Why Teams are Playing Deadlock on Ascent
Turns we can innovate on Ascent
Deadlock has been seeing a lot of play recently in NA Challengers recently, she’s up to a 14.13% pick rate in stage 2 currently, which puts her in the niche but certainly competitively viable territory of agents.
We’ve seen teams play Deadlock before but the results have never been that great. But in Challengers it seems like teams are really figuring out ways to make the agent successful.
Now I want to focus on Ascent specifically because firstly, we don’t see much innovation on Ascent, and secondly it’s been by far her most successful map when you take into account the fact that Deadlock has the most rounds played on Ascent in NA Challengers.
Actually Pretty Good on Attack
Out of 171 rounds played on Ascent, Deadlock currently holds a 68.42% round win rate, and what is really interesting is that Deadlock is good on both attack and defense, in a vacuum you would expect her to be much stronger on defense and much weaker on attack but they’re basically equal. So how is Deadlock this strong on attack?
Well, considering most people consider Deadlock to be strong on defense, it makes the most sense to start with the part of attack that plays most like defense, post-plants, and its no surprise that Deadlock is incredibly strong here. With a 54-10 post-plant win/loss ratio, Deadlock basically guarantees you’ll win your post-plant as long as she’s alive and has her utility down. It’s very reminiscent of The Guard’s old Haven comp with Viper, where if she could get onto A site, she could throw her orb down CT and make it nearly impossible for the enemy team to retake.
However you’ll also notice that Deadlock really struggles to get into a post-plant, a quarter of all the rounds lost on attack were because she couldn’t get into a post-plant and that’s to be expected, most of Deadlocks abilities are pretty useless for taking map control.
Now we can’t really compare this to the meta comp because everyone plays the meta comp, so you have win rate data where the majority of it is made up of mirror matchups which skews the numbers.
Comps are Important
Deadlock in all of these Ascent games has been played as a secondary sentinel, no exceptions, every team has played a Cypher in addition to the Deadlock. I believe this is for 3 key reasons.
Deadlock can’t hold flank on attack, her utility just doesn’t allow it.
Deadlock shouldn’t lurk, she can, but with most of her power on attack coming in the form of post-plants it just doesn’t make sense for her to be in that role and without a good lurking presence your offense becomes a lot simpler and easier to read.
You need Cypher camera to slightly make up for the lack of map control utility that KAY/O has.
How To Actually Get on Site
I’m going to be mostly referencing Turtle Troop here, they came up with the comp and in my opinion they play it the best.
Without a KAY/O, you lack a slot of space creation tools, no more flashes and knifes to push people off angles.
The obvious answer is to run fakes and with this comp it is certainly a viable strategy, you can sell a convincing fake with Deadlock, Omen, and a cross map Sova dart, something like this.
Obviously fakes can’t make up the majority of your attack, but that’s okay because this comp is really good at another thing. That thing is taking control of the mains, these are pretty pivotal locations on Ascent for both the attackers and defenders, but losing KAY/O and adding Deadlock doesn’t take away the comps ability to take main control. Using utility in this fashion gets you control of the mains fairly easily, Jett and Sova can also be moved around if you need more utility or just bodies.
This is a decent default, you can see if the enemy team will give you anything that will let you open up the round.
If they don’t though, how does this comp play out the round from here? This sounds stupid, but just execute onto a site. Deadlock enables something weird, typically you have to piece out your utility on executes so you can save some for the incoming enemy retake, but because Deadlock is so strong in the post-plant you can dump so much more utility than normal into your executes and make it incredibly difficult for the site anchors, this works if you’re splitting a site or if you’re just 5 man going through one of the mains.
A big caveat is that these executes shouldn’t be telegraphed, ideally you’re executing onto a site that at most has 2 people holding, or a start of round rush that seems to work too. There’s also a big reliance on having good Omen paranoias because outside of Sova dart that’s really your only piece of utility to help your Jett out when they dash in.
Defense is Simple
Quick notes on defense because it’s fairly simple and strong. Deadlock and Cypher each play different sites, you can mix and match utility, for example you can stack Deadlock and Cypher utility onto one site and then hard stack the other site. Anti KAY/O setups are very strong for obvious reasons and that is about it. There is a big emphasis on having stronger mid round ideas due to the lack of flashes and KAY/O knife for mid round fighting/info gathering.
Better Than Meta?
Like pretty much everything in VALORANT, it depends. This comp has clearly defined strengths and weaknesses, it has a strong post-plant and strong executes, but it struggles against OPs and is very dependent on being able to get onto sites and set up post plants to do well on attack. It’s strong on defense against executes, but lacks options in the mid round. It’s hard to say if the downsides of this comp are properly being exploited as well because the skill level in Challengers varies so much.
But honestly, I’m just happy to see some variation on Ascent.