Mastering Deadlock Macro: Efficiency, Pressure & Objectives Explained

If you have ever felt lost at any point in Deadlock before, this video is for you. Today, I'm going to break down what

I consider to be the three pillars of macro and provide you with in-game examples of how to implement them so you

can gain a robust understanding of the game. I intend for this video to be as evergreen as possible. So, if you're

watching this a few months from now, it should still be mostly applicable. For those of you that don't know me, hi, I'm

Deathy. I'm a turn six deadlock player with over 3,000 hours in the game, and I focus on teaching you how to improve at

Deadlock. If you'd like to improve, make sure to subscribe to the channel. Let's get into it. Starting with the first

pillar, efficiency. For every pillar, as you'll see, I break it down into three subcategories. For efficiency, I've

chosen souls per minute, killer participation, and movement. We're going to start with souls per minute because I

believe that that's the one that people think about most when they think of efficiency. They think how many souls

can you generate in a game. Souls per minute is determined by essentially how much time you spend on the map doing the

correct things to generate souls. One thing that you'll notice if you look at someone's graph at the end of the game

and you look at souls by source in game. You'll see that they generate souls mostly from troopers. Troopers is always

the number one source of souls, which leads us to waves. You should never miss a wave and you should avoid splitting

waves with more than one other person. Now, generally speaking, there are situations where you have to split it

with multiple. for example, when you're pushing a walker or doing an important objective. But throughout the game, try

to avoid splitting waves with too many people. So avoid those situations where you have four, five, six people grouped

up in the same area, unless you're doing a major objective like the urn or a walker. As far as never missing a wave,

of course, this is a generalization, as many things in this video are, but there's not a lot of things that are

worth missing a wave for. You should always prioritize waves around other things, and you should do what we call

jungling backwards. We'll touch on that a little bit later in the video. Now, when it comes to the jungle, let's say

that you hit all the waves um and then you never miss a wave. You're not splitting them, you know, with more than

another person. So, you're being efficient in that front. Then you move on to the jungle. So, in between waves,

you should be trying to jungle. Now, of course, if you have a lead, you should always be jungling on their side. We'll

talk about that in the pressure section, but there's a general jungle hierarchy of how important certain camps are.

Sinners sacrificed are always the most important camps. Now, the reason why they're the most important is because

they give you a lot of souls. So, I believe at 8 minutes they're around 350 souls and they scale through the game.

Uh, anyone can do them, so they don't discriminate, right? For example, Infernace generally farms jungle camps a

lot faster, but when it comes to center sacrifice, whether you're playing IV, Lash, Infernace, Abrams, doesn't matter.

It's all the same. And on top of that, when you hit the jackpot, they give you four golden statue buffs, which are

extremely important. After that, the tier three camps are the basically the second best option. Sometimes they can

be the best option as well, depending on how fast you can farm them. Now, this a lot of heroes cannot do, right? So, for

example, if you're playing Abrams, you're not going to be able to do tier three camps very well, but if you're

playing BBOP, you can use your ultimate to farm them, for example. Or if you're playing Inferno or seven or even Wraith,

some of these heroes can farm them much faster. But if you're playing Lash, you're probably not going to be a whole

lot doing a whole lot of farming tier three camps. And then it's pretty much tier 2 camps, tier one camps, and boxes.

Now, one thing to note is that at this point, it doesn't really matter like the discrimination between the tier two

camps and the tier one camps. you should just do whatever is nearest in your path and always try to steal the enemy's

jungle. Uh but boxes do become way better later, right? So, one thing about boxes is the way that they scale. Um

later into the game, they actually start giving you a ton of souls. So, if you're like 30 minutes into the game, boxes are

actually really, really good. And I would put them up in the hierarchy as good as like probably tier 2 camps at

that point, right? Or maybe even higher. Finally, the last thing about getting souls is kills. Kills give you souls. Um

I see so many people that are extremely efficient with the jungle. uh they're extremely efficient with waves, but they

never turn that into kills, right? So kills become worth a lot later. Now, in the first 15 minutes of the game,

getting kills doesn't really get you that much. You've probably had that feeling of, you know, oh, you win the

lane so hard, you have five, six kills coming out of lane and then all of a sudden Wraith just goes to the jungle,

you don't see Wraith for 5 minutes and then she has more net worth than you. The reason is kills early, they're not

worth that much. But kills at 20 minutes, 25 minutes, they become worth exponentially more and they definitely

make a huge difference when you get to that point of the game. Assists also give you souls. So if you're doing both

of these things correctly, kills is the next option. Speaking of kills, kill participation is the next factor that

I've included in efficiency. The key here is you want to you want your kill participation to be as high as possible.

Right now, of course, you don't want to be sacrificing other things for your kill participation, but you do still

want it to be high. It is very important. How do you do that? The first thing is you want to play around your

spikes. I've made a whole video on power spikes. Feel free to check it out if you want a more detailed explanation, but

you always want to be active after buying, right? And it's also incredibly important to spend your money as soon as

you have it. So, part of that is farming with purpose. When you're farming, don't just farm for the sake of farming,

right? When you're doing this thing, getting the waves, getting the jungle, getting the kills, think about what is

going to be your next item. Look at your build and be like, "Okay, when I get 3,200 souls, I'm going to get toxic

bullets and then I'm going to be really strong. Oh, when I get 3200 souls, I'm going to buy Majestic Leap on Pocket and

then I can start being active for a little bit. This is the principle of power spikes. Like I said, the whole

video describes it much better than I can in a short amount of time. But always be active after buying. Always

buy right as soon as you hit enough money to buy whatever item you are saving up for. So don't hold on to like

4,000 5,000 souls in the early game. Spend it as soon as you can. And keep in mind that there's a timer to these

actions, right? So when you hit a spike, when you just spent your money, I would look to be active for about 60 seconds.

