What we learned from Deadlock Fight Night #26

Deadlock Fight Night #26 was just the second iteration of the weekly Deadlock esports event after the game’s Major Shop Rework shook things up significantly. Pros have begun to formulate some more ideas about the meta and build optimization, which we will try and cover here, along with major notes from the action itself.

Pure Weapon builds are rare and ineffective

In the Deadlock Fight Night discord, user 80HighDef created a heat map of the itemization trends across all heroes in DFN 25 & 26, showing trends of item types bought across all heroes. Their findings, in the image below, show that the early meta after the shop update leans a bit towards Vitality and Spirit items, generally speaking.

Additionally, the rare times where Weapon items won out led to much lower winrates on average. The highest winrates maintained a perfect amount of balance, even with the less restrictive itemization post-update.

Image via 80HighDef on Discord

Two words – Healing Nova

Healing Nova was bought an absurd number of times in DFN 26, which allowed for fights to break out throughout the laning phase. The sustain this gives heroes can’t be understated, especially when both lane partners bought the 1,600 Soul Vitality item.

I was personally surprised to see this item survive any nerfs in the May 21 patch. However, I would anticipate some tuning coming to this item very soon, especially considering the harsh nerfs to almost all other healing sources.

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Shiv, Geist, and Warden survived their nerfs

I had high hopes that the May 19 patch would have reduced the effectiveness of Shiv, Lady Geist, and Warden, who all feel like they are having their moment in the sun amid the game’s current state. But, at least from what we say in this last fight night, these heroes seem to be doing just fine.

Part of this is due to current itemization trends, sure, but it also comes at a time in the Deadlock meta where both Grey Talon and Vindicta, the game’s cornerstone snipers, are out of commission. This has opened the door to an extremely engagement-heavy meta, where it is all about catching someone, getting a pick, then running in with a superior frontline force.

Keep an eye on other heroes affected by this style of play, like Viscous, Yamato, Pocket, and Calico (just to name a few), who will similarly benefit from a brawl meta.

Sometimes, a 5v6 is all you need…

One of the funniest moments of this week was Melee Creeps closing out the money match 5v6 when their Kelvin, Quig, fully disconnected from the game and had to sit the rest of the match out. This led to a funny tech pause with some iconic banter from the talent team, but also led to a somewhat wild line of thinking – is it better to lose your Support player late in the game in order to give extra farm to your carries?

In this instance, that was exactly the case for Melee Creeps, who maintained their NA crown this week with a 5v6 win over Valhalla in the second map of the NA money match. And while I don’t think this is a trend that would ever catch on, it did show us the importance of Soul allocation and what can happen when your team’s strongest heroes have the most Souls.

Deadlock Fight Night #26 presented by Intel

All of that aside, we are looking forward to seeing the top teams from across the West continue to battle it out next week in Deadlock Fight Night #27! We’ll continue providing coverage, so stay tuned!

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