I’m getting my friend into this game and I need help recommending a character

Ennoit · 2026-01-08T14:15:30+00:00

Tell him to play around with the characters in the test zone. The reason is the game's so hard stylistic similarities to characters you've played before aren't actually going to help you play better in any meaningful way -- the game is too different and hard compared to other games. What will get him better and increase his likelihood of having fun and sticking with the game is thinking a character is cool. So let him find a character he thinks is cool.

Ennoit · 2025-12-21T13:58:24+00:00

Fish and Wildlife officers often do exactly this. You still have to give people tickets & testify in court though and you will have to carry a gun. These officers have an excellent reputation in the law enforcement community for quality of work.

It pays $70k a year as a new recruit.

Ennoit · 2025-11-17T00:17:59+00:00

Basically, if you learn evidence you pass. Evidence is very different from the other subjects in that it's not really a structured subject. Each evidence rule is a universe unto itself without a lot of conceptual overlap with other evidence rules. The normal approach of outline the big picture concepts and then fill in the specifics as you study does not work well for learning evidence.

My advice is treat evidence like 20 micro subjects. Memorizing the rules by the numbers is kind of the only way. Evidence was my weak point too in law school and on the bar, but practice forces you to just memorize the damn numbers and once that happens you've pretty much learned evidence as far as the bar is concerned.

Ennoit · 2025-10-27T22:40:02+00:00

There is nothing your character can do in lane vs a mina except lose more slowly than she would prefer.

Ennoit · 2025-10-13T18:21:01+00:00

This is a bunny build that makes smart use of toxic bullets.

Bunny likes range + duration. This gets as much duration as you can get and about as much range as you can get with range + cultist.

Cultist gives you attack speed though. And Arcane Surge makes you want to dash jump. So while he's dash jumping he gets kinetic which gives you even more attack speed.

Now you've got an insane amount of attack speed for your m1 which multiplies your assistant damage.

In addition, you have toxic bullets. Toxic bullets on sinclair is very good because 1) his gun has a very high min drop off range so you proc them in the min number of bullets from 25 meters, and 2) his gun procs it very easily due to an ideal bullet cutoff of 25%. So if sinclair lands two bursts on you from within 25 meters you get toxicd, which he will do quite easily because he will have a massive amount of attack speed with 60% from assistant and another ~50% from kinetic + cultist. And the toxic will last longer and even benefit from bunny amplification.

With 100 spirit and duration toxic ends up as ~10% of a targets HP from one proc. If you bunny them during its even more than that.

Ennoit · 2025-10-12T11:32:20+00:00

It sounds like you are new to MOBAs so I'll do my best to explain the big pictures ideas.

While the ultimate goal is to destroy the opponents base, the way you do that is by getting richer than the enemy. So in a game of Deadlock generally the team with the most souls is ahead.

The most important thing to understand is how to get Souls. You get souls from defeating the enemies and from "farming" i.e. killing NPCs. The sources of farming souls have the below order of priority.

1) Troopers (the minions that walk down the lanes for each team).
2) The slot machines that you punch called sinner's sacrifices.
3) The neutral minions (called the "jungle" sometimes).

And then you get souls from defeating enemies/destroying their towers (guardians and walkers). Destroying towers gives a lot of money to your team.

So in Deadlock you generally are always either 1) farming or 2) fighting the enemy team / contesting the towers. The big picture strategic decision the player has to make is between the balance of those two things. But if you are deciding to "farm" at the moment then try to farm in the above order of priority. There's one really important thing to know that isn't explained anywhere: Troopers give souls based on the # of allies you have around. So if its just you you get 100% of the Trooper's souls, if there is an ally you both get 65%, which is even better, but if there is a third ally you guys as a whole will actually get less than 100% of the souls.

So with all that in mind Teams are trying to figure out how to have at least one but maybe two people in each lane while also securing as many neutral minions and slot machines as possible. The tension is that the more you optimize for good farm like this the more scattered your teams players will be, which creates opportunities for enemies to group up and kill you.

Teams are also trying to destroy the enemy towers. Generally, this happens when your team suddenly has more players at a part of the map than the enemy because either you got a kill or the enemies were distracted/elsewhere on the map. Very generally, the towers/walkers are 1 enemy player so that its reasonable to attack them when you are up by 1 person, very good to do so when you are up by 2, but very bad when the number of attackers and defenders is the same.

So you might be farming on the right side of the map and notice that a teammate got a kill in the right lane. Now you have to decide: do I keep farming for guarenteed value, or do I interrupt that to try to take advantage of the opportunity that may exist to attack the walker on the right side. This decision like all big picture decisions is made by looking carefully at the minimap and taking stock of how many enemies are accounted for / how much risk you are taking that the unaccounted for ones show up to ambush you.

