Deadlock: A no assumptions beginner's guide for the true beginner. For noobs…

Steam Community guide by TaterD01.

Intro

I don't have many hours in deadlock, but I love this game! However, my first couple hours playing were very rough. There was a lot going on, and I was lost in the sauce. I tried to watch and read other beginner's guides, but most of them weren’t very beginner friendly, and assumed that I already had knowledge which I didn’t have.
I now have learned a lot more, and I’m improving quickly at the game. I wondered if other people are in the same situation I was starting out. I figured I would write a super simple guide for the true beginners. Who better to write a beginners guide for noobs than a noob!
Let’s jump into it and take your first baby steps together.

Choose your character!

In each game of deadlock you’ll play as one of the game's many characters and fight with them! Each character has a unique gun. Each character can tap Q to do a quick melee strike, hold Q to heavy melee, and tap F to parry an enemy's melee strike, which stuns them if timed right. Each character also has four unique abilities; three normal abilities, and a fourth one that is an “ultimate” ability and is often more powerful.
Each character and their abilities tend to lend themselves to a certain playstyle. Some characters don’t die easily and like to get up in the enemies face to fight them. Other characters are good at stunning enemies and healing teammates, so while they don’t do much damage themselves, they help their teammates make the big plays. Some characters do a lot of damage from far away. Some characters do a lot of damage from up close. Some characters are best in long drawn out fights, some characters are best in short bursty fights. No matter your desired playstyle, there’s a character for you!
But maybe you don't know what your playstyle is! I got you covered:
Want to do lots of damage shooting enemies?
Play Haze or Wraith!
Want to do lots of damage with your abilities?
Play Seven, Ivy, or Lady Geist!
Like the idea of supporting your teammates?
Play Paige or McGinnis!
Want to get up in their face and be big and scary?
Try Abrams, Mo and Krill, or Victor!
Find a character that looks super dope?
Try them out! It’s not that deep!
Try to find three characters who you are interested in trying. Then, you’ll need to start a game. I recommend starting with an easy difficulty bot game. That way you can learn the basics with no stress, as you just fight against AI characters.
When you start a game, you’ll need to pick three characters from the roster. The game will then assign you one of the three to play. You can right click in the roster screen to make a certain character higher priority, this way you’re more likely to get assigned them.
Don’t stress over picking your character! You can switch which characters you want to play every game so there is no need to overthink. Just pick somebody and give them a shot. Worse comes to worse, you learned you don’t like them and you never have to play them again.

What am I supposed to be doing and how do I win?

In Deadlock, you and your five teammates serve a big boss guy, called a patron. Your patron wants to perform “the ritual,” which probably makes them become super powerful and take over the world or whatever, not important. Problem is, they can’t perform the ritual yet because there’s another patron getting in the way. This patron also has a team of six serving them, and trying to help them complete the ritual. The patrons are called the Hidden King and the Archmother, and they hate each other. Each game, you’ll be assigned to one of the patron's teams and your patron sends you out in a head to head against the other patron’s team. The goal: destroy the other team’s patron. Whichever team does this first, wins.
Each patron is located on the opposite side of the map or arena. The map is called “the cursed apple”: a section of south Manhattan but it’s all witchy styled. The patron's location serves as your team’s base. There are three “lanes,” or streets, connecting the bases: York Avenue (the yellow one), Broadway Street (the Blue One), and Park Avenue (the green one, which is for some reason sometimes called Greenwich 🤷‍). Having control over these lanes is key to being able to defeat the enemy patron.
To help you attack and defend the lanes, the patron sends “waves” or groups of “troopers” every couple seconds down each lane. Troopers are little minion guys that do damage and try to push out and take ground in the lane they’re assigned to. Killing enemy troopers and helping your troopers push down the lanes and toward the enemy base is key to winning the game. More on troopers later.
Additionally, each patron has placed defenses in each lane to slow enemy pushes.
First, there’s the guardian, then the warden, then a pair of guardians. These defenses are found in each lane. In order to gain access to the enemies base, and therefore a shot at destroying their patron, you’ll need to destroy all these defenses in at least one lane. Additionally, you’ll need to destroy both shrines, which are located in the enemy base, before the patron can take damage. These defensive structures are often referred to as objectives, and will be referred to as such for the rest of this guide.
Throughout the game, you’ll be trading kills, and taking ground in the lanes back-and-forth trying to gain access to and then destroy the other team’s patron.