Now, the reason why I say there's a timer is because for that 60 seconds, you're probably one of the strongest

heroes in the map because you're fighting around your power spike. However, after 60 seconds, other people

will have started to spend their money on different items and you won't be nearly as strong and you'll also be

starting to get closer to your next spike, right? So, then you want to maybe dial it back a little bit, start saving

up for your next item, rinse and repeat. Sidelanes are incredibly important. Now, I've been coaching a lot of people and

one thing that I see a lot is I see a lot of AAM. For those that don't know what that is, it's all random all mid.

It's a League of Legends game mode where basically you have one lane and it's 5v5 and everybody is in that lane. Um, and

do not do this, right? That you're splitting souls. This goes against here, right? Where you don't want to be

splitting souls with too many people. You should only be doing this later in the game uh when it's going to result in

getting mid boss for example. But early on, look in smaller groups, right? make plays with one or two additional heroes

because it's going to be more beneficial from a splitting thing, but it's also going to generate more kill

opportunities when people are staring at each other in what I call the low elo kind of a staredown mid. It's literally

like you're stuck in a deadlock in the mid lane, literally where five people are just staring at each other, nothing

is happening. And I've seen this happen so often. You're going to get so many more kills and you're going to make so

many more opportunities happen if you look in the side lanes. If you look to invade the enemy jungle in those side

lanes, right, together with one or two allied heroes and just communicate with them and be like, "Hey, can we look on

this camp? I think that the wave I think that the wraith is going to look to farm here or hey, I think the wraith is about

to catch this wave. Let's look on it and kill her." Lastly, the advantage part. I talked about this already, but if you

have an advantage, avoid playing passively. I see so many people, they'll get out of the laning stage, they'll be

rich, um they'll be as a team up 10,000 souls on the enemy team, and then they'll just farm their own jungle the

whole time. Now, I think so many deadlock videos talk about this, but it's incredibly important that you

understand when you have an advantage, do not play on your side of the map for the most part. You should prioritize

playing on their side of the map because deadlock is not about having money. It's not about having souls, it's about

having more souls than they do, right? So, even if you're doing something that's not 100% efficient, as long as

it's more efficient than what they're doing, it's good. So, even if farming their jungle might give you less souls,

you're stealing their souls. meaning that the differential in souls between you and them is going to be much higher.

Lastly, efficiency is also guided by movement, right? So, you need good movement in order to be efficient around

the map. Now, recently I just released a video talking about five movement advanced movement techniques that the

pros are using. You can check it out, but I've broken it down into three things that are really, really

important. First of all is using the jump pads. Right? This one I think is obvious, but if you're a bit newer to

the game, you might not be using them enough. And even if you're not new to the game, I've coached so many people

with 600, 700 games that just don't use the jump pads as much as they should. Anytime that you're rotating somewhere,

think, is there a jump pad that I could use to get there a little bit faster? This is super, super important. Then

there's the zipline. Make sure you're using the zipline movement tech where you get off with crouch instead of jump,

right? This allows you to conserve more momentum and then just go further. Also, make sure you're using the zipline any

chance you get. If you want to get somewhere, you can probably get it faster using the zipline and then

combining that with wall jumps, which is the third thing, which is wall jumps can save you a stamina and allow you to

traverse the map much, much faster. So, there's a lot of uses for wall jumps. Obviously, this is not a movement video,

but if you do these three things, most likely your movement is going to be much more efficient. Now, one thing that I

didn't write down, but it's also about planning your moves, right? So, when you're farming, whether it's a wave or a

camp, think about where you want to go on the map next, and then think about which pathing you should take. When

you're shooting a wave or shooting a camp, you shouldn't need to use your brain power to think about how you need

to shoot the camp. Your brain should be using planning your next moves. Are you going to go to the shop to buy? Are you

going to go to this lane to defend? Are you going to go to this other area of the map to do something there? Once

you've planned that, think of how are you going to go there. Are you going to use the jump pad? Are you going to use a

zipline? Are you just going to walk there? Are you going to use a teleporter? Right? I don't talk about

teleporters here because they're much more niche, but they're a super important part of movement that you

shouldn't ignore for sure. Let's jump into some in-game examples. All right, so in this replay, we're going to look

at efficiency as well as my map movements and how I move around. Getting out of the laning stage, we have won the

lane, but not by a ton. We're about 1,000 souls up on our opponents, which are Bbop and Paradox, you know, Warden

and I. And so, as always, you'll see I'm going to apply the principles that I just talked to you about. There's the

wave right in front of me. So, I'm always going to look to catch the wave. And here I notice, okay, my warden is

not with me, right? My warden is farming the centers. So, he's also applying the principles of efficiency. And therefore,

