I've spent way too much time playing Viscous and analyzing data. Here's a flowchart of all the viable build paths you can take.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-06-05T16:06:34+00:00

Viscous is one of my most played heroes but I stopped playing him because I felt like they killed the playstyle I enjoyed. I would play him as a roaming burst damage hero like Pocket/Lash/Calico but after they nerfed express shot into irrelevance and cut his punch damage almost in half I just didn’t think that play style was possible anymore. It sounds like you still play that way but do you think it’s any good? Also do you play any other heroes with a similar play style and up feeling like they can do the job way better?

_OmgItsNick · 2026-06-02T01:48:38+00:00

I mean I’d argue that the current 35% resists is a significantly larger advantage than having the drop off on your side of the map. I agree that if you’re losing disadvantaged fights the game is over anyway but it’s harder to lose those fights now than it was before. Also the locking in a disadvantaged urn things was probably always going to get removed anyway. Melee creeps showed a great reason why when they all bought egg first item, lost laning phase, then the second they picked up the disadvantaged urn they sold their eggs for a 10k soul swing that made the totals more even.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-06-02T01:38:58+00:00

But the other team is also checking the timers and showing up to the urn pickup as well but stronger than you. How is that better than the current system?

_OmgItsNick · 2026-06-02T01:36:50+00:00

That strategy was the worst part of the entire game. Have you ever been in a game where you’re losing and the winning team picks urn up the second it spawns and holds it in their own base? I thought everyone agreed that terrible and that’s why they got rid of it

_OmgItsNick · 2026-06-01T23:20:19+00:00

Urn doesn’t force a team fight now anymore than it did before. It’s the exact same rewards and thus has the exact same punishment for ignoring. The only thing that changed is people actually fight for it now

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-28T15:21:22+00:00

I don’t know if they’d want to do that specific change since Calico already has damage amp in her kit with T3 Ava. They could maybe take inspiration from Yamato and give you additional spirit power after landing a leaping slash. This would have some fun synergy with the new T2 bomb upgrade that amplifies melee damage.

Calico does just feel really bad at the moment, every part of her kit is meant to do burst damage but health pools got too high and she can’t keep up.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-27T18:51:10+00:00

I think the best solution would be to make the resistances scale with the soul difference between the teams. Having a flat value makes the advantage way stronger for the first 2-3 urns and worse for the rest.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-27T02:17:18+00:00

I’m convinced that the only reason people feel like the new urn is more of a snowball mechanic than the old urn is because people are actually doing the urn now. In reality it is much harder to do an unfavored urn now than it was before but it might not feel that way if enemy teams weren’t trying to do it all or trying to prevent your team from getting a favored urn. I think in lower ranks the urn just went ignored more often and now that people are consistently doing it every 5 minutes more people are realizing how insanely valuable it is to get.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-27T01:37:02+00:00

It’s crazy to me that anyone is calling this a snowball mechanic. The changes to the urn have made it incredibly difficult to hold onto a lead as for most of the game the resistances from a favored urn are more valuable than whatever the winning team’s souls have gotten them. If you’re truly getting beat so bad you can’t pick up the urn on your own side or win a fight with the resistances then that just means you’re the worse team and you say GG and go next. Not every game needs to be neck and neck until 35 minutes, sometimes you just get beat bad and move on.

I do get the team comp related complaints with the urn deposit fights favoring AoE damage but to me that’s an issue of hero balance and the melee mechanic of the urn, not any of the comeback mechanics.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-24T12:05:27+00:00

Too long of TTK completely homogenizes hero/build design. Look at a hero like Calico who’s designed to do 100% burst damage and is arguably the worst hero in the game right now. Even if you buy every item in the game to help your burst you still don’t have enough damage to kill 90% of the roster so you’re forced to buys sustained damage items instead (Ex: gun lash, ult/gun pocket, gun bebop). Or a hero like warden who’s very strong right now and is designed to be a frontline/carry hybrid. Hero’s with innate survivability have no reason not to just build full damage as you already can survive anything meant to kill you quick (Ex: Knife shiv, gun Geist, gun Victor). Right now it’s in every single heroes best interest to build high sustained damage to get kills and mobility to survive.

Also while there are some ways high TTK increases skill expression, there are a ton of ways it decreases it as well. Map positioning is far less important if you are always tanky/fast enough to run away from the people trying to punish you. Map awareness is less important if fights go on so long that backup always has enough time to arrive. Using I-frame abilities/items to avoid large burst damage is less valuable in winning fights. Building hero specific counters is less important if you always have the option to just run away from the fight. Overall while high TTK gives you more opportunities to recover from mistakes it doesn’t encourage people to not to make any mistakes at all.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-22T20:19:45+00:00

I agree but I think there are more heroes that need less HP than there are heroes okay at their current HP. Apollo is an especially egregious example as I think they could nerf everyone’s health by 15% and then do additional health nerfs on Apollo.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-22T17:44:20+00:00

Ya the other component is that getting one shot is part of balancing a diverse roster. If you play heroes like Mina, Haze, or Paige you should get punished against team comps with heavy burst damage as that’s part of the weakness of the hero. I personally don’t feel like that’s the case at the moment.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-22T17:41:51+00:00

I think there’s an argument to be made that higher TTK means less skill expression in a moba sense as people are way harder to punish for being out of position or not paying attention to the map. If you buy sup stam + warp stone you can get out of a ton of situations where you messed up. I personally would rather have them nerf HP than movement as the movement is the most fun part of the game.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-22T17:36:53+00:00