Souls and Items: the key to winning fights

Remember this: deadlock is a finance game disguised as a fighting game.
Throughout the game, you’ll earn a currency called “souls.” Souls can be spent on “items” at “curiosity shops,” which are scattered throughout the map. Items can be extremely powerful. The team that earns souls most efficiently will have the ability to buy better or more items. The team with better or more items will almost always win a fight. It doesn’t matter how good you are at fighting, if the enemy has more items than you they’ll do more damage, have more health, and even have access to specific additional abilities, all of which will give them a massive advantage against you. If you want to win a game of deadlock you need to make more souls than the other team.
How do I earn souls?
The main way, and really the only way you need to worry about as a beginner, is by killing the enemy troopers. That’s right, those little minions that mindlessly walk down each lane. Each trooper contains a certain amount of souls. Upon killing them with a melee attack you’ll gain all the souls instantly. Upon killing them with a gun you’ll gain a portion of the souls instantly, and the other portion of the souls will float out of their body in a little orb. You’ll need to shoot this orb gain the full soul amount. Enemies can steal that portion of your souls by shooting that orb before you do. Likewise, you can steal a portion of their souls by shooting the orbs from your troopers. You don’t need to worry about this too much, though. Just kill troopers, shoot the orbs when you can, and get your money up.
You can also earn souls by:

• getting kills on enemies or assisting kills (nice)
• destroying objectives (if you can destroy one, do it! If you can’t, don’t force it)
• punching the random boxes that are around and getting the souls which are sometimes inside of them (if you come across some, great! But don’t worry about going to look for them)
• Killing the random alien guys, called Denizens, that show up between the lanes here and there (for now, don’t worry about this unless you have nothing else going on. You should focus on killing troopers.)
• punching the “Sinner’s Sacrifice" machines that show up sometimes (again, focus on killing troopers for now)
• successfully delivering the soul urn (for now, don’t worry about this)All of these methods are more complicated, and often less efficient than just killing troopers. Later on, there’s lots of helpful YouTube videos you could watch to help you get these down. But for now, keep it simple and use the magic formula:
  Magic formula:
  Kill troopers = souls = items = win fights = win games
  What items do I buy?
  The answer to this question can get pretty complicated. But this is a beginners guide, so here’s the easiest answer:
  When you are at the curiosity shop, in the blue menu, in the top right corner, there is a “browse builds” button. Clicking this button will show you the most popular “builds,” or combination of items, for your character. Go to the public tab and just click on the top build. This will load the most popular build for your character. Now the blue tab will just straight up tell you which items to buy. By the “early” or “core” items first, and the “late” items later, usually left to right. You can try this out in the lobby before you’re even in a game!
  Still have more questions about items? Here’s a couple of useful tips:
• Read what the items do. When you buy an item, you’ll want to know how it’s actually helping you, so read what it does when you buy it.
• Most items are passive, which means they do whatever they do automatically, and you don’t have to worry about it. Some items, though, are active. This means you’ll have to press a button (usually Z or X, you’ll see it at the bottom of your screen by your abilities) to make them do whatever they do. While these are often really powerful, if that sounds like too much to worry about, then just buy the passive items. You can tell if it’s passive or active by reading its description.
• There are two damage types in deadlock. Bullet damage is orange colored and caused by bullets and melee attacks. Spirit damage is purple colored and is caused by abilities. There are some exceptions to this (guns that do spirit damage or abilities that do bullet damage) but this is the rule of thumb.
• If you feel like your gun or your melee doesn’t do much damage, needs more range, shoots too slow, or doesn’t have a big enough mag, orange items make your gun or your melees better
• If you feel like your abilities don’t do much damage, are too small, don’t last long enough, or take forever to be usable again after you use them, purple items make your abilities better
• If you feel like you’re dying because you don’t have a lot of health, the enemies do too much damage, you can’t move around enough, or you keep getting stunned, green items help you survive
• Items are sorted into four tiers based on cost and power. Tier one items cost 800, where tier 4 items cost 6400 souls. Unless your build specifically tells you to, there’s no real reason to save money early game for a higher tier expensive item. Buying the cheaper items will make it easier to make more money, which will in turn make it easier to buy the expensive item.
• After you die, if you look on the right side of your screen while waiting to respawn, it will tell you how much damage you took from specific sources. If you’re noticing that you’re taking mostly purple spirit damage or mostly orange bullet damage every time you die, it might be worth it to buy a green item that specifically gives you “resist” against that kind of damage.
  If this is starting to feel complicated, just follow that premade build you loaded. You can learn the rest later.
  