I can't really be aggressive as I'm in a one versus two. I get gone on here, but as you can see, I'm keeping my priority

on clearing the wave. And you have to take some risks and deadlock. So, there I took the risk. I cleared the wave. And

even if I died in this situation, which I end up narrowly escaping, it would have been worth it just to clear the

wave. And as you can see, they're super aggressive. Yeah, but now they're completely out of position as the wave

is at their walker over here. So even if I died, they wouldn't have been able to accomplish much pressure off of it. And

I still got a lot of souls for clearing the wave alone. Now, as I return to my lane, I'm not going to over complicate

things, right? Some people be like, "Okay, should I be ganking? Should I be doing this other thing?" You know,

someone needs to catch this wave. My warden is focusing on doing the centers, right? Not both of us can do this. And

this is something you need to understand is based on the pillars of what is most important when it comes to efficiency.

You also need to recognize what your teammates are doing. So, I'm seeing, okay, my warden is focused on clearing

the wave. H sorry, my warden is focused on clearing the centers. So, I'm going to focus on clearing the wave so that

he's allowed to kind of farm these centers, right? And the moment that I clear the wave, I'm going to move to do

something else, which is take this fight in their jungle and take advantage of the pressure that's been created. Now, I

want it to be really, really clear in everyone's mind. The moment you clear a wave, you buy yourself time to do

whatever else you want. So, clear the wave, do something, go back to the wave, right? You don't see me sticking around

in the jungle and just, you know, doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't really matter. I'm going to the wave, I buy

cultist, instantly use it on a tier three camp, and then I notice I look at the clock and the clock in replays is

broken. So, it's about 30 seconds in advance. But, this means that the buffs are about to spawn. So, therefore, as

I'm farming, I'm thinking, okay, I want to go to the buff. Mess up my movement a little bit there. I see there's a fight

happening on the buff. Hayes actually got it right before me. If I was a little more efficient, I should have

been on the buff right away. Now, you'll see that since I'm Lash, I'm farming this tier 2 camp. And, you know, I'm not

really able to farm tier three camps, and there's no centers left on my side of the map. So, the only things left for

me to focus as per the rules that I established prior are the tier 2 camps as well as the waves. So, I'm going to

farm this tier 2 camp and then I'm going to get the wave. And once again, I'm going to focus on just not wasting any

time and catching all these waves alone. You can see that just by doing this, I'm the richest person on the lobby because

despite not having farmed any centers or not having done any tier three camps, I've caught a bunch of waves alone,

which has given me a lot of souls. Another thing you'll notice is as soon as I have enough souls, I go to buy. So

right here, I have enough souls for majestic leap. I spent all my money. I buy majestic leap as well as extra

stamina. And now I can be active for that 60-second timer, right? So I hear paradox farming this camp. I'm like I

call out to my warden. I'm like, "Hey, we can go on this Paradox. I mess up my movement really bad there. Don't look.

But you know, at the end of the day, execution sometimes is not quite there. But the idea is correct. I the paradox

and we should be able to take her out as she is one HP. My warden does end up clearing her up. I get hooked into the

walker and I think I'm going to end up dying here. I actually can't remember. I think I actually do escape, you know,

due to some good movement there. But, you know, a lot of things went wrong there, right? I got hooked. I actually

messed up my execution on the paradox. But the idea was correct. I buy. I look to get a kill and punish them. I heard

paradox farming. I go to paradox on top of the camp to punish her. The second pillar is pressure. Now, I've talked to

a lot of people that are very efficient. I look at 20 minutes and they'll have, you know, 27 28,000 souls, but I look at

their damage and I'm like, that's some pretty low damage numbers. Now, if that's you, then you definitely need to

focus on this pillar. And I think that if you're, you know, between the ranks of archon to ascendant, this is probably

the main mistake that you're making is you're not applying enough pressure if you have a lead or if you're in a

winning position. Now, how do you apply pressure? I break it down into three categories. Waves apply pressure, but in

a different way from efficiency. For the sake of efficiency, you want to push waves, but as you can see, they're also

important for pressure. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. You also need to contest, right? What that means

is, you know, it's it's a multiplayer game. There's enemies on the enemy team and you need to contest them. You need

to fight them, but you need to determine which one should you fight, when should you fight them, how do you fight them,

and you know like where on the map should you fight them as well. And then the third part is stealing, right? So

pressuring them is taking things away from them. Whether that's positioning on the map, whether that's the jungle,

whether that's, you know, their unsecured souls, whether that's the buffs, the earn, whatever, it doesn't

matter. But you need to steal from them. Starting with the waves, we already covered pushing the wave, right? But

what I would recommend further in order to apply pressure is try to push until you start dying. So too many people are

afraid of dying in deadlock. But not all deaths are bad deaths. If you clear a wave and you die, as I covered in the

previous example, it's not always bad. In fact, if you clear a wave and you die, they usually can't push your

objective cuz they don't have a wave for at least 30 to 45 seconds. And early game, the death timers are not that

punishing um because the game wants to incentivize you to try to make plays and try to make things happen on the map. It

doesn't want to give you a 60-second death timer for just trying to make something happen when it's 15 minutes

into the game. Once you start dying consistently pushing waves, you're probably being too aggressive. So, dial

it back a little bit. But one thing a lot of people don't teach in their videos is you have to die in order to

learn. It's called limit testing. If you don't push your luck, if you don't go further than you think you can, you're

never going to learn what the limit is, especially for your rank. The limit of how far I can push a wave, it's not

going to be the same for you. I'm in an Eternus lobby. You're in whatever your rank is, right? And per rank against the

opponents, how good they are, what heroes they're playing. So many different factors. And the only way you

can learn this is through repetition. When it comes to jungle pressure, prioritize jungling backwards. So many

times I see people that are like, "Okay, they're going to respect the first criteria, which is never miss a wave."

