Valve pushed another minor update for Deadlock to Steam on 28 July. It is flagged as minor and reads as a balance pass, but the notes run long: several items were rebuilt rather than renumbered, a large slice of the roster got touched, and even base-side orb spawners and the voice chat volume slider were adjusted.
The item pass is the real story
A handful of items changed behaviour, not just values.
- Echo Shard now carries a 0.5s post-cast time, no longer hands out +5% fire rate, and its cooldown is calculated as 30s plus the cooldown of the imbued ability instead of a flat 35s.
- Cursed Relic drops the permanent -14% damage output penalty in favour of a -25% debuff that only lasts the 3.25s duration.
- Scourge loses its innate +17% debuff resist; the active now supplies +20% and applies retroactively, while max health drain per second drops from 2.5% to 2.3%.
- Spirit Burn is no longer an area effect — the 12m radius is gone, explosion damage falls from 110 to 50, the cooldown is tracked per target instead of per item, and the halved NPC cooldown was removed.
- Slowing Bullets stops granting +15% weapon damage, Weighted Shots falls from +40% to +30%, and Tankbuster no longer procs off items.
On the other side of the ledger, Frenzy picks up an innate +10% bullet lifesteal, Fury Trance adds +1m move speed and removes the shooting slow while active, Diviner’s Kevlar goes to +40 spirit power, and Restorative Locket heals 0.5 per boon. Lifestrike and Melee Lifesteal now always prioritise healing off a hero when a trooper is hit at the same time.
Heroes, dashes and base objects
Apollo’s Riposte gained a longer base stun at 0.8s, and its T3 was swapped entirely: instead of extra stun duration it grants +60% bullet, spirit and melee lifesteal against the target for 7s. Doorman received the deepest rework of the patch — rescaled bullet damage, a slower Call Bell charge, a shorter base Doorway with a stronger T1, and a weaker Luggage Cart whose upgrades compensate. Haze had her Sleep Dagger T2 and T3 effects traded around and lost some spirit scaling on Fixation. Celeste came out ahead, Calico and Drifter were trimmed, and Dynamo’s Singularity cooldown dropped to 250s.
Outside hero balance, stamina bucket 3 heroes now dash for 0.72s on the ground and 0.51s in the air, base orb spawners split their souls to nearby players when they expire, and the party/teammate voice volume slider was fixed.
What this means for players using software
Deadlock ships through Steam, so a content-light update is still a rebuilt client. That matters far more than any nerf list: when the binary changes, offsets move, and an aimbot that worked yesterday will lock onto nothing, ESP will draw boxes off-model, and triggerbots may stop firing altogether. Before you queue, check whether your build has been confirmed against the new client on our update status page rather than finding out mid-match.
The balance changes also affect how you configure things. With Spirit Burn now single-target and Tankbuster no longer proccing off items, any automated combo preset built around them is doing something different from what you intended. Echo Shard’s new post-cast delay will break scripts that assume an instant chain, and the slightly longer dash windows on the slowest heroes are worth re-testing if you rely on prediction or auto-dodge logic.
Basic routine still applies: give the first day after a patch to a throwaway account, keep your HWID spoofer current if it is part of your setup, and avoid loading an unverified build on the account you actually care about. Our Deadlock software list tracks the client, but waiting for a compatibility mark is cheaper than eating a crash in the middle of a match.
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