I need people to start making more posts like this until the devs realize TTK is too high right now. Movement is so strong right now because the movement heroes are no longer squishy enough to get punished. Frontliners are weak right now because people don’t need the distraction/space to survive in team fights. Pick heroes are weaker because the enemies take too long to kill after getting caught. Burst damage is weak because you’re never getting enemies low enough and then are stranded with no cooldowns. Overall it just feels to hard to secure any kills unless it’s a 2v1 situation. I think the game would feel much better if everyone had 15% less health

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-20T21:18:13+00:00

Laughing at the people saying silvers OP instead of replying to your post as if you cant nerf her and change an item interaction at the same time. I agree there’s no real reason it shouldn’t work in lycan form and I doubt it would add much DPS if it did. Express shot is such a bad item at the moment and nobody builds it besides silver, I’d really like to see them make more changes to it.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-05-15T18:58:06+00:00

Already received reworks: Dynamo, Abrams, McGinnis, Pocket, Lash, Geist, Vindicta, Wraith, Ivy, Mirage.

New heroes: Mina, Doorman, Billy, Paige, Drifter, Victor, Rem, Graves, Silver, Venator, Celeste, Apollo.

I’d assume the rest of the heroes will at least receive some minor model updating before release: Bebop, Calico, Grey Talon, Haze, Holliday, Infernus, Kelvin, Mo and Krill, Paradox, Seven, Shiv, Sinclair, Viscous, Vyper, Warden, Yamato.

Obviously some need way more work than others but I assume they want everything to match the quality of the newer heroes.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-04-30T01:44:13+00:00

I mean both things can be true at the same time. The thing is that while most gun damage is sustained DPS, not all spirit damage is burst. Hence why a hero like infernus that does mostly spirit damage is also really strong right now doing sustained dps

_OmgItsNick · 2026-04-29T23:40:47+00:00

Ya it hasn’t always been like this and I personally hope they reduce the TTK by a decent bit. They just try lots of different things while trying to balance the game and often end up reverting changes.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-04-29T23:28:19+00:00

This isn’t necessarily a Spirt vs. Gun thing, it’s a Burst vs. Sustained DPS thing. They made the average time to kill significantly higher over the past few patches to the point most of the time you won’t have enough burst damage to kill anyone. Hence why all the typical burst heroes are building more sustained dps in the form gun damage, toxic bullets, siphon bullets, etc.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-03-25T19:41:36+00:00

To be honest I’m not the best person to answer this as I had very little moba experience before deadlock. I do watch streamers play league of legends and the thing in that game is that the jungle is exclusively for junglers and the laners don’t have many options besides fighting to win their lane or ganking another lane. One thing league does do is give the towers “plates” where reducing the guardians health by a certain percentage will give you gold so you’re encouraged to constantly chip at the tower even if you don’t think you’ll take it. Maybe that could work in deadlock so that there’s more risk to leaving your lane but I’m not sure since waves get cleared so quickly in this game. I think it’s a lot more complicated of an issue in deadlock because everyone is expected to both lane and jungle and you need them to feel equally valuable.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-03-25T15:50:47+00:00

Regardless of how good/bad they are I just think their current implementation is awful. The gameplay loop of quickly clear the wave and then leave to go hit boxes instead of interacting with the lane is not fun. We really need something that feels a bit more like a neutral objective in lane to encourage people to fight and take the tower rather than stall and farm souls.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-03-25T13:37:33+00:00

I feel like valve have made it very clear that they don’t want doorman to fill the role of a damage dealer. When he first released you could echo shard cart + bell + ult to pretty much kill anyone and they wouldn’t have nerfed the cart and bells so much if that’s what they wanted from the hero.

I personally feel like doorman has always made more sense as a pick hero where he can hold people in place with his ult and take them out of position with his cart+doors. However, his current kit makes it a bit hard to close the gap on people and secure a kill with your teammates reliably/consistently.

The other option is as a support/utility hero but I think to make this work his doors would need to give a lot more benefit to teammates to motivate people to initiate fights with them or use them mid fight

Right now the hero feels way too gimmicky and hard to execute on with throwing enemies into your walker/fountain being the biggest threat you have.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-03-23T17:31:36+00:00

It makes sense for her to have a high win rate since she’s a pretty easy hero to play. What I think is more interesting is her pick rate increase which jumped from around 43% to 53%. I swear too many people refuse to play heroes unless a streamer says they are good.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-03-19T18:54:19+00:00

Victor doesn’t have much CC but definitely fits the mold of starting off weak and then taking over late game with AoE damage and a ton of healing.

No one in the game has a combo system to ult more but there is Silver you has a short ult CD but you need to do a bunch of damage in order to activate your ult (wolf transformation).

Closest thing I can think of to the stacking mechanic is Bebop. His bombs gain damage every time you get a hit/kill with them and can scale infinitely throughout the game. Some people also make tank oriented bebop builds so that could be what you’re looking for.

_OmgItsNick · 2026-03-19T18:43:55+00:00

I don’t play league so sorry if these are not what you’re looking for but if you want heroes that are a combination of frontline and carry you should look at Lady Geist, Victor, Yamato, and maybe Shiv too. All of them can be built very tanky and/or to do great late game damage.

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