If you’ve been playing new Valve game Deadlock over the past week, you’ve likely run into a particularly problematic exploit. Deadlock, like all MOBAs, is a game where squeezing as much juice out of the creeps to fuel your character’s growth is essential to victory, so when players discovered a way to essentially double their soul gain it quickly became a dominant and game-breaking strategy. Fortunately, Valve has stepped in with a new Deadlock update that puts a hard block on this trick.
This Deadlock soul sharing strategy takes advantage of the way that souls, which act as both currency and experience for your character, are shared between heroes in the same lane. Essentially, by carefully timing when you kill the enemy creep waves, one player from each of the double lanes can rotate over to a solo lane and also claim the souls from that wave. That results in the two rotating characters earning double the souls they’d typically get during the early laning phase of the MOBA.
With how quickly you can turn an early lead into a snowball effect, that puts your team in the best position to roll over the opposing side before they know what’s happening. The video below from YouTuber and competitive Deadlock player ‘Deathy’ shows how his team earns a colossal 13,000 soul lead in the first ten minutes of a tournament match simply by taking advantage of this strategy.
Of course, this poses plenty of problems. Firstly, it’s a trick that is much more likely to work with team coordination, putting players who queue together at a big advantage. Secondly, it favors heroes with fast wave-clear abilities or rapid movement to quickly get between lanes, reducing the viability of any Deadlock characters who can’t do either of those things. As Deathy notes, it also feels like it dramatically hampers the “skill expression” of the early game by necessitating a very by-the-books, mechanical way of playing.
Thankfully, the Deadlock patch notes for Tuesday September 17 mean it’s no more. The update, shared by Valve developer ‘Yoshi’ to the Deadlock forum, fixes “players being able to exploit soul sharing across multiple lanes to earn more souls than intended.” The solution Valve has chosen is a simple one – “each player can only be considered for an enemy trooper death event four times per wave during the laning phase.” Past that, you simply won’t earn the souls.
It’s a straightforward but undoubtedly effective fix. Perhaps it’s a little on the strict side – it might actually make rotating or looking to pick off enemy heroes in other lanes feel a little less valuable – but Valve can always work on more nuanced solutions as it continues to develop its latest early access game. For now, this should at least resolve a problem that has been plaguing matches across the player base, and let us get back to a more fun and interesting laning phase.
The new Deadlock changelog also includes a few other fixes – one for “troopers sometimes not dying after doing their death flash state,” one for the Unstoppable state not preventing fire rate reduction, and one for broken cameras on Grey Talon’s Charge Shot and Vindicta’s Assassinate.
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