What to do in your first hour in Deadlock: New Player Tutorial

Most people, when they first boot up Deadlock, will just load into a random game and see what happens. That is not the way to learn this game. If you want your first hour in Deadlock to feel doable instead of overwhelming, you need a plan.

Minute 0-10: Start in the Hideout, Not a Match

When you load in, you land in the Hideout, which functions as Deadlock’s main menu. From here, you can access the tutorial, replays, news, and — most importantly — the Atrium practice range. Before you queue anything, stop here and pick a Hero with intention.

Open the select hero screen (escape → Swap Hero) and start flipping through the roster. If you’re choosing based on art and vibes, Deadlock supports that: each hero has splash art and a three-word descriptor that quickly communicates the fantasy.

If you’re more numbers-driven, you can hover the right-side icons to see Weapon, Vitality, and Spirit stats. If you care about lore, you can read backstories directly from the hero page. And if none of that matters as much as playstyle, look at abilities: hover to see what they generally do and what upgrades provide.

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Minute 10-20: Lock a Hero and Test Abilities

Once you land on a Hero you like, head into the Atrium and hit the button that turns off cooldowns. This is where you can spend time actually testing how the movement works, what abilities look like, how the dash behaves, and what the ultimate implies.

The goal is not mastery, it’s removing surprise. You should not be discovering how your kit functions for the first time while someone is trying to kill you in lane.

Minute 20–30: Learn the Shop, Then Touch a Build

Next, press B to open the shop. I recommend you spend a short stretch simply reading item categories: Weapon (orange), Vitality (green), and Spirit (purple). Don’t try to memorize everything. Just start recognizing what kinds of effects live in each tab and what an item tooltip looks like.

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If you want to see what real builds look like, open the build browser and skim public builds for your Hero.

You can also buy Items in the Hideout and test them immediately without loading into a match. And if you want a more game-like environment, use the teleporter in the Atrium to enter the sandbox, where you can spawn enemies, fight minions, and mess with mechanics in a low-stakes setting.

Minute 30–60: Play a Bot Match

At the 30-minute mark, most players think they’re ready. No. You’re playing a bot match next. Bot games are low stakes, they let you experiment freely, and they’re the only place you can pick one hero and guarantee you actually get that hero.

More importantly, bot games expose the real reason Deadlock overwhelms new players: decision pressure. Even walking to the shop with 800 souls can spiral into stress. Do you buy survivability? Do you buy sustain? Do you buy damage?

In a bot match, you’ll still feel those moments of panic — but you’ll feel them without tanking anyone’s experience, and you’ll start noticing which decisions consistently confuse you. That becomes your roadmap for what to learn next.

Slow down. Deadlock isn’t a game where you can just queue up and figure it out through chaos. It’s a game of constant choices, and those choices pile up fast. If you take your first hour deliberately — hero selection, practice range, shop familiarity, sandbox experimentation, then a bot match — you set yourself up to enter real games with a foundation instead of anxiety.

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