A 'small update' just shook up Deadlock's basic mechanics and tweaked nearly every hero

Deadlock's not-so-secret invite-only beta has been a blast if you don't mind your favorite MOBA getting fundamentally altered every few months. The game has switched up how many lanes it has, dropped half a dozen new heroes in one go, and now, majorly overhauled lane creep mechanics in what Valve calls a "small update."

Troopers, Deadlock's version of the lane creep you'd find in any given MOBA, grant souls on death which players exchange for items. In the past, you immediately got half the souls (split with nearby allies) when a trooper died and had to shoot the other half out of the air as it floated from the corpse. Now, the first half of the income also has to be manually secured—it will fall to the ground, and you'll have to walk within a short radius of the souls to claim them.

Unlike the souls which have to be shot, these can't be denied by the enemy team and will appear translucent to them. Still, it will certainly lead to more fights breaking out in the laning phase; heroes that prefer to stay back and farm from afar will have to get closer to the action so they can snag those precious souls.

Another significant trooper change is that the healing trooper will no longer, well, heal. Instead, it will drop a medic pack when killed by the enemy team, which will restore 10% of nearby players' missing health. Both of these changes remind me of Blizzard's MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, where minions drop EXP as small orbs on the ground and every wave drops a "healing globe," though in Heroes they are claimable by either team. If you're going to take, may as well take from the best.

The biggest takeaways as I see them are twofold: players will have to be more aggressive in lane to secure all their income and keep their health topped off, and it will be easier to keep a steady income in the late game, since you can arrive to a lane after all the troopers have died and still get their souls. But knowing Valve's definition of a "small update," that's not all.

Nearly every hero has also seen a balance pass. Most of these are minor number tweaks, but other heroes have gotten substantial changes; Mirage's ultimate can now take him to friendly objectives, for example. You can find the full list of patch notes here.