eco through her passive (she gets increased souls for kills with ultimate), she now gets free weapon damage per snipe stack, same principle as before. She is both straightforward as well as having a high mechanical skill ceiling and her self-peel and range allow newer players to play-safe when necessary. Editor's note : Since this guide was initially written I have become a filthy Vindicta main so I stand by my rec.
Venator: at the time of writing is very new so take everything I say with a grain of salt (as always) but this mad ♥♥♥♥ is currently absolutely one I'm going to tell you to try out when looking for a conventional M1-based carry. He has a good blend of a straightforward playstyle (click enemy heads dumbass) with enough room for skill expression via his shotgun movement and trap set-ups, you can pick him up and your effectiveness with him will directly scale with your time-investment, he's as good as you need him to be at any given skill-level. Also he is in the unique position of having the tank-shredding ability right now, his ult is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MW2 intervention that does true-damage at infinite range and pierces targets - grab a refresher if you're feeling really nasty.

Vyper is a solid alternative if you can't aim.

I'll also quickly mention that if you want to afk farm into easy team value with 0 need for mechanical execution just play McGinnis lol.
Right so that's a carry covered, next let's look at getting an anti-carry for those games where you don't want the pressure of doing it all yourself and would rather just target one or two enemy players and ruin their day repeatedly: **
Holiday:

Holiday is in the category of "I just shoot you better than you can shoot me" alongside Mirage, Haze, Infernus and Warden, this inherent advantage to basic mechanical execution (just headshot people lol) can take you pretty far.** On top of the value you get from Crackshot passive procs, the rest of her kit is a good mix of outplay tools and team utility. **She has stable poke and consistent damage that makes her a strong laner **and by mid-game she can become a very strong duelist and pseudo-assassin. I also shouldn't understate that her kit has a tonne of weird interactions and techs that lets dedicated Holiday players pull off some absurd ♥♥♥♥.
That said the average Holiday in my games is...

The Doorman:

This character is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nuts lol. Take what I said about weird tech and outplay potential on Holiday and multiply it by several orders of magnitude. Good Doorman players regularly do ♥♥♥♥ that feels illegal. You might think that a character with this much outplay potential probably has a very high mechanical floor but he really doesn't, Call Bell is an excellent poke tool with very strong spirit scaling and Luggage Cart is a versatile ranged CC option that can peel you out of any sticky situations as well as set up disgusting plays in combination with teammates. His ultimate turns any fight into a potential mismatch due to completely removing a target of your choosing from the action for 6.5 seconds. Doorman is just a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mystery box of tech, outplay manoeuvres and consistent pressure.

Paradox and Wraith are also solid bets for more conventional gun-focused gameplay.
Now when it comes to those of you who are a little shy, a little fragile, maybe even a little pathetic, you will no doubt be wanting a support pick or two, so let's look at the options:
Paige:

Paige is currently the most 'standard' support character in the game. She has what you'd expect from say an enchanter in LoL, she shields and heals teammates, disrupts enemies and peels allies with strong crowd-control pressure and has some straightforward damage tools that allow her to contribute offensively. This straightforwardness is both a strength and a weakness, it doesn't take long to figure out her deal and start optimising your gameplay on her but equally she's fairly predictable and easy to react to for opponents. Success on Paige relies on your fundamentals, awareness and instincts, not on mechanical skill or pulling off slick outplays. She's also quite numbers dependent, you need to maintain consistent eco and avoid pointless deaths because the strength of your utility (especially heals and shields) directly depends on how much cash you're bringing in. As such Paige is a solid choice for people looking to have a dependable support option with low-stakes gameplay and a lot of room to optimise fundamental skills. I should also note she currently has a very strong and obnoxious gun build.
Ivy:

Ivy is a counter-point to Paige. **She is a more proactive support pick with great playmaking potential ** and di