Valve has released a fresh update for Deadlock, focusing on refining the balance for the Soul Urn and Unstable Rift objectives while shifting the power levels of several key heroes. While less sweeping than last week's major overhaul, these changes aim to improve the flow of mid-match objectives and tighten up the current meta.

Objective Adjustments: Soul Urn and Unstable Rift

Valve continues to iterate on the distinction between the Urn and the Rift. Catching a Soul Urn runner is now more manageable; the runner's move speed bonus has been reduced, and they no longer receive a sprint bonus unless they are currently behind. To assist defenders, the Urn now broadcasts its location every six seconds—down from eight—and its audio cues are audible from a greater distance.

The Unstable Rift has received significant tuning to make it a more high-stakes objective:

  • Rift Troopers: Winning teams now spawn troopers with 30–45% Spirit Resist and 25% Melee Resistance. While they spawn at a slightly slower rate, teams that are behind can now secure a total of 14 troopers, up from 12.
  • Rift Mechanics: The warning time for the Rift has been cut from 25 seconds to 20, putting a higher premium on scouting. Additionally, the resist aura for trailing teams has been expanded from 20 meters to 35 meters.

Elsewhere in the core mechanics, the bounty split for nearby players has been reduced from 40% to 30%, shifting more of the reward toward a team-wide distribution. Additionally, the tier-four Spirit item Scourge has received a minor nerf to its damaging aura.

Hero Balance: Winners and Losers

Graves players have plenty to celebrate today. Her Jar of Dead now builds faster from neutral creeps, and the heal effect benefits from a 60% increase in spirit scaling. Her Essence Theft now counts melee hits toward stat-stealing and can target an extra opponent at max rank. While Grasping Hands has a slightly reduced immobilize duration, its tier-three cooldown has been slashed by four seconds.

Silver is also seeing a resurgence, with her ultimate cooldown reduced to 60 seconds. While still higher than the 40-second window seen a month ago, it is a significant improvement over the 80-second cooldown from previous iterations.

Conversely, Shiv remains a target for nerfs. Bloodletting now clears less deferred damage and has a five-second longer base cooldown. His Killing Blow fatal threshold has been lowered, and he sees reduced spirit scaling on Serrated Knives and Slice and Dice.

Other notable hero changes include:

  • Yamato: Flying Slash range is down to 26 meters, and tier-three additional charge delays have increased to four seconds. Importantly, dashing to an ally now requires an alt-cast input to prevent accidental targeting.
  • Drifter: Suffers from reduced Bullet Damage gain per boon. Stalker’s Mark has a nerfed early-game cooldown and reduced bleed bonus at max rank.
  • Mirage: Trades cooldown improvements for Djinn’s Mark and Traveler for weaker spirit scaling on Fire Scarabs and Dust Devil.
  • Victor: Receives a 35-second reduction on his ultimate cooldown.

The update is live now on PC. With nearly six months having passed since the Old Gods, New Blood update, players are keeping a close eye on what the next major evolution for the title might look like.