Basic Strategy and Tips

Your mini map is your best friend and you should check in with them often, like every 30 seconds. I literally want you to check your minimap every 30 seconds.
Not sure where to go? Check your mini map! You probably should go where to whichever lane is pushed in closest to your base.
If someone on your team can see an enemy, they show up on your mini map. So, check your mini map. If you can only see two or three enemies you should be asking yourself: where might the other enemies be?
If you’re pushed up pretty far away from your base check your mini map! If there are enemies you don’t see on there, they are probably coming to kill you. You should run. Now.
Maybe you checked your mini map and there’s one or two teammates surrounded by three or four bad guys. They probably need help. Unless you have an opportunity to get a ton of souls somewhere else, you should probably go there and help.
It’s been 30 seconds. Have you checked your mini map?
Taking objectives is essential to gaining control of a lane, pushing into the enemy base, and winning the game. But it can go bad if you’re not careful
make sure you stand behind your troopers so the objective targets the troopers and not you. If there’s no troopers in front of you, that’s a problem, go find some troopers to get in front of you.
If you attack an enemy while in range of an objective, it will immediately target you, so don’t do that unless you’re able to quickly get the kill and quickly get out of the ink’s range.
If the warden, shrine, or patron looks like it’s charging up an attack, that’s because it is. Don’t get hit by it!
If you target an enemy while in range of enemy troopers all of them turn and start attacking you, and they lowkey do a lot of damage, especially early in the game. Watch out for that!
If you’ve killed all the enemy troopers in the lane you’re in, that’s a good time to try to head to a shop to buy an item. Try not to leave your lane to go buy an item when there are troopers available to kill.
One of the enemy troopers will be holding a flag. Kill that guy, and he drops a health pack, which heals you.
Low on health? You can ride the zip line back to base where you can buy items and heal to full. You only want to do this if you’re really low though, as you can passively heal by just killing waves of troopers.
At the very start of the game, you’ll be assigned to one of the three lanes. A teammate will go with you. Rule of thumb: stay in or around that lane until you’ve destroyed the first objective (the guardian) in that lane. Then you can go explore or help push a different lane.
For the first five minutes, enemies won’t do too much damage. You obviously don’t just wanna stand in the line of fire and die, but don’t let them scare you off from getting as many troopers as you can. That should be your focus.
Melee tips:
Tap Q to do a quick melee
Hold Q to do a heavy melee that has more range and does more damage
Tap F to perform a parry. Parrying right before an enemy melees you will stun them. While stunned they take extra damage.
Many characters kind of revolve around melee rather than shooting. You’ll want to know how to parry these characters when they get close to you. Try to avoid getting parried yourself if you’re one of these characters. Don't be predictable!
Don't play scared. It’s easy to just hide and play passive when you’re new, but you’ll learn slower that way. Go get in there and make a mistake.
Mute the chat. The other players won’t say anything helpful over the mic or in the text chat, trust me. Do yourself a favor and mute it.
Now go and WIN!