They're going to be like, "Oh, I have time to farm this jungle camp, and I'm still not going to miss the wave. I'm

going to be able to make it there in time." And while this respects the criteria of efficiency, it doesn't

respect the criteria of pressure because you want to be creating problems the enemy team has to deal with, then you

want to do the safe option, right? So, always do the riskiest thing first if you can help it. Push the wave as far as

you can. Go that one more wave as I say here, and then jungle backwards, right? So, jungle backwards on the map. Now,

one more wave is incredibly important because a lot of the time what I'll see is someone will push a wave, then

they'll mess around for a little bit in the area for 10, 15 seconds, and then they'll rotate. Now, the problem is you

have to clear the wave right before rotating somewhere else because the moment that you rotate, you're

essentially giving up pressure on that side of the map. So, if you clear a wave and then rotate right away, that will

create a huge amount of difference in the amount of pressure that you're doing because it's going to make it so they

can't apply counter pressure. And it's also going to make it so one of their heroes feels like they have to stay in

that lane to deal with the pressure that you're putting on, making it so you're more likely to get a numbers advantage

somewhere else on the map in a fight or in a gank or in a pressure or whatever it may be. Clearing wave buys you

roughly 45 seconds on the map. Right? This is not an exact science, but just keep that in mind. You can't leave your

lane for too long unless you're going for objectives or unless somebody else can take your lane. If you do end up

leaving your lane for a long time for whatever reason, try to ask one of your teammates to take it over. Now, when it

comes to contesting the enemies, there's a couple things that are important. I broke it down into three: matchup,

items, and rotations. So, matchups is thinking about who you're fighting. So, let's say you're stuck in a side lane in

a one versus one against a specific hero. Um, what items do you need to fight them? Are you in a winning

matchup? Are you in a losing matchup? For example, let's think of the fact that I'm Lash and I'm stuck against a

um, for example, Wraith or Drifter in a 1v one or even Ladygeist, right? These heroes in a fair 1v one will beat me.

However, if I go for slams every wave with my majestic leap, for example, I just use majestic leap. I use my ground

strike and then I back up. I'll deal a good amount of burst damage and I'll win that trade. Now, if I do that enough

times, eventually I'll win. But I need to make sure that I don't go in extended trades against them because I'm going to

lose that every time. Generally, I would consider these to not be an ideal situation for Lash. So, I would consider

it to be losing. So, I would ask swap. I'd be like, "Hey guys, I'm not really happy in the lane that I'm in right now.

Could somebody else take it over?" You know, maybe you have a teammate that has a better match up against that hero or

you have a teammate that wants to farm while you don't want to farm. You want to be active. So, ask to swap. Put

yourself in the situation where you can succeed. If you're winning, make sure to put pressure on them. If I'm playing

Yamato and I'm against Wraith and we're even net worth or I'm even higher net worth, right, I'm going to go

aggressive. However, if you're Yamato versus Wraith, it's a perfect example of, hey, you might need specific items

in order to win this 1 v one. One of those items might be counter spell because Wraith's only scary because of

her ult in the 1v one because she's going to silence you and then you're not going to be able to ult Yamato and

that's a problem. However, if you have counter spell, you can mostly negate that, right? So, if you have counter

spell, you can counter spell her ultimate, fight her, and you should have the edge. So, think about how to itemize

in these 1v ones, right? This is the example. will buy a counter spell against Wraith, but there's plenty of

other examples. You're playing against Mirage and you want to kill him by slowing Hex. Slows him for 3.5 seconds.

He can't use tornado, which is what he'll think he can use to dodge your abilities. You might be playing Lash,

which is a hero that I know the best. If you want to look to ultimate a mirage, well, you need either silence wave or

slowing hex because otherwise he's going to dodge it with his tornado. But if you go on him right as you bought the

counter item, he's not going to expect you to have that, right? So, make sure you're itemizing for the 1 v one if

you're stuck in a 1 v one or if you're trying to kill specific people. And lastly, it's rotations. Try to match the

heroes you know you can pressure. Try to think, hey, which heroes do I do the best against in this game and just try

to be where they are on the map so you can pressure them because it's a good matchup for you. Now, you can also take

souls into account, right? If you have a lot more souls in a hero, perhaps you want to try to be there. Or let's say

that you're the richest in the lobby and you see, okay, their wraith is starting to get a lot of money. She's going to

start to become a problem. Perhaps you want to try to match her because you're the strongest in the lobby and you need

to shut her down. Now, lastly, there's stealing. You want to steal the jungle. I think I've talked about this a decent

amount. Stealing centers is massive value because the thing to understand about stealing jungle, right? Is let's

say you take a sinners and the sinners is worth, you know, 350 souls, right? So, it's plus 350 souls. Except if you

actually steal the sinners, not only is it plus 350 souls, it's actually minus 350 souls from them, right? which means

that overall, and this is kind of the principle of trading in Deadlock in general, is that overall it ends up

being a 700 soul like difference, right? And that's what you want. You want to create a difference between the teams.

