Deadlock Souls Guide

This article is adapted from Prohibit's Youtube video, Deadlock Is Easy, Just Learn This.

After playing Deadlock for a while now, I'm sure we're all familiar with this:

Sometimes the game was just a stomp, and other times it might have been a back and forth epic nailbiter. Regardless of the outcome, I'm certain you remember that one fight or play that made you think, "If only I was a little bit stronger, then I would have won that fight.

"If only I had more Souls."

Although Deadlock is very much a shooter, at its core Deadlock is a MOBA that's like League of Legends or Dota 2. And one of the most core concepts in all of MOBA's is how well you can maximize your farm or economy. Taking down minions and creeps in League and Dota is what gives you gold to buy items and experience to level up. In Deadlock, farm has even more of an impact because their currency system in the game is Souls, which have more implications than just being able to buy more items.

First off, similar to League and Dota, getting Souls allows you to buy more items. However, in Deadlock, the amount of items you have access to buying is much greater. In Deadlock, you have up to 16 item slots that you can eventually upgrade most of your items, to 3k or 6k plus soul items if the game goes incredibly late. Whereas in games like League and Dota, you only have access to six item slots.

Second, Souls are what determines unlocking skill upgrades and increasing your base stats. All of your MOBA's have two different systems entirely, which are usually gold and experience. But in Deadlock, it's just one universal system of Souls. Whenever you reach certain milestones of Souls collected, you obtain more skill points and base stat increases.

This is just based on the total Souls you've collected in that game, and isn't impacted by spending Souls at all. In a game like League, some things are designed to give a lot of gold, but not a lot of experience. And vice versa. In Deadlock, if someone has a lot of Souls, then they are guaranteed to have more items and levels in you. Which makes the game a little bit more snowbally.

Now, there are a ton of ways to gather Souls in Deadlock. Luckily, there are some resources out there that break down all the sources of Souls and how much they give. The main way to gather Souls is through troopers, denizens, heroes, and objectives like the Soul Urn.

These methods should be familiar to most MOBA players. However, there are some new things unique to Deadlock, like crates and breakables. These are things around the map that you can roll into or shoot, and they drop Souls or permanent stat increases. It encourages roaming and map exploration to maximize your soul income, and to create diversity in how you can play the map and increase your team's power. There are a lot of factors that go into each category that affect how many Souls they actually provide at any given time during the game. Let's go over each source and determine which sources are actually the most effective and consistent methods of gathering Souls in Deadlock.

The first thing I want to go over is troopers.

Troopers are the most consistent and reliable source of Souls throughout any game of Deadlock. Due to the deny mechanic giving you the ability to gain half of the soul's value of an enemy trooper, the number of Souls per wave can reach upwards to 6 troopers if you're laning versus somebody. But it's highly unlikely to achieve that. Past the 8 minute mark, troopers drop 100% of their soul value in the soul orbs, so waves can reach up to 8 troopers worth of value.

Farming troopers is much more similar to Dota than it is to League of Legends, and that's mostly because of the deny mechanic. Being able to farm troopers properly is deeply reliant on player skill. Your soul income varies heavily based on how good you are at securing your own Souls and denying the enemy. You can fail to last hit properly, and you can be missing out on 2 thirds of your income from troopers in the early game and even 100% of your income in the mid to late game.

The second thing I want to talk about here is the camps.

Camps comprise of small, medium, and large denizens, and these are the monsters of the game. Small denizens don't provide much value compared to a full wave of troopers, but that's offset by how easy they are to do. Many heroes like Lady Geist for example can take out a full small camp with just one ability after acquiring enough stats and Souls. They are meant to be just something that you can easily do between waves. Medium denizens are where you start seeing actual tradeoffs in value compared to troopers. In the early game, they take a bit of time commitment, so you'll likely lose out on troopers if you don't do camps at the right times.

Large denizens on the other hand, especially the triple camp of large denizens, provide many more Souls in a trooper wave, but the caveat is that they take significant time to do. If you're not a hero that excels at taking camps like Haze, Wraith, or Seven, your time is better spent elsewhere when trying to maximize your Souls.

Another thing about camps is that they take quite a while to respawn. Ranging from anywhere from 4 to 8 minutes, camps aren't a replacement for farming troopers unless you're completely built around taking neutrals. In 6 minutes, you'll have time to farm roughly 14 waves of troopers, which is roughly 6,000 Souls worth of troopers, around 10 minutes. That would take a minimum of 8 large denizen camps to match or pretty much your whole side of the map's neutral camps.