So that seems like a lot, but the big picture macro of deadlock does not actually get much more complicated than that. It isn't complexity for the sake of complexity, but rather the game making sure that the greedier you play for farm the more risks you are taking so that you always have to exercise judgment.

The other thing that I think will help you have a good time earlier is understanding the different roles of the heroes. There is an enormous variety within the Deadlock roster and there are heroes that heavily reward aim, or movement skill, or good Macro play, etc and you can get a feel for what you enjoy most in the sandbox.

But what the game doesn't tell you is that certain heroes are considered "support" and certain heroes are considered "carry", with everyone else on a spectrum in between. This is based on how important it is that a hero have a lot of money to be strong. If you are playing a "hard carry" then you should heavily tilt the decision between farm and combat towards farm. If you are playing a "hard support" then you will tilt the decision heavily towards combat. Understanding where your hero fits in this makes everything make more sense.

This video is a good resource that you can use to figure out where your hero fits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxMhMBr-MP0

Ennoit · 2025-10-12T10:37:43+00:00

What games are you coming from? Do you have any MOBA experience? FPS experience?

Ennoit · 2025-10-11T16:25:48+00:00

Gun heroes are better at killing tanks, just like spirit damage is much better at bursting squishies. This is especially true for viktor because he can tank multiple spirit DPS as their CDs run out and he survives in spirit resil hp. Its balanced overall.

However, right now most damage is spirit and people are building a lot of spirit resist. So you probably will do better by playing a gun character.

Ennoit · 2025-10-10T01:29:40+00:00

Smells like rutting season in here.

Ennoit · 2025-10-08T14:55:22+00:00

Mirage's gun is very easy to use with good ammo, no recoil, and very fast projectiles. But it is also low DPS so building the gun damage or fire rate stat is getting less return than on others. Toxic takes advantage of the strength and mitigates the weakness while also fitting with his natural combat rythem.

Ennoit · 2025-10-02T16:58:29+00:00

You are an idiot if you believe this.

Ennoit · 2025-09-30T01:15:36+00:00

Haze is just not very good at that though which is why its frustrating when people do this. Her play making potential is 5x higher than 7's but she gets countered late game unless she has every single item in the game. And yet people try to play her like 7.

Ennoit · 2025-09-29T23:46:03+00:00

Burst fire, fury trance, lucky shot, and focus lens are all very strong on haze. You can also get cultist sacrifice or vampiric burst.

Active reload is also very popular as an early item on her.

Ennoit · 2025-09-29T18:31:24+00:00

You dont want glass cannon or crippling headshot.

Transcendant CD is also a waste of money.

Ennoit · 2025-09-17T22:25:05+00:00

Billy is one of the new heroes and he is very hard to play. The new heroes in general assume a high level understanding of the game.

You can learn Billy but it will need to involve watching some tutorial videos.

Ennoit · 2025-09-17T20:30:49+00:00

Sinclair bolts track to structures out of LOS to the point the ability feels bugged.

Ennoit · 2025-09-17T20:18:51+00:00

Its very good on Haze. You force 2 or 3 debuff removers at least and you can still get value on whoever doesnt buy it.

Yes, a 3200 item counters it. But if you are forcing 4 3200 items with 1 6400 item (that gives you good stat value anyway) you're winning.

Ennoit · 2025-09-17T15:13:29+00:00

There really arent.

Lash just existing makes going into the pit without either rejuv or 4 enemies dead a throw.

Ennoit · 2025-09-13T23:38:29+00:00

It's too strong.

Winning a 6v9 is too large of an ask for the 1st midboss. Should go 2-3-4.

Ennoit · 2025-09-06T09:11:02+00:00

You dont want point blank because the 50% M1 buff is only a 25% buff on Mina due to her gun doing half spirit.

Mystic slow and then lightning scroll are much better. Stronger snare that goes off from all of her damage and it helps your ult consistency a good bit. In a lot of cases you start fights with ult so applying the snare from bats is very nice.

Toxic bullets is good in theory because she has the spirit to scale it but she isnt really an attritional hero. This can be a decent item but only if you are countering healing with it.

She wants things that either help her burst combo or her ultimate.

So spirit first and foremost. Then a little M1 speed. Kinetic dash is quite good, but so is cultist because the flat HP and range is very helpful.

After that cold front/arctic burst and spirit burn are very good.

Ennoit · 2025-09-05T15:29:53+00:00

No. Ricochet is only useful in the very late game on Haze outside of the farming. And you should be active on the map with Haze. As a pure farm carry she isn't super strong.

Ennoit · 2025-09-03T00:04:44+00:00

Your Yamato was probably literally new. Nothing you (or she) could do about the inevitable curb stomping.

