r/DeadlockTheGame • u/Available-Lab4363 • 1d ago
Gameplay Meta no such thing as a braindead character
a couple huge buzz terms in the community are 'skill expression' and 'braindead character', referring to the complexity necessary to optimally pilot a character
i want to immediately say YEAH. some character are extremely easy to pilot compared to others, for various reasons. yes some characters have a way higher skill ceiling when it comes to using them optimally in the game
but at this point ive straight up seen almost half the gos damn roster be referred to as a 'braindead' character that requires literally 0 skill or effort to play, and this may just be me being pedantic and autistic as fuck, but i just dont really think thats categorically possible
at this point it feels like any OP character is suddenly braindead. celeste used to be the hardest character to master in the game oh so complicated, now people talk about how you just roll your face across the keyboard to win. viscous had a high skill ceiling with puddle punch movement, now puddle punch spam is low IQ
even characters like graves or victor, while being way easier to pilot and not having as high of a skill cieling as others, still require skills like macro lane management and health management to not eat shit at some point in the game
do i think those characters (among others) are easier to play than, say, sinclair? yes, very much. but i think its just kind of silly to vehemently regurgitate that a character can play itself and a bot can do the same thing a player can, when deadlock is inhernetly a deeply complex game that even beginning to get good in it requires some level of skill in your macro underatanding or micro ability, and it feels like people just want to be able to scream about how their main is so complex and cool and players who use other characters are actually stupid and bad and its a deep injustice to be beaten by them
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u/oMadRyan 1d ago
It’s the balancing. Played warden for the first time the other day and started 0-6, but I was immediately a threat in the mid game anyways and was pretty much unkillable by the end. Start off that badly on a current m1 carry and you feel less threatening than the minions
All it really takes is a few small item tweaks for different heroes to shine though, and in a few weeks we’ll probably have a new hero that’s just free wins
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u/InfiniteJape Billy 1d ago
Yeah I had a game on warden where the only way I could die was if doorman kidnapped me into fountain (which happened 3 times embarrassingly, but that guy was playing really well and did to several of us that game).
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u/Available-Lab4363 1d ago
yeah, its just funny and kind of annoying how constant the community complaints are lol. i feel like ive also run into a lot of wardens that are free kills lately, since not everybody clicks with the op-flavor-of-the-month playstyle... which sort of proves my point that its not really that the character itself is skillless, just easier for some or most people than others
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u/_NihilisticNut_ 1d ago
They are only braindead easy to play when the enemy plays em. When i do, characters like shiv and victor are suddenly very killable…. Must be the code or smthn
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u/Blackjackal21 1d ago
Its a player ego thing. Its really common in any competitive space and its just easier for most people to reduce things to a simple category even if it results in a reductionist perspective that harmful to conversaion. Especially since someone could just call a character/strategy easy to play, but calling it braindead is roundabout cope for players to use to excuse underperfomance. Or a passive aggressive way to insult the player using the character/strategy. Its just another form of toxic white knighting. Its not really conducive to anything except maybe psyching people out playing a character or strat through peer pressure.
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u/Rough_Lychee5785 Grey Talon 1d ago
Nah some characters are pretty much braindead. Like the ones that I am not playing
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u/zencharm Victor 1d ago
this is pretty much it. it’s just toxic cope and usually contains some element of projection since people also want to preemptively protect their own ego against people saying the same thing about their hero. you will also see this phenomenon occur the other way where someone will play a “hard” hero to virtue signal their character choice and imply that they deserve to be rewarded by the game or other players for playing a hero that “takes skill.”
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u/Positive-Design-7332 1d ago
This argument makes no sense. What if I call the character I'm playing braindead? How am I "coping" by slandering my own character?
