Deadlock Tier List: Best Heroes After the November Patch

Deadlock's November 4 minor update didn't add a new hero or rework the map, but it quietly reshuffled the hero shooter's power rankings just a day before Ranked Beta Season 2 began. If you're building a lineup for your climb, here's an opinion tier list of every hero Valve touched, built from the actual numbers in the patch notes rather than guesswork.

01What Changed in the November 4 Update

Valve shipped the Minor Update on November 4 in the final stretch before Ranked Beta Season 1 ended and Season 2 opened on November 5. It landed on top of the Halloween 2026 + Gameplay Update from October 30, which had already reworked the Mid-Boss fight, Haunts, comeback gold and several core items. The November 4 notes focus entirely on seven heroes: Apollo, Baba, Celeste, Deadman Danny, Mo & Krill, Nurse Harrow and Rat King, alongside a diminishing-returns nerf to the Healbane item's stack scaling.

None of the changes are headline reworks. They're the kind of numbers-only pass Valve tends to ship between seasons: ability cooldowns shifted by a second, scaling coefficients trimmed by a few tenths, a cast range pulled in by five meters. But in a hero shooter where every percentage point compounds across a 30-minute match, small numbers add up fast, and this patch created clear winners and losers heading into the new ranked season.

02How We Built This Tier List

This is our opinion ranking, not a leaked win-rate chart from Valve. There's no public match data behind any of these placements. Every tier below comes from reading the verified numbers in the official patch notes and weighing how much each change actually moves a hero's kit, not from invented stats or guessed percentages. A hero who picks up several buffs that stack on an already-strong core climbs further than a hero getting the same raw number of buff lines spread across a weaker kit. Treat this as a starting point for your Season 2 pool, not gospel, and weigh it against whatever you already play well.

03S-Tier: Rat King and Mo & Krill

Rat King comes out of this patch as the clearest winner on the list. His base bullet damage rises from 5.7 to 5.8 and his ammo count climbs from 24 to 26, both small gun-feel buffs that add up to meaningfully more sustained damage per clip. His ultimate, Rule, Ratannia!, gets a bigger push: move speed while it's active increases from +3m to +4m, and its first tier now also knocks 25 seconds off the cooldown, letting him use the ultimate far more often across a long fight. The one offsetting change, a shorter fuse-time extension on Scrap Grenade when meleed, is a minor nerf that doesn't come close to canceling out the rest.

Mo & Krill gets a similarly clean set of buffs with no real downside attached. Scorn's heal-from-heroes multiplier rises from 1.2x to 1.3x, Burrow's damage radius grows by half a meter, Sand Blast's tier-two slow and dash-reduction both jump to -28%, and Combo now restores 50 health per kill instead of 40. Every one of those numbers reinforces the same sustain-and-disruption identity Mo & Krill already had, which is exactly the kind of compounding buff that pushes an already-viable hero into must-ban territory.

04A-Tier: Apollo and Nurse Harrow

Apollo is the only hero in this patch who received buffs across the board with nothing pulling the other way. Riposte's Pommel Hit now disarms the target on top of ending any parry they were mid-animation on, and its tier-two bonus duration grows from +0.6s to +0.7s. Itani Lo Sahn's tier-three bonus damage jumps from +50% to +60%, a sizable spike for a hero whose late-game burst was already respectable. None of these changes are individually dramatic, but stacked together they make Apollo a notably stickier duelist than he was a week ago, which is why he lands just below the S-Tier pair rather than alongside them; his kit was weaker to begin with, so the same raw buff value simply doesn't move the needle as far.

Nurse Harrow's changes are smaller in number but still a clear net gain. Bullet damage is up 8%, Lurking Terrors' vertical angle widens from 50% to 65% so the fear projectile covers verticality far better, and its fear buildup time drops from 2 seconds to 1.75 seconds. That's a faster, wider, harder-hitting kit with no compensating nerf anywhere in the notes, which is enough to earn her a spot alongside Apollo even though neither received the volume of changes Rat King and Mo & Krill did.

05C-Tier: Baba, Celeste and Deadman Danny

Baba takes the heaviest hit in the patch. Spirit Resistance scaling drops from 0.7 to 0.5, melee damage per boon falls by 10%, and Baba's Brew gets slower on every axis at once: its cooldown rises from 27 to 28 seconds, its burn-DPS spirit scaling falls from 0.15 to 0.13, and its cycle time stretches from 1.5 to 1.6 seconds. Granny Long Legs loses five percentage points of both melee resist and debuff resist. Individually these are modest trims, but there isn't a single buff anywhere in Baba's changelog to offset them, which is the clearest sign Valve is reining in a hero that was overperforming since the October 5 launch.

Celeste absorbs a similarly one-sided set of nerfs spread across her whole kit: Dazzling Trick's tier-three silence duration is cut nearly in half, Radiant Daggers loses cast range and has its spirit-amp bonus pushed back a tier, and Shining Wonder gets weaker on five separate stats at once, from slow percentage to cooldown to bounce range. Deadman Danny fares only slightly better, with Close the Deal's bonus damage to low-health targets cut from +75% to +55% and Chimera Mk1's healing both reduced in flat value and in spirit scaling. All three heroes remain usable, but none of them are the safe pick they were before November 4.

Hero changes at a glance

Quick Adjustments for the November 4 Patch

1. 1Both heroes picked up kit-wide buffs with no offsetting nerf, so their win rate hasn't caught up to their new power level yet. This is the window to learn them before bans catch up.Pick Phase
2. 2Pommel Hit now disarms on top of ending a parry, so trading into Riposte is safer and more punishing than it was last patch. Use it more aggressively in early duels.Laning Phase
3. 3With Spirit Resistance scaling and melee damage per boon both cut, Baba's old pattern of stacking boons and brawling is noticeably weaker. Play him more for utility than raw melee trades for now.Itemization
4. 4Celeste's Shining Wonder and Deadman Danny's Close the Deal both lost significant damage. Don't expect the one-shot windows you remember from before November 4; play both heroes around sustained pressure instead.Team Fights
5. 5Four hero bans per match instead of three, and far fewer rank-loss protection shields above Phantom, mean a single bad streak costs more than it did in Season 1.Ranked

06What This Means Going Into Ranked Season 2

None of these changes are big enough on their own to define a new meta, which fits a patch Valve shipped specifically to smooth out rough edges before a new ranked season rather than to introduce one. The practical read is narrower: Rat King and Mo & Krill are worth queuing into your next few ranked games while they're still undervalued, Apollo and Nurse Harrow are a tier stronger than their reputation suggests, and Baba, Celeste and Deadman Danny all need a slightly more cautious approach until the broader playerbase adjusts to their trimmed kits.

Layer that on top of Season 2's own rule changes, the reduced rank-loss shields, the extra hero ban and the new points-based hero unlock system, and the opening weeks of the new season are likely to reward players who adapt their hero pool quickly rather than coast on whatever carried them through Season 1. Keep an eye on Valve's own Steam community announcements page for the next balance pass, since a game still this early in development tends to get follow-up adjustments faster than most live-service shooters.

It's also worth remembering that Deadlock is still officially in early development, with Valve releasing patches and running ranked seasons well ahead of any full launch announcement. That status is exactly why balance moves this quickly and why last patch's winners can become this patch's targets with a single changelog. If you're newer to the game, this is a reasonable moment to pick up Rat King, Mo & Krill or Apollo, since all three now combine a strong kit with the kind of community reputation that usually follows a patch rather than leading it.