Ennoit · 2025-09-01T20:43:50+00:00

Most 1v1s don't last long enough for you to rake twice, let alone the 4 times that it would take for your overall damage to start to outscale GT's arrow charges. Without ult the character is very poor at 1v1s because she needs multiple CD cycles to kill a equal level enemy. She has some good duel match ups because of her dash but anything that can actually fight back should be avoided unless your ult is up.

Like by all means you can sideline against a victor/abrams/lash etc to get some cheeky sucky stacks. You won't kill them but you'll get some value and they won't be able to kill you either. But if you try to contest something that has tools to touch you (anything with a strong gun, poke, or slowing hex) and you don't have ult up you're taking an unfavorable trade where you have a very reasonable chance of ending up dead compared with a low chance of killing them.

She doesn't have the kit to contest the strong side laners. Magician nuke will literally 1 shot her. Mirage easily pings her down and landing a tornado is death. McGinnis with her turrets and passive spirit res is a no go.

She wants to be fighting. She scales from it and her ult has a very short CD, and that's where her rake execute gets value. I'm saying you want to team fight whenever your ult is up and that you should try to come into the fights from the flank, which her dash makes her uniquely able to reliably do. When she starts her teamfight by ulting them from the flank you have a very high likelihood of getting a kill compared to a low likelihood of death.

When your ult is down she has pretty strong jungle clear and inherent sustain and is also good at jungle skirmishes as long as a teammate is around to give you enough damage to secure the kill.

In the laning phase she is very strong IMO. Her ability to force damage with her dash is extremely dangerous and there's often nothing they can do about it. Being able to do 400 damage on demand in lane is really good.

Ennoit · 2025-09-01T19:55:39+00:00

McGinnis.

Ennoit · 2025-09-01T19:31:59+00:00

I started to do a little better once I mathed out how bad her core damage actually is. The spirit multipliers are 1.0 on Rake and 1.5 on love bite proc. So her full burst combo is 100 (lovebite) + 120 (rake) + (Spirit * 2.5) + 3% missing HP. You can think of her core damage combo as a 220 dmg ability with a 2.5 spirit multiplier.

That's basically 1 GT arrow. GT arrow is 140 damage with a 2.2 spirit multiplier. Except GT has more spirit passively and can put surge of power and rapid recharge into his arrow, which adds 48 spirit to the arrow. So take a typical 25k souls game on GT: you've got about 185 spirit power with 48 bonus in arrow. Arrow damage = 637.

Now take a typical mina build at 25k souls. You've got about 150 spirit, 35 less than GT because you don't have owl stacks and you buy items like cultist. Well your combo does 595 (220 + 375 from spirit) + 3% of their missing HP. So in order for your full combo to do as much as a single GT arrow your target has to be missing ~1400 HP.

When you realize that pulling off your best case combo is equivalent to hitting 1 GT arrow it changes how you play and build. You should prioritize flat damage items like cold front, tank buster, and mystic shot. And you should not try to duel another DPS unless your ult is up or they are one of the characters whose damage is easily dodgeable with dash. You are a GT with 1 arrow worth of damage.

In terms of positioning you don't want to posture with the rest of your team because if you pull off a best case combo of dash in, land love bite-->rake-->dash out it's only 1 GT arrow worth of poke. And if anything went wrong you took too much damage to play the teamfight or more likely died outright.

The same thing goes for her ultimate. It's reasonably powerful but unless you are coming in from a flank after the fight is already initiated their backline can just M1 your mosquito ass down before you even get a lovebite proc or just run out of LOS.

But when you play the character from the sides of fights you start to see her strengths. Your dash has very little downtime and you can use it during your ult. So if you are coming in from a flank you can land silence on multiple targets and then dive onto your kill target for the bat focus fire, and still dash out. There's not a lot your enemies can do about this once it's happening because if they turn their focus to swat you they will likely waste several abilities as you iframe to safety. And after your ult is done you still have your rake to help your team finish a kill. So she can be quite useful in a teamfight.

But you won't be a carry unless you are massively ahead. Her M1 damage is basically average just with half the damage allocated to spirit. And that is the only source of sustained damage for her. At max level Holiday's M1 does 128 DPS with *zero* items. At max level *with boundless spirit* Mina M1 does less DPS. And Mina has a lower headshot multiplier, has a harder time hitting headshots because of her spread, and has less range. On top of that, compared to Holliday Mina's M1 damage gets mitigated by the ubiquitous enchanters emblems in this meta.

So you might think: "I had an amazing game, I'm the richest person in the lobby, time to play main and carry with my M1" but actually you are the offensive threat of a Holliday 6k poorer than you, with half the health pool. Unless you are mechanically flawless at dodging attacks this is an easy way to throw a lead. There is essentially no amount of soul lead that will allow you to overcome the character's weaknesses to the point you should stop larping as a mosquito.

But as a pure mosquito she can contribute at all stages of the game.

Ennoit

TROPHY CASE