You don't want to do what gives you the most souls. You want to do what gives you the most souls and them the least

souls, right? So, stealing centers on their side of the map is a 700 soul difference. Taking your own centers is

really only 350 souls cuz they weren't going to take it unless they were about to steal it. Now, there's other, you

know, differences we can get into, but this is the general idea. Positioning in shooters, a lot of the time, positioning

is key. In MOBAs, it's no different. When you have an advantage, you want to play on their side of the map as much as

you can. Anytime you have an advantage and you're playing on your own side of the map, you're giving up an opportunity

to take something away from them. You want to slowly feel like they're getting suffocated on the map, right? You don't

want to give them any room to breathe. You don't want to let them grab positioning. You don't want to let them

get information. You want them to feel like if they go too far away from their walkers, they will get punished for

doing so. And lastly, try to predict them. In the previous example, I showed myself going where the Paradox was

farming. This is a perfect example of like, hey, what is Paradox going to do in this situation? What is the next camp

that she's going to farm? What would you do if you were them? Go where you would go if you were them and either contest

them on what they're doing or steal it, right? Try to predict what they want. Now, this is a good example of pressure.

right here. We've just cleared the left lane right here. And now I'm rotating over to the mid lane in order to take a

numbers advantage fight. So I know that it's likely for us to have a numbers advantage because we just cleared the

left lane which creates pressure on the map, right? And that's always about kind of like that buying you 45 seconds on

the map that I talked about. And then I go mid here in order to take a fight where we should have an advantage. I go

on the great Talon. We do a decent amount of pressure. We end up getting the kill. And as you can see, people are

responding to the wave on the left side. So I see, okay, there's two people on the left side responding to my warden,

but this pressure from them doesn't really do as much because they haven't cleared the wave, right? So they're

chasing warden, and that's great, but we're not really too worried about it yet. Now, warden does end up going down,

and then that means that we have to deal with the wave after. I see that there's people, so I end up making sure to

rotate. And this is what it comes to kill participation, right? You want to make sure to kind of like be efficient

on the map and stay involved in these fights and take the fights when you have wave advantage, you have numbers

advantage, and you know, be in the situations that you want to be. Now, as Lash, this is exactly the situation that

I want to be in because I want to be moving around the map, staying active. I don't want to be stuck in a side lane 1

v oneing someone. So, I let my warden do that. And then I moved between the mid lane and the left lane, creating

pressure on both lanes. And as you can see, I haven't played on my side of the map at all through this entire clip

because we're ahead of them right now. The only reason that I would go on my side of the map is if something else

that I need to do, like for example, we've taken all of their objectives. There's nothing left on their side, then

I would go back. Now, here I make arguably a risky play. However, I ask my pocket I'm going to pause. I ask my

pocket to take over the left lane in this situation and IV to take over the mid lane. The reasoning here,

technically I could have pushed the left lane, right? But I wanted to make a risky play, which is use my newly

acquired power spikes, especially the cool down, and take a fight on the right side because one, I don't think they

would have expected it because I use the teleporter to move across the map very quickly. And two, I'm very, very strong,

right? I'm the richest person in the lobby. I'm at 16k and nobody else is really that close. And so I want to use

that lead to take an objective. And taking the walker, I think, is what we want at this point to get an extra flex

slot. And I think the right walker is the one that I'm most likely to get because they're not going to expect me

on that side of the map. So I ask, "Hey Pocket, can you take the left lane? Ivy, can you take the mid lane?" And then I

go over to the other side. Now, of course, in your games, it's not going to be as easy to ask people to take lanes

because they're not going to listen to you or they're not going to understand the importance of it. But that's still

the theory. Now, moving here, I actually kind of like mess up my movement pretty significantly. I get caught in this kind

of like weird 1v one with the haze where, you know, I'm fighting her, but this is not really that beneficial to me

because she's Haze. She's going to ult me and you know this is this is a little bit awkward but we have so many people

here that we should be able to clean this up. Um unfortunately now I see okay we're not getting the walker. So I

rotate back over to mid. The play doesn't work. I think it should have worked definitely. Uh but unfortunately

we misplayed it right. So that means that right away I'm using my cultist and I just go back to mid in order to deal

with that. And I want to try to keep you know stay active on the map always be doing something not wasting time. So

here I'm just going to try to the BB bop. I mess up, right? I'm showing you guys the mistakes as well as the

successes. But that was kind of the idea of the play and that's what you guys should be looking to do in your games as

well. This brings us to the last pillar of macro and arguably the most important one, objectives. Now, I don't talk about

guardians here because I assume everybody already knows that you need to take the guardians in order to further

the game. I talk and said about the objectives that I think are either the most misunderstood or some of the most

important in the game which are walkers mid boss and the earn/buffs. All right, so let's start with walkers.

Now the first thing I said about walkers is die. I want to you know make sure that it's clear that it's die in game.

