Deadlock’s Old Gods, New Blood update has released its final hero, the duelist Apollo, and he’s really goddamn fun—before I get into the nitty gritty of the Ixian cast, however, Valve has some fun stats from the voting process to share.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Deadlock’s latest update has introduced six new heroes—however, they’ve not all been released at once. Instead, players have been able to vote on the order in which each character arrives at the Cursed Apple, with two added to the game every week.
Players accumulate votes by playing games—with your first win of the day giving you four whole votes to spend. Valve states in the Steam update that “60,776,963 total votes were cast across the event.”
This person played, at minimum, 756 games of Deadlock over the course of 19 days—if we assume each match lasted a half-hour (they can range from 20 minutes to hour-long slogs), that’s 378 hours of Deadlock. Or, pleasingly, around 19 hours a day for 19 days. You might notice this leaves roughly five hours for sleep.
Chances are, this player in question instead played a lot of Street Brawl, the update’s newer game mode with a shorter runtime—but even at around 20 minutes per match, that’s still 252 hours of Deadlock, or 13 hours of gaming a day.
Anyway, Apollo
Apollo is a duelist type that’ll likely be built with a bent towards Spirit items, given most of his abilities deal Spirit damage in some way. His weapon, “Pride of Ixia”, has a relatively short range but fast travel time, meaning he’ll need to get in close to secure last-hits and denies in lane.
Image 1 of 4
His first ability, Disengaging Sigil, creates an Ixian rune that explodes on the ground and sends him flying backwards—it also causes a movement slow. At its highest level, it also refreshes your air dash/jump limit when you strike an enemy with it, making it—ironically enough—very good for continuing to engage with people.
His second, Riposte, is a parry that deflects any attack (basically, a left-click) and sends him flying towards any schmuck who triggers it. Apollo gets invulnerability frames while he dashes, and stuns them when he lands. This also reduces their bullet resist, making it a nice softening-up ability for your more gun-focused allies.
Flawless Advance is the result of some madman at Valve going, “Okay, Deadlock’s already really complicated, so what if we added a QTE to it?” Apollo lunges forward up to three times, and if you release the active key at the perfect moment, indicated by an Osu-style ring around your crosshair, you gain maximum damage.
What’s neat about this is that it can be used while airborne, making it good for movement. Apollo will also kip in the direction you input before activating the ability, allowing you to juke left, right, or backwards between strikes.
Lastly, his ultimate, Itani Lo Sahn, sees Apollo farming aura for a few seconds (otherwise known as ‘charging up’) before dashing forward. This Curses enemies for a brief window and also forces them to move in slow motion so Apollo can look cooler. Then, they explode for an enormous amount of damage—one that increases against half-health enemies, making it a soft execution.
All in all, Apollo seems designed to win 1v1s and capitalise at the end of teamfights with his ultimate, mopping up enemies and chasing down low-health adversaries. He also seems designed to be rad as all get-out, and I can’t wait to play him and inevitably whiff every single one of my skillshots.
Read the full article here
