we just saw the first pro tournament for deadlock where four teams were invited to compete for $10,000 the tournament featured two hero b per team a hero draft and some pretty competitive games all things considered and most importantly some crucial lessons that we can learn from and after studying all of the vods I want to go over what I learned from the Aurora $10,000 tournament that I think would be useful for just about anyone who wants to get ahead of the game Let's dive into it first and foremost this tournament just shredded any doubts that
Kelvin might just be the best hero in the game at the moment sure he's not a flashy damage dealer with nice looking feet like vindicta but the amount of utility he can provide as a support is gamechanging his ultimate lets him seal off any objective that you might want uncontested like the guardian mid boss or even the weakend patron it even lets you trap yourself with an enemy for a free kill while you're getting yourself healed up like crazy and not only that but his ice path lets him cross the map insanely fast and you
know at any level with his teammates being able to use the same paths with increased move speed the amount of support map control and objective control is so good on Kelvin and it's no surprise that he had a 100% pick or ban rate in this tournament we also found that punching generally speaking is heavily underutilized by most players well sure constantly punching players is going to lead to you getting parried stunned and then killed that shouldn't stop you from from punching Troopers jungle mobs objectives like the guardians or even the mid boss in most cases
especially in the early game punching deal significantly higher damage per second than your weapons or abilities and properly using it will let you deal insane damage to Guardians and even to the mid boss much sooner than you would think and while it might be hard to know when it's time to use your guns or abilities or use your melee while it's not perfect you can actually calculate whether it's more efficient for you to shoot an objective or mob by holding link Tab and then hovering over your here portrait this shows your flat melee damage per
melee your damage per second amongst other things and while the melee damage might change as you get more items the amount of melees per second that you pull off doesn't and at the time of this video you can pull off one heavy melee every 1 second and some change so as long as your melee damage per second is higher than the normal damage per second or DPS then it's going to be more worth it to punch not to mention that it also does AOE damage that being said said be really careful if you're punching Guardians
because in order to do so you're going to have to be overextended there's a chance you're going to take damage from the guardian or you're going to end up getting caught by the enemy and their teammates so don't just blindly do it as for Guardians if you get close enough to them they'll actually go for a punch on you and not many notice but you can actually Parry the guardian as well which temporarily stuns them and stops them from dealing damage to you or to your Troopers even if you aren't going for punches trying to
stun the Guardians when possible will stop them from dealing unnecessary damage to you you or your Troopers which will give you a lot more pushing power punching is generally really good in dead luck as you might know by now punching a trooper with low enough Health secures a sole orb without the enemy getting a chance to deny it and instead of taking a risk of a skill check the pros just went for a melee almost every time and they did it constantly another thing that the pros do is that if a teammate dies near them
or if an objective is captured in front of them then they start shooting the souls that you know come out of it this the nice enime team a lot of souls that they should have gotten otherwise and it really makes makes a huge difference if they're really close to the dead teammate or objective they could also punch the Sals which is a safer way of making sure you get all of them but obviously you'll probably come at a risk of getting poked when doing jungle clears they also just kept punching them and in some cases
there were even lineups that let them hit as many jungle mobs as possible in a single hit which lets them clear these jungles in no time without wasting shots in their magazine or without wasting their cooldowns things to the ban system and also just going off how the games went overall we also got to see what Heroes other than Kell are considered big problems in deadlock if you look at the highest level which probably should trickle down Heroes like qu Dynamo and Warden can have insanely high impact in their own ways to the point where
it's safer to just ban them all together than risk the enemies getting them instead I mean Mo and krill are in insanely good at the highest level not only can they cross the map at record-breaking speeds but also have a super fast jungle clear great survivability and gank ability but if they're pushing with a teammate nearby using their ultimate on practically any enemy will turn them into a complete free kill Dynamo on the other hand is just too good of an allrounder to pass up on with a knockup a Teleport and a void ability for
himself and teammates a self heal and speed boost and an incredibly strong ultimate that will Stone lock the entire team if you do it right and as for Warden he just deals so much damage if you get him rolling and he's going to be impossible to deal with when it comes to how the lanes play out it seems that the optimal setup Lane sorts at one 1221 setup with single Lane sworts of sides and the double Lanes in the middle this gives each team the highest amount of map presence possible with the highest concentration of