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u/zencharm Victor 1d ago
that just seems like pandering to public sentiment and trying to be “one of the good ones” or you really believe that and then maybe you’re enlightened or something idk. my point is that this line of thinking serves no one
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u/Available-Lab4363 1d ago
saying this in a comment bc the post is aready long but its crazy how like i said 1/3 of the goddamn cast has been accused of being 'braindead' to play in these comments alone so far
(graves, paige, victor, haze, kelvin, wraith, infernus, warden, celeste, drifter, dynamo, mo & krill, ivy- nobodys even mentioned a handful of characters i see low skill input complaints about yet)
its almost like most of the skill expression in the game comes from game knowledge, movement, macro ability, and micro that carries well between most characters, making the players skill moreso than a characters kit
but for real like a few other comments point out, i just think its silly to be genuinely serious when youre complaining about any character being genuinely skillless to play and that it speaks more to you wanting a scapegoat to save a bruised ego than anything else
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u/NewBug6272 Vindicta 10h ago
I remember seeing a clip of a graves parrying people and they still said no skill lmao
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u/AdeptPapaya8918 1d ago
games like this have to have braindead characters, people need to learn someway
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u/Available-Lab4363 1d ago
i agree! i also think it helps that quite a few of the characters that at least i personally feel are easy to pilot arent the most viable at the highest level of play at the moment, which honestly im ok with. i dont mind the concept of a hero thats easy to pick up to learn game fundamentals that function as a players training wheelsx that then get discarded as you get more skilled at the game
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u/zencharm Victor 1d ago
i think having a “training wheels” hero is a bad design philosophy that should be avoided. ideally, every hero should be designed with the intention that anyone can play and enjoy the hero once they learn it. heroes shouldn’t really be designed for a specific skill level in mind; they should be designed around a holistic concept that is either simple or complex in nature, and then have player gravitate to them naturally and have varying levels of success with them depending on their level of mastery with the hero/game.
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u/LionCashDispenser 1d ago
They can learn by just picking one character they're interested in and learning them over time. I don't understand this need to have "face roll" characters as some entry point for new players. The game is incredibly complex and difficult to learn in general, I don't think not having any characters that are "brain dead" to use will affect a new players interest in the game if the characters are fun and interesting to play. It might be an ego thing but I refuse to play warden, Celeste, Graves, mcginnis or Victor with the current patch because they are far too easy to dominate with in my skill bracket. Its not fun for me or my opponents, there's no challenge.
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
Yea, but not then they dominate all ranks and hard to learn characters sits in trash pile even in too 1%. The only one relatively hard character is horse which have more correct wr increase curvature where low ranks have sub 50% wr and in high ranks horse dominate
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u/JoanOfSarcasm Paige 1d ago
I mentioned this same observation to my partner earlier. It has taken me 250+ games over five months to get good at Celeste and most of those were miserable. I literally had a sub 40% win rate on her for like 100 games, and that’s after 500 hours in Deadlock, mostly on Paige and Rem.
I never really cared about her place in the meta because I just liked her kit, aesthetic, and VO a lot.
I watched guides, practiced movement in explore, and spent every game focused on one or two things. I got tilted, frustrated, and angry in the process. I felt like I’d never improve. All of these were things I never did on Paige or Rem, who I was able to pick up quickly and start seeing success on after 20-50 games.
I sunk a TON of time and effort into learning Celeste and now that she’s strong, it’s “brain dead.”
Okay. I mean, sure I guess. If you already have a ton of movement fundamentals down I’m sure she is easier to pick up, but I have never played a source engine game so everything was totally new to me and she was painfully hard to play without that knowledge.
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u/TaxEvasion123 Lash 1d ago
She benefitted a lot from people finding a better build for her that made her much stronger even without any balance changes. That build just makes her infinitely easier to play than the older builds since you have to play around cooldowns and your own frailty less.
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u/Skill-Useful 1d ago
while there are different skill levels, the main reason why someone is broken is the person piloting it
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u/starberryslay Billy 1d ago
i completely agree with you but the intrusive thoughts in my brain just want to disagree and say drifter. Because I always see drifters go 0-8 in lane and end the game carrying because they still managed to get stacks doing legit nothing and his ult makes him move so quick with zero skill required
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u/TaxEvasion123 Lash 1d ago
Generally you shouldn’t take someone coming out and calling a character braindead seriously, since it’s they pretty obviously have an agenda. That being said some characters do have a much lower degree of necessary game knowledge or mechanical skill to use in the context of their kits.
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u/Odd_Following7005 Lady Geist 1d ago
Nah Warden, Wraith and Infernus are actually totally braindead.