Um now I say seriously these objectives are worth dying for in game as long as it's before 20 minutes. Now you want to

make sure that you're not giving them free kills all the time, right? Right? So, you want to make sure that you don't

just sacrifice yourself over and over for these walkers. But if it's before 20 minutes and you trade your life for a

walker, that's worth it. So, I see so many times people that are so close to getting the walker and they just start

running away and then they end up dying anyway. So, just take the risk and, you know, just as long as you get the

walker, it's okay. Don't be afraid of sacrificing your life for it. Now, the 15-minute mark is an important one for

walkers. I would say generally before the 15-minute mark, it's going to be difficult to get a walker. Now, I want

to make sure that this is also dependent on the skill level and the region that you play in. Now, in Europe, I see

walkers dying before 15 minutes much more often because people are more active on average. And this is also

given, you know, higher ranked games. However, if you're in lower rank games before 15 minutes, don't try to go for

walkers too much. Understand that you're going to be better off just stealing their jungle or doing other things

because they're very difficult to pressure before 15 minutes. you can if you have a big lead, but be very very

careful because you know they have a lot of resistances and Walker's resistance decreases throughout the game. Um, so

you just want to be careful going for them too early. And the last thing is be aware that they give resistance to their

allies. A lot of people don't know this, but if you are near your own walker, right, you'll get an aura and that aura

gives you 15% bullet and 15% spirit resistance. Now, the value of 15% bullet and 15% spirit is roughly 1,600 per,

which means that essentially the people defending a walker have an bonus 3200 souls because it's kind of like if they

had battle vest and enchanter emblem while defending the walker. Now, it's not quite as strong as that. So, you

could round it down and be like, okay, they have a bonus 2,000 souls, but they still have a lead. So, if it's an even

fight, even souls and everything, they have a significant advantage being near their walker. So, to be careful about

that. Let's talk about mid boss, which is the win condition, right? Mid boss is how games are won. This is extremely

important to understand. If you don't get mid boss, it's going to be way harder to win the game. It's the best

way to finish games. If you ever have a lead that is higher than 10,000 souls, the next fight you win, you should go

mid boss. Now, this is time to an extent. If you want if you want a mid boss before 15 minutes, you can, but it

requires a lot of coordination and a lot of damage. So, in your average matchmaking game, it's probably not

realistic. So, I would say the 15-inute timer applies also to mid boss where before 15 minutes, it's going to be

very, very unrealistic to do mid boss in most matchmaking games. In pro games, sometimes you'll see mid bosses as early

as 12 or 13 minutes. But this is not going to happen in your matchmaking games. The moment you win a fight, if

you have a 10k lead, be like, "Hey guys, let's go mid boss." Or even better, if you want to communicate to your team,

let them know, "Hey guys, next time we win a fight, let's go mid boss." talk about it before the fight even happens

so that everyone is mentally ready to just go mid boss the moment the fight is won or the moment you get one or two

kills as far as contesting mid boss since mid boss is the best way to win the game right you have to kind of make

sure that your opponent doesn't get mid boss for free if you can help it so early it's worth to contest mid boss

even if you just steal one rejove if it's early enough right so if you take a team fight on the mid boss if you have a

decent chance of winning that team fight it's worth it even if you end up losing it as long as you don't lose too bad so

for example let's say that you kill three of them and you lose four or five people, the respawn timers are still

quite early, uh quite short if you're early, let's say 15 to 20 minutes, and so it's worth it because you'll at least

take out all of their reju buffs, which will make sure they don't have a huge advantage for the next couple of

minutes. I see too many people giving mid boss for free and saying, "Hey, ever since the mid boss changed, it's not

worth to contest anymore." That's not true in my opinion. Of course, you shouldn't force it. It's not over,

especially if they get the first mid boss. Uh, but if it's second or third mid boss, usually you kind of have to

contest it cuz if they get it, it's probably just game over anyway. And lastly, securing it is very important.

If you ever call mid or want to go mid, think of the ultimates and abilities that can secure or steal. So, if you're

the team doing mid, try to think, okay, which ultimates do they have or which ultimates do they not have that can

steal it, and what do we have to secure it? For example, oh, okay, we have a Yamato and Dynamo on our team. So,

Dynamo can use Black Hole on top of it to kind of like secure it. And uh they don't Oh, but they have lash. So, oh,

Lash is going to be able to hold the dynamo away and cancel his black hole. But it's okay because we have Yamato who

can dodge Lashalt with unstoppable. Or hey, we have Haze who can sleep dagger the Lash. So, understand what your role

is in the mid boss pit. Try to think, do I have any abilities to secure or do I have any abilities to steal? Now, last

but not least are the earn/buffs. There's the timers. So, pay attention to the clock. Okay, at lower ranks, if

you're on time, it's a free objective. That's one thing that I want to make clear is pay attention to the clock. And

if you want to go even further and you can combine certain pillars, if you pay attention to the clock, this can dictate

some of your actions. So let's say that the clock shows 1430. Now you can be like, "Oh, buffs and earn are spawning

in 30 seconds." Now, this means that I we should push the waves as much as we can. So if it's 1430 and you're jungling

in your own jungle, right? Not being aggressive, you're essentially giving up these objectives. Whereas, if you're the

team and you know, hey, buffs are spawning in 30 seconds, push every wave that you can as aggressively to create

