Master Deadlock Builds: Adapt to Win, Not Just Max DPS

Remember that time you were playing Risk of Rain or Binding of Isaac or Hades or whatever flavor rogike of the month and

you hit Giga Perfect DPS build and you did a billion damage and everything died immediately. Deadlock isn't that game.

And if you think it is, you're going to lose more games than you should. I mean, sure, we've all had that game where we

buy 12 gun items, absolutely dunk on the enemies. But if you get those same gun items and do this in all your games,

you're going to find yourself getting hard stuck at some point, unable to rank up any further. It doesn't matter how

many YouTuber builds you follow, you'll find yourself dying, unable to kill their team, and having limited impact in

games. And you won't know why. Why is this character so horrendous? Why am I doing no damage? What can I even do in

that situation? Here's the answer. You're building items wrong. To summarize this whole video in one

sentence, you need to build to win the game and not build the best version of your character. It doesn't matter how

much damage you do to the test dummy if it won't win you an actual game. To elaborate on this a little further, I'm

not saying that builds are bad. Everyone uses builds to get an idea of how to itemize towards a character's strengths.

For example, almost every haze build will have burst fire and bullet life steal. Dynamo will usually have arcane

surge abs with some melee items. But one of the most important things in Deadlock is knowing when to venture outside of

the build. No two games are alike, so why should your builds be? You need to find a balance between playing to your

character strengths and dealing with anything the enemy team throws at you. To do this, you need to understand the

state of the game. You shouldn't be blindly following the build, but rather thinking about two things. What stops

you from playing your game, and how do you stop the enemy from playing their game? Usually, the things that will stop

you from playing a straightforward game are CC and high damage. If you're dead or running back to the base to heal,

you're not playing the game. truly doesn't matter how much DPS you do if you're not around to use it. You're not

farming, you're not pushing or fighting, you're only getting further behind with each death. On average, you'll make

around 1,000 souls per minute. So, if buying a 1,600 soul item stopped you from dying twice, you've actually made a

profit. So, to fix this, you'll need to compromise your giga DPS build somewhere. Think about what you're dying

to, or will possibly die to if you're a smart cookie and can think ahead. There's options at different tiers for

both spirit and board damage, which is the most appropriate for the situation. I don't want to go into huge detail on

all of the items. The focal point is that you should know when to variate from a preset build and why it's

important that you're able to independently recognize this. There's a lot of ways to build resistance in the

game. Some will come naturally on items you'll normally build, as well as the dedicated resist items. Think battle

vest and enchanters emblem at tier two and the obvious bullet and spirit resilience at tier three. Think about

your options outside of the straight resist items too. Restorative locket can instantly give you a massive chunk of

HP. You can use it to bait enemies in. And the bullet and spirit shields are great for low HP characters. Warp zone

gives you good mobility to both initiate and get out of fights. And the bullet resist on use is stronger than you'd

think. The tier four greens give you some pretty fun and frustrating to the enemy ways to play around damage. Plated

armor and juggernaut make gun characters miserable and spellbreaker and witch mail are both potent tools for dealing

with high spirit burst. In terms of lockdown, your defensive options are pretty straightforward. You've got the

early option of reactive barrier which will give you a bit of a buffer and actually scales really nicely with

spirit. And you've also got debuff reducer, which builds into two very strong options in debuff remover and

unstoppable. Both of which will have huge impact on keeping you alive. Unstoppable counters literally every

single stun in the game and means you get to play your game uninterrupted for 5 seconds, giving you time to dodge an

entire Dynamo singularity, waste a holidays lasso, or stop mow and krill from grabbing you. People who haven't

come from Dota seemingly haven't caught on to the fact that unstoppable is almost mandatory on hard carries. You

could be having the game of your life. You're 20 and0. Everything dies in one touch, but this doesn't actually matter.

If you get chain stunned at 45 minutes, die and you lose the game. It actually doesn't matter how much damage you were

doing for the 44 minutes leading up to it. You've essentially just thrown the game. And that loss, that's on your

head. So, now we've talked about your defensive options, how to play your game with less roadblocks. What about the

other point? How do you stop your enemy from playing their game? To go back to the point I made around souls. If you

kill an enemy at 19 minutes, they're off the map for 40 seconds. They're not making souls, and you've not only earned

some souls for getting a kill, but you've freed up some space on the map for your team to farm or take an

objective. You've cost them that 1,000 souls per minute and created a wealth disparity between the teams, hopefully

getting you closer to that ever so rewarding wind screen. To stop the enemy from playing their game, think about

what they do. It's okay to venture out of your build path to shut someone down. Remember, at the end of the day, the

only thing that matters in a game of Deadlock is which team killed the patron. I see heaps of YouTube comments

complaining that you have to buy certain things versus certain heroes, and that's kind of the point. If we all just built

the same hyperoptimized items every game, why don't we just go and play blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. To keep

things short, think about what the enemy is good at and when they'll be strong in the game. What can you do to stop that

from happening? Or at least minimize their impact. There's a few areas to think about. Do they have heavy healing?

Are they evasive? Do they cast big impact spells? Do they do insane gun damage? The good news is you can be a

pain in the ass through your itemization to every single thing that makes someone strong. I want you to shift your

mindset, find joy, not through achieving the perfect hero build in a lab, but the perfect hero build to make your

opponents absolutely miserable. Slows, stuns, silences are going to be the answer to mobility heroes like Calico,

Pocket, Yamato, Lash. Have they got big healing in the form of Shiv, Abrams, Warden? You'll want some form of

reduction. There's quite a few, so it should be fairly simple to slot somewhere into your build. So, we've

talked about how to stop this defensively for your character, but you can actually help the rest of your team

survive as well. Items such as rusted barrel, suppressor, disarming hex, and inhibitor will have a huge impact on

shutting down the enemy's damage. Now, there's a few items which you obviously shouldn't buy at times. Don't buy toxic

bullets or crippling headshot if you're not a gun character. Don't buy spirit burn on characters with no way to proc

500 spirit damage. Most of the time, there should be nothing stopping you from grabbing an item on any hero.

There's no hard limitations. If no one on your team is buying a slowing hex and the pocket keeps getting away, don't let

the idea of a perfect build get in the way of buying a counter item. To recap this entire video, you want your item

builds in Deadlock to solve problems. This means your build should almost never look the same. At the end of the

day, in terms of this defensive/offensive item split, it's usually more important

to build specific items to stay alive rather than directly counter the enemies. Remember, being alive in itself

is pressure on the map and taking souls. Even if you don't manage to perfectly counter an enemy, you're still able to

win the game by pushing better, taking better objective fights, or managing your lanes better, or even just simply

brute forcing them with damage. All of those things you cannot do while you're dead. One last tip for the video, never

ever ever ever buy trophy collector. It is by far the worst item in the game. >> Cool. Hope I've inspired you to change

your deadlock mindset. I made this video after seeing too many people on my team with absolutely no green items at 40

minutes. If you enjoyed, sub to the channel to see more and come through to Twitch. Thank you.