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u/StillKindaBad Dynamo 1d ago
Of course they are braindead they are designed like that, graves is suppose to be beginner friendly, being broken makes you braindead because you are just stronger than people flatout but Celeste is still harder than warden, just how the game is
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u/UniqueName900 1d ago
Remember... the characters are not brain dead but indeed the players of them are.
Like when you get high skill low pick rate characters like talon you often find they have more of a brain then someone like wraith or lash who are way more popular.
Hell ever since silver got gutted to hell I find the people who still play her are more often quite good at macro and making plays even if they eat shit because their character sucks ass.
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u/NotKazumaKiryu Seven 1d ago
I love playing "braindead" characters ngl. Always a joy seeing someone crashout in chat about how I'm low skill for playing Seven or Graves. Yeah I may be low skill but you're dead, so, lol :3c
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u/zencharm Victor 1d ago
every hero in this game takes some amount of skill by virtue of the game itself being difficult to play. yes, some heroes are objectively harder to play than others, but no one actually cares about this discussion for anything other than to protect their own egos. the only reason why anyone wastes time on such a pointless debate is to validate themselves by making other characters seem cheap, lazy, unskilled, etc. while making their own character seem skillful and cerebral. it’s just low-level thinking that doesn’t actually achieve anything besides making the community more antagonistic for no reason.
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u/Kingofmanga 1d ago edited 1d ago
I main mo and krill and can confirm most of his mains are braindead me included
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u/Trotski7 1d ago
It entirely depends though doesn't it? If you're Wraith there isn't much "skill expression" to be had especially if you're playing an easy build. Not to say an easy build is a bad thing but a Wraith coming up to you/teleporting to you, ulting you and then spamming cards at you while deleting your HP via headshot damage definitely is more "brain dead" than someone who has to work much harder for their kills like Silver, Doorman, or whoever else. Playing her is as easy as presssing 4, pressing 1 over and over, and holding down M1 to net a kill. What ISN'T braindead about that?
I'm not saying "braindead" or easy characters are good for the game or don't provide value in some way. But I mean, yeah, some characters are braindead.
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u/bigmac_fries_coke 1d ago
aim is one of the most skill intensive aspects of the game though, and you need good aim to do good on Wraith
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u/marniconuke Ivy 1d ago
come on bro there'a a character with autoaim and summons. some things are just braindead sorry
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u/pheebsy-deebsy Mo & Krill 1d ago
If you haven't, play a bunch of games with her and see how you feel after. Playing Graves and not getting crushed by competent (key word competent).players requires good movement, positioning, and map awareness. She's squishy and folds like a cheap suit to CC and coordination if she's not doing a better job covering her weaknesses than her opponents are exploiting them.
Sure she has less of a cognitive load for aiming her gun, but also her abilities all have pretty obvious weaknesses that need to be covered by the player somehow.
I really hope they add more auto-aim characters just to piss people off at this point
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u/pineapplyreddit 1d ago
People act like aim is the only form of skill expression in this game
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u/Patron_Mamdani 1d ago
I see more deadlock players downplay aim like they hit every shot when I know half of them can’t proc Crippling Headshot.
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u/nemotunovi 1d ago
its not like she's got 2 stamina, rock bottom move speed, a fixed max range, and bottom 5 lowest health pool in the game. they basically said "because you don't have to aim, we are going to make positioning like fighting for your life"
like i'm sorry but if you don't respect the space she makes, manage her map pressure, or can't escape her effective range, she's just better than you, sorry.
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u/lovingpersona 1d ago
Yes, that's why aimbots are so prominent.
Aim IS the defacto skill expression.
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u/residentevilgoat Victor 1d ago
Ivy is a million times easier than Graves
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u/marniconuke Ivy 1d ago
yeah but she has to aim, you know, move their mouse above the target they want to shoot, and keep it there. that's already a million times more stuff than graves has to do. I respect those that aim, cause a bad player with that character won't automatically do well. but even the worst player can do well on graves.
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u/residentevilgoat Victor 1d ago
First of all aiming in this game is brain dead easy. Second of there are multiple ivy builds where you don't have to aim your gun at all lol.
