Deadlock’s latest patch buffs three of the most annoying heroes but manages to leave out the biggest thorn in my side
Valve is forever dishing out small patches for Deadlock as the devs try to balance all the new heroes and team compositions. After a major update, which saw six new heroes added to the Hero Labs, we’ve got a small update that strengthens a few heroes and weakens a few others.
I have no shame in saying that I’m a Seven player. I know he’s not the most complex hero or very impressive, but I don’t have the time or the strength to learn more than four heroes right now, and Seven is the easiest hero to grasp, so here we are.
Seven was also really powerful from the get-go, and has stayed pretty strong throughout Deadlock’s closed beta, which is one of the reasons why most players find him pretty annoying to fight against. The skill ceiling is relatively low for a high-reward hero, making him a bit of a monster in average player pools. But the fun doesn’t end there, because this latest update has given him a slight buff, with the damage per second of his ultimate Storm Cloud increasing from 110 to 120.
Other annoying heroes who have been buffed in the recent patch include Shiv and Bebop. However, Bebop’s changes could be a nerf to some players as a lot of the changes revolve around the hero’s damage stacks on the Sticky Bomb ability. This includes stacks no longer decreasing on death and earning stacks based on dying heroes hurt by Sticky Bomb damage with a 12-second buffer. Before this, players would automatically get stacks if the bomb hit anyone. So if you’re able to get multiple kills, you’ll be able to turn Bebop into a killing machine, but if you’re in a difficult lane and can’t quite manage to get any kills, then you’ll probably have a hard time reaching anything higher than 50% on your bomb. But Bebop also gets a damage stack increase from 3% to 5%, spirit power damage scaling increases from 0.9 to 1.2, and Sticky Bomb cooldown reduces from 19 seconds to 18 seconds.
Then there’s Shiv, probably one of the more terrifying heroes to be pitted against. Shiv’s ability, Killing Blow, has got some serious buffs like the cast range increasing from 13 metres to 14 metres, rage per weapon damage increasing from 0.015 to 0.017, and the drain rate reduced from 0.3 to 0.25.
Paradox, McGinnis, Kelvin, and Grey Talon also all got various changes that weakened their abilities or increased their cooldowns. But one hero who is absent from this list, who I always like to see get a bit of tweaking, is Jacob Lash. There’s nothing worse than going 1v1 against a Paradox or a Kelvin and almost getting a kill only for Lash to swoop in from nowhere, pick you up, throw you back down into the ground, and then beat you to a bloody pulp. So it would be great for this hero to get a couple of adjustments, even if his ground strike was weakened just a little bit.
Although it seems like most players don’t want to see Lash change at all. “Once again, not a word about Lash,” one player says. “Imagine adjusting Lash. Icefrog isn’t a fucking idiot; he knows Lash is perfect. Man, what a character. What a good video game character. Shout out to Jacob Lash.” Spoken like a true Lash player.