pressure on the entire map and then go to the buffs as soon as they spawn. And a lot of the time you'll get them for

free. The community is still not very good at getting these on time, even at very high levels. Now, when you get to a

turn of six lobbies, people are pretty good at being on time, but I would say anything below high atus, people are not

on time that often to these objectives. Now, I want to talk about earn and buff specifically. These give a massive

advantage and are forced fight opportunities. What I mean by that is that if the enemy doesn't fight you over

these and you just get you just get them for free, you gain a huge advantage. So if you're ahead, these are incredible

because they allow you to one further your lead and two, if the enemy contests you on them, they give you an

opportunity to fight. Now what do you do if you're behind, right? Because obviously you don't want to give them up

for free, but you also don't necessarily want to fight them just mindlessly. What you can do if you're behind is try to

predict where the enemy is going to be. So a lot of the time they're going to try to stack people on one side of the

map or the other and be like, "Okay, we're strong, so we want to pick up the earn." If you know the enemy wants to

pick up the earn, play on the other side of the map and look for a pick there in order to get back into the game. You can

use this to your advantage even when you're behind by trying to do the opposite of what the enemy team wants

you to do. Last but not least, deny slashcounter. Earn souls can be denied for up to 40% of the value of the earn.

So, when someone is doing the earn and you're like, "Okay, we can't contest it." If you can be on a rooftop nearby

and you can just shoot some souls to deny it, you can get up to 40% of the value of the earn. So, if you manage to

do this and you manage to deny every single soul, it's actually really not even that big of a deal that they got

the earn because they're not going to get that many more souls than you did anyway. Now, the other thing about

counter, right, is always look for counterplay. So if you know that you can't get you can't contest the earn for

whatever reason, the moment they pick up the earn, do not do your own jungle. You should look to be like, okay, can we

push a walker on the other side of the map? Can we pressure? Can we steal a little bit of their jungle, right?

Always look for something that you can do in exchange. Don't just give up things for free and understand that, you

know, there's an eb and flow to the game of deadlock where if they take something, you can take something in

return. And it's not like, oh, we can't contest the earn, therefore we're going to lose. How people lose is that the

enemy team will pick up the earn, they'll go to the drop off and while they're doing that, you'll just be AFK

doing nothing, accomplishing nothing on the map, putting no pressure, doing no other objectives in exchange, and

therefore they just get a free lead. Now, in this situation, once again, the clock and replays is bugged. So, the

objectives haven't spawned yet, but they're about to spawn in 10 seconds. So, I head over to the left lane. We see

we've already put a lot of pressure in the middle lane. I'm going over to the left lane, and I'm going to do this

thing called cutting the wave. Now, there's another term for it in League of Legends terms that I don't remember, but

cutting the wave is the term that I use from Dota. And essentially, I kill the wave as it gets there. And this creates

more pressure on the left lane, meaning my team can easily get the left buff, right? Because we had the mid lane

pushed in and the left lane pushing. So, we were able to get the left buff. Now, we see with this lane pushing, we go

towards the walker and we've got an advantage here of 3v2. So, we decide, hey, let's push the walker. We kill the

paradox and now we're pretty confident that we can get this walker. And at this point, you know, we have to fight them

cuz there's at least two of them. But I'm happy to die for this walker if need be. Now, of course, I'm not going to

just go in and, you know, feed for the walker. But, as you can see, I'm also not going to leave when the walker's one

HP, right? If I need to die, I would have. Now, the moment I get the objective, this is something that I

didn't say necessarily on the whiteboard, but when you get the objective, don't overstay your welcome,

right? We got the objectives, we all back up, and we reset. Now, this is another example where I went to the

other side of the map and I asked Pocket to take over the lane and we got the first walker and I want to keep keep the

pressure up, right? Because we're up 14k. So, I'm like, "All right, I want to get another walker." Now, unfortunately,

I go for the lash. I get counterpelled, but I'm still putting a lot of pressure. We have a lot of damage on this walker.

Billy makes a little bit of a mistake, right? He gets hyperland and we should be able to clean up this walker. Um, and

you know, don't worry about the misexecution there. I I booped my head on the walker, right? But as I said, you

don't get anything without risking something, right? So, we had to risk these things. And what they're doing on

the other side of the map is they're counterressuring our midwalker. And the mistake that they're making is they're

not really dying for it. It's one HP. They're going to end up getting it. And they're also getting the comebacker in

while this is happening. So, they're doing a good job of looking for counter plays. And when you're playing at a high

level, you're never going to get anything that's like super clearcut. And so, this is what I was talking about.

When you're looking for counterplay, they didn't try to defend the walker at all cost. Instead, they were like, "Hey,

we can get the midwalker in exchange." And arguably, we didn't need as many heroes as we had on that side. Now, we

got three kills. It's 17 minutes into the game, so it's past 15 minutes. And so, we call mid. We decide, okay, we're

pretty confident we can get mid. We look at their heroes and we're like, they don't really have amazing heroes. Their

best ultimate for mid is probably Grey Talon, who's dead, and Viscus, who doesn't have his ultimate. We look at

our heroes. We don't have any ultimates either. So, there's not really any ultimates that can seal into play. And

we also had huge numbers advantage, meaning it's very unlikely they can test this. So they give this up for free and

we get the mid boss advantage. Now one thing I want to remind people is that when you get mid boss, you don't

necessarily need to force the issue right away. So looking at this map for example, this is a bit of an example of

the different pillars. On the right side, they have a bunch of farm. On the left side, they have nothing, right? So

I don't really want to be on this left side despite despite me, you know, taking this jump pad out by accident.