players being around the middle at all times as for the macro the overall strategy of the games it became abundantly clear what both teams were playing for at all times and all the things that they did in order to get towards those goals obviously to win a game you need to defeat the patron and obviously there's a bunch of things you need to do to get there but in these pro games every player constantly made an effort to get as much damage on the enemy objectives as possible at any point in time there wasn't as
much fighting or all inning as you might imagine unless an opportunity presented itself and as soon as their Lane was empty their opponent would take this opportunity and deal significant damage if not destroy their guardian or even walk her entirely so if the enemy team grouped for no reason the players might just keep pushing the lane because they get something for free in some cases that led to a trade in some cases that led to a completely free turret without losing anything I mean look we're only 3 minutes in in this clip and this Guardian
is already at half Health it makes sense that you want to push the lanes in every Guardian that does go down gives you significantly more control of the lanes of the map overall since you now can rotate around more freely without detection and you have access to zip lines that go deeper into the enemy base but most importantly it unlocks Flex slots and every time you get a flex slot that gives you the possibility of getting hell of a lot farther ahead in your Bel than enemies could ever dream of there was a lot of
trading objectives constantly pushing and only fighting if it really was necessary other than punching the objectives number thing is s do a lot is something I have covered previously where you want to slide on nearby steps or Ledges or whatever when shooting an objective because it gives you infinite ammo for the duration of the slide and that lets you extend your magazine near infinitely obviously punching is generally more damage but if you want to play safer it's probably smarter to shoot at the guardian from the safety of your steps rather than being all the way
next to it because you will not be able to escape if somebody comes but then go for the Guardians and Walkers another thing that stood out to me is just how big of a priority mid boss is in this tournament most of the pros would start doing the mid boss in the early game practically as soon as it spawned assuming they had enough time to kill it before the enemy team could come and deny it in some cases they did a mid boss after team fight and in some cases they just relied on the element
of surprise and it almost always if not always paid off because of how quick they killed it the buff that you get along with the pushing power that all of your Troopers get lets you push up all your lanes that much more easily which lets you get those Guardians those Walkers and and all of those objectives that you're so desperately fighting for practically for free obviously fighting the mid boss would normally be near impossible this early in the game but they just punch it death punching just deal so much damage I am baffled the soul
earn is also really important maybe not as important as the mid boss but it's still vital to the success of your team and both the mid boss and the Soul earns were practically ran as soon as they were available and then immediately after they came off coold down and respawn there was also an incredible amount of micro strats to make the run more safe including Ivy Ting the player who's holding the ear to deliver them to the other side using rescue beams to joink the carrier towards the other side or creating a long ice bridge
that the carrier can run on for an easy deliver I also want to mention a really good counter that I saw which is picking up something akin to a knockdown specifically to shut down vindicta players it has a decent range and if it stuns her it not only keeps her stunned for a few seconds but it takes her out of the air and the stun doesn't actually start ticking down until she hits the floor powerups that you can find in these two places on the map can actually be picked up by several people at the
same time if you stand on top of these grates right when Buffs spawn then anyone who's sitting on top of it will also receive the buff there was also this tiny thing that I saw tons of the pros do here which is this tiny roll out across the bridge where you dash onto the bridge and then slide to use the tiny stairs and then just slide a little bit farther if you buy an item that gives you additional ability charges like rapid recharge then you not only get additional charge but all of your charges are
refreshed and of course I was happy to see that an item that I initially rode off still was seeing some uses in the highest levels of the game The Magic Carpet actually has some use for certain Heroes with large area of effect abilities that normally rely on the element of surprise you know like seven the carpet is great for rotations and split pushes but it can also be used sort of like an enduring leap to jump straight into enemy's back lines or just position yourself perfectly but since you can fly you can come off of
angles that they would never expect and get some incredibly valuable ults off but yeah that was most of it there are definitely more things to gather from this tournament but I think it was worth mentioning some things that really stood out to me that I knew that you guys could benefit from if you guys enjoyed the video hit the like and if you want to get even better at that like because I know you do click the video on the screen thanks for watching and I'll see you next time peace out
