
Deadlock Fight Night continues this week with its 27th iteration, right on the heels of some major patch updates from Valve. Players from all of the competing teams had very little time to adjust to some of the changes, but the action was just as intense as always, and turned out to be among the longest fight nights ever! Here are our five biggest takeaways.
In the first game of the EU money match, Virtus.pro’s obikym managed to heal for 73,000+ on Kelvin, with Rescue Beam being the primary healing source at 31% of his total healing, according to the broadcast.
Frozen Shelter and Frost Grenade provided a lot as well, but the stat line and the result it helped to provide for VP certified that healing still has a prominent place in the Deadlock meta, despite some healing items seeing nerfs.
Game two of the EU Money Match between Abrahams and Virtus.Pro (Image Courtesy of Deadlock Fight Night)
Shortly after the shop rework and throughout May, it felt like only a handful of heroes and items could be truly dominant. Three patches and two Fight Nights later, and it feels like things have opened back up significantly.
Grey Talon was seen again, Haze became a priority, NA prioritized Vindicta, and some heroes that had dominated in DFN #26 weren’t seen nearly as much. The same goes for itemization, which saw a ton of parity across games, with only a handful of items bought by most players. Enchanter’s Emblem, most notably.
The post-game infographics provided by the DFN production team gave a lot of great information about where players’ Souls came from, showing some pretty insightful and staggering data.
In the image above, you can see MikaelS’s Pocket was able to get the largest percentage of his Soul count from Neutral camps (23%), while obikym gained 10% of his Souls from the Urn (roughly 4,400 Souls). Once data like this can be seen with larger sample sizes, it should provide a lot of great insight on the most optimal way to farm on certain heroes.
In the NA money match, this was especially noticeable, as Melee Creeps, intentional or not, funneled Souls to their Viscous and Bebop up against Warden and Yamato carries on Valhalla. This did not go well for Melee Creeps, who dropped an uncharacteristic second map, in large part due to this less-than-ideal Soul allocation.
The early and midgame in this one were close, but the steep drop-off in the late game points towards a lack of late-game carry heroes for Melee Creeps. This will be something to keep an eye on in future fight nights as teams get better and better at strategically drafting their heroes.
While this has improved with the addition of comeback mechanics in the game, the early game is still crucial for teams that want to win games regularly. Nearly every game in this week’s fight night went the way of the team that played well early and took care of business on the mid-game macro. Melee Creeps continued to show a mastery of this in their first and third match, as did Virtus.pro.
This will be something to keep an eye on in Deadlock Fight Night #28. Will we see a major comeback pulled off, or will the strong teams continue to dominate?
Stay tuned here at The Game Haus for more Deadlock Fight Night coverage, and be sure to check back next week for DFN #28 and our coverage. We’ll see you then!
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