Beginners Guide to Deadlock Movement.

The entirety of this page will be written by compsoter. Feel free to DM or ping me on Discord if you have any questions.

Hi. I'm compsoter. I run the Deadlock Movement Wiki (formerly the Deadlock Movement Doc) and am probably the biggest nerd about movement available. The following will be an introduction and path through movement

Universal Movement

Some baseline information about Deadlock

  • Deadlock uses ticks to determine actions; every 64th of a second, the game calculates game logic. Ticks are used as a time measurement; they are simply 1/64th (or 0.01562) of a second.
  • Deadlock uses Hammer Units, or Units as a form of distance measurement. These are equivalent to inches, or 0.0254 of a metre. This also means that metres are equivalent to 39.37 units. The wiki also uses measurements such as metres per second (m/s) or units per second (u/s).

In my opinion, it's best to learn about universal movement options before your own characters movement options; it's best to have a stable foundation to iterate upon.

Before you get started, I highly recommend changing your dash and crouch keybinds to keys that are not Shift and Ctrl. I personally use the side buttons of my mouse and this is the default within the movement community. Others have switched over to ESDF and used surrounding keys, or have switched to different input methods entirely.

Below is an ordered list of movement tech/movement concepts that you should learn, or that I think are necessary to learn. Anything else is additional tech that you can learn but aren't necessary. While learning these concepts, I recommend going into the Sandbox map with fast stamina and no cooldowns enabled and implementing these into your muscle memory. Also try practising combining techniques.

If you come across a term not familiar to you that has a link, click on it and read it. There's no harm in extra reading.

On the right of every page will be a clip. Click on the clip to view the technique or concept in action.

I recommend learning movement in this order:

  1. Walking/Sprinting
  2. Jumping
  3. Stamina
  4. Dashing
  5. Dash Jumping
  6. Mantling
  7. Heavy Melee
  8. Sliding
  9. Transit Lines
  10. Zipline Momentum Cancelling into Zipdashes
  11. Wall Jumping
  12. Slide Bunnyhopping
  13. Instant Air Dash
  14. Air Strafing if you play Holliday Holliday.

After that, I recommend learning the following to boost your knowledge and gain a little edge over opponents:

  1. Warp Stone Warp Dash Jump
  2. Air Strafing
  3. Viscous Viscous Puddle Punch Boosting
  4. Viscous Viscous Wall Punch Dash even if you do not play him.
  5. Crouch Gliding
  6. Majestic Leap Majestic Leap Cancel

Character Tech

What is a movement character?

Quite frequently I see this question; what are movement characters?

I classify movement characters as characters whose significant portion of their game plan revolves around a movement ability/attribute, has complex techniques around a singular attribute or needs universal tech to properly function. I would classify:

as movement characters, with Shiv Shiv and Viscous Viscous as the characters who have complex techniques.

Around half of the cast has no character tech, for the simple reason which is they have no abilities that can affect movement. A quarter of characters have character specific movement tech which is surface level and is not complex or cannot be expanded upon. A quarter of characters have character specific movement tech that is highly complex.

If you do want to read about character specific techniques, I recommend reading the Viscous Viscous and Shiv Shiv in particular if you are interested.

What after?

Join us in the Deadlock Discord guide, Understanding Movement for movement discussion and exploration.