As a low risk option, camps are a great way to supplement your soul income with troopers, but I would never prioritize camps over troopers unless your hero is especially efficient at clearing camps quickly. Be careful though, because your Souls gained through taking down denizens are converted into unsecured Souls. This means you can lose these Souls if you're taken out before you can spend them or before they naturally convert back into secured Souls over time.

The third thing that I want to talk about are Souls dropped from heroes.

Heroes are a source of Souls that are a bit complicated to understand. At a base value, heroes give you a similar amount of Souls as a wave of troopers, but with much higher risk. Same reward for much higher risk doesn't seem very worth it on paper, however there are a few benefits from fighting and taking down other players when you look a little deeper.

First off, Souls are a relative metric. What I mean by this is that the most important thing is how many more Souls you have compared to your opponent. Taking out an enemy hero gives you Souls, but also takes them off the map so that they can't acquire Souls, or defend objectives that you can take down to drop you even more Souls. Although risky, this is the main way to create leads against similarly skilled players.

Finally, the amount of Souls you gain from taking down an enemy hero is actually scaled with how far behind your team is, whereas Souls from troopers remain static, and the value of Souls that drop from them only increases with time throughout the game. This means if you want to change the state of the game in a meaningful way, or break parity with the other team, or catch up to your opponents, looking for fights becomes a much more rewarding option even if the risk is still high.

And the last major source of Souls that I want to talk about are soul urns. Soul urns are the last major way to obtain Souls for yourself and your team. A soul urn run gives your team the rough equivalent of one extra trooper wave.

The soul urn will spawn in one of two locations on the map and rotate after each spawn. The urn first becomes active at the 10 minute mark and responds 5 minutes after completing a run. If your team is behind, the courier while carrying the urn gains more movement speed. And if you successfully deliver the urn, your team are rewarded extra bonus souls depending on how far behind that you actually were. A minor method to gaining Souls that's worth mentioning are breakables. The drop rate of Souls from breakables is about 40%, and the amount of Souls you can gain from a single breakable isn't very high either. There are some breakables called cinder sacrifices that spawn around the map every few minutes.

These machines give lots of Souls, but they only spawn starting at 8 minutes with a 4 minute respawn timer. They give a large chunk of Souls when they first start spawning, but don't scale well throughout the game. The main draw of most breakables are the fact that they drop permanent stat increases, although you won't be leveling and purchasing significantly more items from breakables. Your hero strength will definitely increase noticeably as long as you know the most efficient route while moving around the map.

Now, those are all the main ways to generate Souls throughout the game of Deadlock. I didn't cover souls dropped from structures very much like guardians, walkers, and shrines, but that's because they're a very fairly small percentage of your soul income, and their soul value doesn't scale throughout the game. So they're fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, at least when it comes to gathering Souls. They're definitely still important when trying to progress the state of the game in the map.

But this isn't the whole story when it comes to Souls in Deadlock. We can map out what the best sources of souls are when it comes to Deadlock, but since Deadlock is a MOBA, there's another factor that drastically changes what the best sources of Souls are at any given point in the game and that's the concept of scarcity and dynamic value.

You might be wondering, yo, what the hell is this guy talking about? Well, when looking at a MOBA, a big part of the game is resource management and distribution throughout the game. We learned earlier that troopers are a consistent source of Souls, but in Deadlock, there are six players on your team, and there are only four lanes.

This means that at least half of the lanes can't get full value out of the Souls of their troopers since they have to share the Souls with a teammate. This is what I mean by scarcity and dynamic value. The value of things like troopers and heroes change based on a variety of factors, like how many players are there, and how far ahead you are or how far behind you are, or the time of the game.

So the value of things like troopers and heroes change based upon a variety of factors, and not everyone can benefit from the full value. So our evaluation on what the best course of action at any given time in the game is incredibly dynamic based on the game state. The relative value of the choice to go for ganks, farm camps, or breakables goes up for teammates in a duo lane, because not only are there alternative options now better or equal in comparison, you're also giving an additional player on your team more soul value out of troopers by leaving them alone.

There are a bunch of resources on the map, and your playstyle and hero choice directly impact which sources of Souls become easier for your team to lean into.

This is something that a lot of players instinctively internalize as they improve at MOBA games, and it becomes second nature to them. If you're just learning or getting started with the game, or new to the genre in general, just being aware of this concept is good enough. So that when you review your game, or you're wondering what you can do better, you have another piece of knowledge that you can point to a potential improvement, rather than just blaming everything on how bad your teammates were.