Mastering Deadlock: Essential Limit Testing Strategies for Improvement

Hey, I'm a midnight I've been coaching in Deadlock for over a year. And recently in my coaching sessions I was

coaching an Eternis player and I uploaded this video. Now, it is very normal for all of my videos to get

comments of what no matter what the video is. You can go to any video on my channel and there is a comment saying,

"How is this guy this rank?" of some guy who's hard stuck two ranks below. Right? The comments around that were not

unexpected, but at one point he executed to a jungle camp. And the comments around that were where I think there is

a real fundamental misunderstanding of Deadlock. I saw so many comments saying like, "I have never died to a jungle

camp." "Eternis is don't execute to a jungle camp." which this is the main comment and the reason that this whole

video happened was cuz this guy I mean I ego I just said self-report and he got rage baited for like 20 comments. And

obviously the idea that Eternis players don't execute to jungle camps is just unequivocally untrue and idiotic. I've

also got a friend who's E6, second best IV for 7, 8, 9 months at this point. Hi Docker, I'm sure you know him. I don't

know why I'm asking him his credentials. Execute to so many jungle camps. It is unreal. And the reason this is such a

common occurrence and the correct way to play Deadlock is you should be limit testing as much as possible. You are not

playing the game correctly if you are not limit testing. There was a lot of different types of limit testing, but I

think first off because this is what started this video, we're going to talk about farm. Now, there's a couple ways

to limit test in farm. We know the first one which is just can my HP manage to farm in this camp? I'm one HP. Can I

squeeze out this camp? And you should try. If you don't know, if you're like 200 HP, obviously this wouldn't be with

a tier three, but if you're 200 HP and you're trying to farm like this medium camp and you don't know if you can farm

it and not die, you should There's only one way to find out and it's doing it, so you should try. And if you die, you

just learn from that. You learn, "Okay, when I'm playing Warden and I'm like 10K souls on 200 HP, I can't min-max a

jungle camp without my shield up. I can't full farm the jungle camp without the shield up." Cuz that's something you

need to be learning and something you need to be testing and constantly limit testing. There's also the second version

of limit testing, which is can I greed this camp before the wave reaches wherever the wave reaches my tower, the

wave reaches my walker, the wave crashes into me. Can I clear this camp in time? And again, if you don't know, you should

try. You are going to make a lot of mistakes and a lot of the time you're going to do these things and they're

going to take the tower cuz you farm this too long or you're going to execute to the camp. But that's the correct way

to play Deadlock. If you watch good players, they are constantly constantly limit testing and making these mistakes.

Obviously at super high elo it gets less and less extreme. You're not really going to see someone like lose a wave to

a tower cuz they know how efficiently their character farms. You might see them be like two seconds later than they

thought they would be. And it's a lot harder to pick up unless you're like really and truly actively looking for

it. But even if they're more minute, high level players do still currently do these things and you do still see high

level players execute. Again, I've watched Hi Docker execute a thousand different times. But especially when

they are learning the game, like I'm sure you are if you clicked on this video, they were limit testing even more

because the most efficient way to improve is to limit test at every turn. The next big one is calling objectives.

I'm sure most people know that a big difference between low elo and high elo is just how much mid is called, how many

times earns are called, or just we see three on the left side, let's go split push this walker, whatever. I'm not

going to keep beating into the ground. There's only one way to learn these things, so I'll start skipping over that

part in the spiel. If you don't know, can we do this mid? Well, two of them have 15 seconds on their respawn timers,

but blue wave is shoved into us, so they have a quick zip back and we haven't been monitoring their boost timers. Try

it and if it goes wrong, just analyze why. If you need to, you can go into the VOD and look exactly why did this go

wrong. And also keep in mind every play that doesn't work doesn't mean it was fundamentally wrong. Maybe you called a

good mid. The mid was good. You had time, but your stupid page player just like ran across the map and went to buy

for like 20 seconds before coming to the fight and she showed up late and she didn't have old for region dropping or

she just wasn't there to melee the mid boss and kill it fast enough. That'll happen a lot with earn fights too where

you say you like are putting someone inside, you see a response, you know you have a player advantage on earn run.

It's still a good earn run. People just misplay the fight on a micro level. Sometimes olds can factor in this like

you're not always going to win a 5v6 if they have like lash dynamo warden old and you're out of old. So look for stuff

like that. Or just look at the fight or the call and ask, "Why did this go wrong?" and learn from it and just try

again next time. Because that's the way you can learn in 200 hours what it takes most players a thousand hours to learn.

