Glossary & meta

The words you'll hear

Economy. Souls are your money and XP in one number. A last hit is landing the killing blow on a trooper. That spawns a soul orb — the floating ball you shoot to bank the souls. A deny is shooting the enemy's orb to snatch the souls they were about to collect. Net worth is the total souls you've earned all game (your power scoreboard).

Build. AP means Ability Points — what you spend to unlock and rank up your four abilities. A Boon is essentially your level: cross a soul threshold and you earn one, which bumps your base HP, Spirit, and damage and hands you AP (you can stack up to 35). Imbue means attaching an item's effect onto one of your abilities. A flex slot is a bonus item slot the whole team unlocks by killing structures. Items are either active (a button you press) or passive (always on), and cheap components combine up a build path into the expensive item you actually want.

Colours. Orange = bullet (weapon) damage, purple = Spirit damage, and green items are Vitality (health, regen, armor). When a number flashes orange you're taking gun damage; purple means spirit.

Map. Guardian, Walker, Base Guardian, and Shrine are the tower chain you smash in order; the Patron is the final boss and the only win condition. The Urn is a soul prize you carry and contest, the Mid-Boss (it drops the Rejuvenator buff) is the neutral boss in the pit, camps or neutrals are the jungle monsters you farm, and a rune or powerup is the temporary buff that spawns on the bridges. Each of these has its own card with the real numbers — this is just the quick decoder.

Reading patch notes & the meta

The three words every patch uses: a buff makes something stronger, a nerf makes it weaker, and a rework changes how it actually behaves rather than just tuning a number. The "meta" is simply whatever's strongest right now.

Deadlock is still in active development, so it updates often — roughly every couple of weeks, usually one larger patch followed by smaller hotfixes — and the changes are openly experimental. That's why core numbers never sit still. The 05-22-2026 patch alone shaved 10 HP off every hero's base pool, cut the HP each Boon grants, pushed the medium jungle camps to spawn at 5:00, made Shrines invulnerable until a pair of Base Guardians falls, and reworked the Urn into a king-of-the-hill capture circle. A build or a tip that was optimal last month can quietly become a trap.

Two things people confuse: tier lists are community opinion — Valve doesn't publish an official one — and the leaderboard ranks players, not heroes. The competitive ladder runs 11 rungs from Initiate up through Seeker, Alchemist, Arcanist, Ritualist, Emissary, Archon, Oracle, Phantom, Ascendant, to Eternus (six sub-ranks each), and it tracks your own MMR. A hero being "top tier" does nothing for your badge.

How to play it

Don't sit and memorize the dictionary — you'll absorb most of these terms in a handful of games. Just bookmark the cards for the ones that actually have depth (deny, Imbue, flex slots, Boons) and read those when they come up.

When a patch drops, skim the notes for your hero and your core items before you queue, because last week's perfect build may now be wrong. Treat any guide or tier list older than the current patch as a rough suggestion, not gospel — the numbers it's built on have probably moved.

And don't panic-swap heroes the moment yours catches a small nerf. A 5% tweak almost never decides games at the rank most players are climbing through; clean fundamentals — farming, denying, grouping for objectives — win far more matches than chasing the flavour of the week. When a teammate types a word you don't recognize, it's almost always one of the terms above. Ask, then open the matching card.