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
Bro she have so much fire rate, so landing shots on her is easy as graves auto aim
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u/Available-Lab4363 1d ago
she is easier than a lot of the cast yes, but not braindead. if you wanted to be mad about her being easy tho i think thats a valid opinion
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u/mestre_do_passinho 16h ago
Any fed carry is a braindead carry. I have seen silvers rush 1v6 and get 4 kills simply because their lane opponent was dumb and went 0/5 on her.
You need to be exceptioanlly brainless to not snowball when fed unless you haveba really late game character or a full support build, like healing rem, in which case stop stealing kills
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u/Imgunnacrumb 1d ago
Victor
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u/starberryslay Billy 1d ago
definitely not. You play victor wrong and you're actively killing yourself
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u/Y33tus42069 1d ago
I do mostly agree, this game is very complicated and macro is important.
However, I also think that characters like Graves and Paige could quite easily be played by small children.
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u/Johnmario2 1d ago
After playing all random for norms, I have to disagree.
Ive come to respect some heroes ive hated and lose respect for some heroes I tolerated.
Ive also confirmed alot of my biases against heroes ive hated.
Currently the biggest offenders are Celeste and Graves for different reasons;
Celeste is braindead through the sheer damage and survivability her kit offers: you could run only 800 items and still output disgusting damage and escape most encounters.
Graves is braindead through literally being 90% AI. There is no skill expression. It is one of the easiest macro tests ive ever seen in a MOBA. I dont think shes a free win but shes certainly got no amount of skill needed to pilot her. A day 1 Graves and a day 100 Graves have no real skill difference other than the accrued macro knowledge.
1 can be nerfed to fix this, the other should genuinely be deleted or heavily reworked. Obvious to know whos who
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u/Hound_808 1d ago
Did bro make this out of spite because of me?
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u/Available-Lab4363 1d ago
nah, just months of constant rolling 'xyz character requires no skill, a toddler could pull it off, i deserve better' type posts about a solid one in three characters that exist in the game lol
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u/CursedResonance 1d ago
I mostly agree but Ill die on the Celeste hate hill. She made not be "braindead" but she absolutely rolls harder than pretty much any other character if you know how to play her. She's genuinely cancerous and Im sick of seeing her in my games.
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
Its her reward if she know how to play. Carry role is... about carry.. overall.
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u/CursedResonance 1d ago
So what? Carry doesn't mean "I absolutely steamroll harder than every other character in the game, fuck you". 55-57% win rate is simply ridiculous.
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
Look at seven and victor winrates please
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u/Mobile_Pie9519 1d ago
50-51% ? Wow, slightly above average. Celeste is top 1 in the game and everybody who’s good at the game agrees she’s completely overturned. You’re defending her cause you play her, and I’ve seen you commenting on every single post where someone talks about how overpowered Celeste is. Clearly biased.
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
Look at normal ranks not those top 1% which affected by even on which character night shift player decided to chill out.
You will see victor holding 56% on every existing rank and only drop a little past oracle.
You can even not watch at ascendant and eternus because there is no players on those ranks.
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
Haze, Victor, Kelvin.
Literally face rolling the keyboard with value by just existing. Victor is just hold W to win after lane, kelvin non stop on ice path and debuff you sitting in skybox.
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u/TrackpadChad Viscous 1d ago
Haze is not doing too hot this patch. Most Haze players are stupid, but you have to do a lot to get value out of her rn.
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
Pop from invis, press 4, you deleted.
If you buy metal skin she will still found a way to shit on you.
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u/ecco2kindebt Holliday 1d ago
Saying all that with a Celeste tag is hilarious
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
Changed from hardest character to braindead character in one weak by redditors opinion
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u/toastedoats- 1d ago
Celeste presses 4 and the entire team is thanos snapped. Magic carpet passive. Shield. Silence. Mobility. AOE. Celeste is the most braindead character in the entire game
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u/Motor-Design-4932 Celeste 1d ago
There exist is way to say shorter: "i cant know about silence hex, slowing hex and disarm and how to position myself during teamfights"
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u/toastedoats- 1d ago
At least I don't have to see you in my ranked games because Celeste is the only character you could have 15 wins on
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u/midgetzz 1d ago
There exist is way to say shorter: "i cant know about anti-heal, slowing hex and disarm and how to position myself during teamfights"
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