The next major category of this is just how you build. If you're very in a head in a lane, can you afford to build two

greens very early before anything else? If I'm winning by a lot, can I afford to go just pure purple items and not build

a single green and just find out. If you're dying quickly, you need a green. If it's working out and you're just

allowed to snowball your lead, that's great. I will give general advice of you shouldn't put two pure defensive items

like resistance items before you get a lot of your major spikes cuz you still need a form of damage. And generally

when you're behind, you should be itemizing offensively and when you're behind, you should be itemizing

defensively. But just in general, trying things like, "Hey, I don't know what's happening. I'm into this super scary

Shiv Kelvin lane. Can I just go spirit shielding, get extra region, get healing right, get monster rounds and just slow

play the lane as long as humanly possible? Or do I have to start building more offensive items to survive?"

Especially when you're making a build which I do generally recommend once players hit the Oracle or Phantom

standpoints, they start if not making their own build, at least starting to modify builds they like. Just try

things. If you're like, "I don't know. Let's see if radiant region is good on Warden." Just buy it. Maybe it isn't.

Maybe it's terrible. You can check the statistics screen after. You can look at your VOD which I also might make a whole

how to self-analyze or self-VOD review yourself video. If you guys are interested in that, let me know. I'm I'm

kind I'm on the fence about making it. It seems good, but I'm not quite sure exactly how I want to go about it.

Actually, I take that back. Watch this video by Backso which is his how to self-VOD review yourself. And he's the

player who I was VOD reviewing cuz an Eternis four player, he's very good, a very good educational content creator. I

think he's very underground for his talent, his good game knowledge, all of that. And he had to the whole wave of

emissary players that happened on the last video. I just feel like I should shout him out for that and this is a

good way to work it in. And last known for this weird kind of random spontaneous, I don't really have this

scripted out and I'm just kind of talking guide, but I got reverse rage baited by an Oracle player is PvP limit

testing. Now, when you are learning a character, I recommend you run it down with them. Uh I don't mean that in like

the true run it down way, but if you're learning a character, especially in laning stage, the only way you're going

to improve micro is by limit testing. If you watch good players, there's something called a limit testing stage

whenever you're learning a new character or especially you'll see them call it that or them when they're playing a new

character, which is just when they are constantly running at the enemy and just figuring out, "Hey, can I do this?" One

way to find out. You're going to lose a lot. Ido did this on Shiv. Uh this was probably a couple weeks ago where he was

learning Shiv and I think his first 20 games on Shiv he lost 18 in a row. But now, you look at that man in Shiv

excluding today's deal and us. You look at him on Shiv in solo queue and he looks like an actual monster. And he did

in 20 games what it would have taken him in a hundred games if he kept like a 50% win rate just by playing Shiv kind of

safe and like not really limit testing or figuring things out. Again, feel the aura of this guide is the best way to

improve is just to say, "Let's figure out. Will this does this work? I don't know. Let's just try it." And again, I

especially recommend it when you're learning a character. The first 20 games or the first 10 games, you should just

be constantly limit testing no matter what the case. And then after the first 10 games when you start to get a good

handle on the micro of your character, I recommend you start limit testing more. Like you should still limit test in

laning stage probably for your first like, let's say 25, 30 games you should be limit testing really hard, but you

can tune down your mid and late game limit testing. And then after you've done that, you can start playing the

character at a more like reasonable pace. And also if you watch me play random character, for example, I think

Warden's actually good right now. I think he's just not good in Eternis because people know how to move on and

use capacitor. But if you're not Eternis, I think this character is very, very good from a solo queue standpoint.

So I've been spamming him and I just run at the enemies. I had a game my last game. It was actually I think it was two

games before this. I went one and eight on Warden cuz I was just running at the enemies and figuring stuff out. But I

walked away from that game super knowledgeable about the character. And all the knowledge I got towards the

limits and min-max of this build and what this build can and can't do and why Shiv and Kelvin is such a fundamentally

broken combo. I got all that knowledge and I just have it in future and I can use it in future much more if I just

kind of like sat under my tower and shot them cuz I was scared and threw flasks. Now again, this guide was off the cuff.

I don't even know if it's going to make eight minutes, but again, I just got reverse rage baited, so here we are. If

you like the video, you know what to do. If you want more guides like this that are just kind of like, "Hey, these are

my thoughts." I I mean I do have like a couple scripts. I had four bullet points of just what I want to talk about. You

like this very vague, I'm just going to throw this together. This video will take me an hour. I'm not even going to

like put engaging gameplay in it. I'm just ADHD around the map not even because I want the content to be better

or to look better, but because I can't like I just got to fidget. And this game is a great game to fidget in while I'm

talking. If you want more stuff like this, let me know cuz again, this is new. Maybe this will flop. Maybe it

won't. Either way, to the guy who left that comment, you are so so incredibly dumb and I need you to understand that.

Keep it real. [Music]