However, we also have a bunch of farm on our side of the map. In fact, we have way more farm on our side of the map

than they did on their side. And so we make the call at this point, hey, let's just chill for a second. Let's farm our

side of the map. Now, this is one of the situations where you should actually kind of go against the rules and farm

your side of the map because they don't have much left on their own. If everybody on your team does this and

clears the jungle, it allows you to clear the jungle very quickly. As you can see, it's only been a little bit and

we've cleared most of our jungle. And now we're going to look to push our advantage further as we still have two

rejuvenators and we know that we've got a couple minutes left on them. Buffs and Earn are going to spawn soon enough. And

I see here Billy is out of position in his jungle. I called to my team to come towards him so that we can punish them.

A lot of people rotate over. I'm not overcommitting, but I'm more than happy to fight this. Now, I didn't show you

the fight because not much really happened, but we created pressure. As you can see, the left lane is pushing

forward. I'm going to push this lane. The buffs and earn are going to spawn in 5 seconds. Once again, the replay clock

is different and Mina is handling the midwave. So, I'm going to go one more wave because I know that they can't

really contest the buff, right? So, I don't need to be on the buff right the minute that it spawns because they can't

really contest it. And then Billy ends up fighting me. Now, this is actually a pretty good play by the Billy because I

can't really 1v one him and he knows this. However, I start calling my team over because I want to keep the pressure

up on him and I kind of want to bait him into fighting me so that my page can come over and help and then after we can

beat him. This Billy actually ends up being really really difficult to kill because he has

a lot of spirit resistance. But we're able to take him down after some uh very very difficult work as he, you know,

survives for a long time. I mean, the hero is pretty strong, but he finally goes down and we get rotated on by, you

know, most of their team. So, this actually ended up being like quite a bad play in retrospect, but I think the

logic still very much applies. And you can see the logic is still sound. It's just we ended up going on the wrong

target, which was the Billy. I didn't realize he had too much spirit resist. And now after that, I die once and then

I die twice due to some pretty bad movement here. Now, despite my death, we maintained earn control and we still

have a 20k lead. So even though we don't have rejuvenes, we do still want to go for this earn,

right? And we know that we're ahead. So we're happy to take any fight. Now I know that I'm really close to a power

spike. I'm really close to spirit burn. And so I do want to take a fight, but at the same time, I don't want to

overcommit for it. So here they actually all go for me. And that this was a like a very bad play for me where I got a

little bit overzealous. But luckily, my team ends up showing up just in time. I actually make a lot of mechanical

mistakes in this replay which I didn't remember. But once again, I messed up on the paradox where I should have easily

killed her. But regardless, I at least bought a lot of attention to my for my team, a lot of time, and then we end up

being able to win this fight. Now, the next mid boss has recently respawned. And here there's a mid-en engagement.

And I know that this should be pretty decent for us in theory because we're up significantly. And as lash, sometimes

all you need is just one good kill with the ultimate. You don't need to hit the massive lash. So, we kill Bbop

instantly. Then, we get a follow-up kill on Paradox. And now we've got a very significant numbers advantage. And like

I said, in this situation, yeah, we're going to chase the haze a little bit. You know, see if we can catch her.

Realistically, we could probably just let the haze go. I think at this point, I'm making a call that's like, "Hey

guys, don't worry too much about the haze. You know, she doesn't really matter. My IV keeps chasing her." Um,

and you know, it's fine. But I go to mid. I worry about what really matters. I'm like, "Hey, the haze kill doesn't

really matter that much. If we secure a mid boss, we should be able to win the game." And in most situations, getting

the second mid boss is pretty much GG. Now GT is actually doing a lot of damage with his arrows from a distance. And so

you kind of have to make the decision sometimes of like, hey, do you have to fight the people that are outside the

pit cuz these people know that they have to contest this, right? And so here I'm going to try to fight the Viscus a

little bit and make it so it's not super easy for him to, you know, steal one of the reju. I'm going to delay my parry to

get a little bit late. They still get one steal. Surprisingly, we didn't delay our parries enough and we didn't kill

him. So he does still get one rejuv, but overall very very, you know, positive for us. And now that once we've obtained

the mid boss, we can then go end the game. You know, we just get the ern, we get the we get the walker. We don't need

to walk into their base right away. And as you can see, even at this stage of the game, wave pressure is still

incredibly important. So, I'm not just running over to the walker mid right away. Even though it's one HP, I know

we're going to be able to get this walker soon enough. I'm pushing the left lane. Ivy is pushing the right lane.

We're keeping pressure on the whole map. We're going to get this and then after getting the earn, we'll go to the walker

and then we'll end the game. Thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions about Deadlock Macro, feel

free to come into my live stream anytime. I'm streaming almost every day um on YouTube and on Twitch, so please

stop by. Uh you can also put any question in the comments and I'll do my best to reply. Thank you so much for the

support. Have a wonderful day. >> No mercy comes for you today. [Music]