Deadlock Keeps Evolving
Deadlock has been quietly building a pretty dedicated community through its invite only beta. If you have been in for a while, you already know the game is not afraid to reinvent itself. Lanes have changed, whole batches of new heroes have arrived at once, and now Valve has dropped another so called small update that actually reshapes how the game feels in lane.
This time the spotlight is on troopers, Deadlock’s version of lane creeps. They might look like background noise, but the way they work now affects how you farm, how you fight, and how aggressive you need to be from the very start of a match.
If you are new to Deadlock or just curious why everyone is suddenly talking about souls and medic packs, here is what actually changed and why it matters.
How Trooper Souls Work Now
Troopers drop souls when they die. Souls are the main resource you spend on items, so if you want to scale, you need to collect as many as you can. Before this update, the system was pretty simple. When a trooper died, you instantly got half of its souls split among nearby allies. The other half floated into the air and you had to shoot those souls to pick them up. That is where most of the contest happened.
Now Valve has made a key change. The first half of the income is no longer automatic. When a trooper dies, that initial chunk of souls drops to the ground instead of going straight into your pocket. To claim it, you have to walk within a short radius of where the souls landed.
There are a few important details here.
- The ground souls cannot be denied by the enemy. They appear translucent to the other team so only your side can pick them up.
- You still have to manually secure them by moving into range, which means you cannot just sit far back and safely farm forever.
- You still have the airborne souls that need to be shot, so you are juggling both positioning and aim every time a wave crashes.
The result is that laning is going to feel more active and more dangerous. Heroes that preferred to chill at long range and last hit from a distance now have a reason to step forward. That creates more opportunities for ganks, trades, and all those scrappy fights that decide who snowballs out of lane.
On the flip side, this new system actually helps in the late game. If you rotate to a lane after a fight and find a bunch of corpses, their ground souls will still be there waiting for you. You can roll up late and still collect income instead of feeling like you missed everything because you were a few seconds too slow.
Healing Troopers Become Battlefield Loot
The other big trooper change is all about sustain. Before, healing troopers would simply restore health over time as part of the wave. That passive healing is gone.
Now, whenever the enemy team kills a healing trooper, it drops a medic pack. That medic pack restores 10 percent of missing health to nearby players.
This sounds small, but it shifts how you think about staying alive in lane.
- Healing is now a physical object on the ground, not a background effect.
- You and your opponents can play around when and where those medic packs drop.
- Positioning around waves becomes about both gold and sustain instead of just damage and last hits.
If you have played Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm, this probably rings a bell. That game uses little experience orbs and healing globes that drop from minion waves, and both teams can fight over them. Deadlock takes a similar idea but keeps souls team specific. Still, the vibe is the same. You are not just clearing waves. You are harvesting little resources spread across the lane, and everyone knows they matter.
Put together with the new soul system, these medic packs add one more reason to scrap over minion deaths. You push up for gold, you step in for health, and every time you commit, you risk getting punished. That is the kind of design that makes even early waves feel tense instead of routine.
Balance Passes And What It Means For Players
As usual with Valve, the trooper update does not arrive alone. Nearly every hero in Deadlock has been hit with some kind of balance change in this patch. Most of those tweaks are just number tuning, like damage values, cooldowns, or scaling. But a few heroes get more interesting changes.
One standout example is Mirage. Mirage’s ultimate can now take him to friendly objectives, opening up new options for rotations, escapes, or surprise plays. Changes like this can quietly redefine how a hero fits into team comps and map strategy.
If you are deeply into the meta, this is probably the part that sends you straight to the patch notes. The broad idea is clear though. Valve is not just changing troopers in a vacuum. It is recalibrating the whole ecosystem of Deadlock. Lanes are more contested, roaming and rotations are more rewarding, and heroes are getting nudged to fit that faster, more active style.
For returning players who drifted away after earlier experiments like lane count changes, this might be the moment to jump back in. The game is still in flux, but it is also getting sharper about what it wants to be. Active laning, constant skirmishes, and map wide movement all feel more important than ever.
For new players, this update actually makes the basics clearer. Troopers are not just background bots. They are walking loot drops that control your income, your health, and your tempo. If you learn to play around souls and medic packs early, you will understand the heart of Deadlock much faster.
Valve might call this a small update, but in practice it changes how every lane phase plays out and how every role thinks about farming. If these are the small tweaks, it will be interesting to see what a big update looks like once Deadlock finally steps out of beta.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/a-small-update-just-shook-up-deadlocks-basic-mechanics-and-tweaked-nearly-every-hero/
