Deadlock Objectives Guide: Guardians, Walkers, and Patrons Explained

Deadlock doesn't care about your kill count. You can run up a 30 and 2 scoreline and still lose, because the only thing that actually ends a match is wrecking the enemy Patron in their base. Getting there means chewing through a fixed ladder of structures in each lane. First a Guardian, then a Walker, then a pair of Base Guardians, then two Shrines, and finally the Patron. Every rung you break unlocks the next one and pays out souls, map control, or a permanent team upgrade.

Knowing how to crack these things without feeding a kill in the process is most of what separates a winning team from one that throws. Here's how each objective works and when you should be pushing on it.

Guardian Damage Falloff and Tanking Tips

The Guardian is the first roadblock in every lane, a big metal automaton with a flaming brazier for a head and a laser that cooks anything standing in front of it. It's got 5500 health, which sounds tanky, but the stat that actually decides the fight is its damage resist, and that figure slides as the clock runs.

The resist curve is the whole fight

Lane Guardians start the match with 50% damage resist and that resist decays in a straight line over the first 12 minutes, dropping all the way to negative 50% by the 12 minute mark. So at minute zero you're barely scratching it, around minute six it's neutral, and past minute nine the thing takes bonus damage. Stack a flat 10% bullet resist on top, plus a "player vulnerability" quirk that makes Guardians take 25% extra damage from heroes, and the pattern is obvious. Early, Guardians are walls. Late, they're paper.

That decay is the reason most teams don't bother smashing a Guardian at minute two. You poke it down with your trooper wave once the resist has softened, somewhere in the 4 to 7 minute window, and you finish it during a numbers advantage. You take it when the math says you can, not the second you walk up.

Drawing the beam so your team can hit it

Guardians are immune to all damage when no enemy is within 24 meters. The instant a trooper or hero steps into range, it wakes up, locks its laser onto the closest target, and starts chipping away. A few details make tanking it manageable:

• The beam is weapon damage, so bullet resist and shields eat it. A frontline with bullet resist or a barrier item can stand in the beam for a long time.
• The Guardian will switch its laser onto an enemy who hits one of your allies within 15 meters. That's your aggro tool. If you're tanking and the carry gets dove, smacking the diver can pull the beam off them, or you can dive to pull it onto yourself.
• You can't shoot the Guardian from outside its 34 meter range even when it's awake. You have to commit to its zone.
• The brazier head (that's the flaming pot on top) takes headshot damage. Aim up if you've got the angle.

Quick tanking tricks

If you're the one body-blocking, a few things keep you alive. Don't stand point blank unless you mean to. Inside 5 meters the Guardian starts meleeing you, and those swings hurt. The upside is you can parry the melee with your own melee input, which stuns it for 2 seconds and locks it out of melee for 5 more. Time the parry right and you turn its scary punch into free structure time.

When the Guardian falls, every alive hero on your team pockets 1250 souls, not just the people standing nearby. That's a fat team-wide payout, which is part of why cracking one early-ish snowballs the whole squad at once.

Breaking Walkers Without Overextending

The Walker sits behind the Guardian, a hulking four-legged machine with an eyeball it uses as a gun. You can't even scratch it until the lane Guardian is dead, and even then it's wrapped in backdoor protection, shown as a green ring on the ground, that cuts your damage by 65% and heals it 65 health a second. That shield drops only when your trooper wave has marched all the way up to the Walker's position. So step one never changes: clear the enemy wave, shove your own wave forward, and let your troopers walk the backdoor off for you.

Don't pile everyone on it

This is the part that trips people up. A Walker takes less weapon damage for every extra enemy standing within 51 meters of it, from 20% reduction at three attackers up to a brutal 50% reduction when all six of you are clustered on it. The classic "everyone group up and focus the Walker" play is actively bad here. You burn it faster with two or three bodies on it while the rest of your team holds the map, contests the side objective, or watches for the rotate.

There's a second reason not to crowd it. The Walker hands 15% bullet resist and 15% spirit resist to any enemy hero within 28 meters. Dump your whole team onto an enemy Walker and you've just made every defender nearby noticeably tankier.

Respect the three attacks

Walkers only fight back with spirit damage, so spirit resist and a bit of distance go a long way. Three things to dodge:

• Fire beam. A channeled beam on the nearest target that does 2% of your max health every second. Annoying but not lethal on its own.
• Stomp. This is the one that deletes people. If anyone gets within 15 meters, the Walker stomps for 350 damage plus 15% of your max health and a 2 second stun, in a 15 meter radius. It's on a 7 second cooldown. Melee divers get caught in this and just die, so stay outside the inner white circle.
• Fireballs. Every 10 seconds it lobs six projectiles for 200 spirit each, and they leave fire on the ground that ticks 25 a second for 5 seconds. The fire also shaves 10% off your bullet and spirit resist. Don't stand in the patches.

The outer white circle is its full threat range, 24 meters. The inner one marks the stomp zone. Treat the inner circle like lava.

Why the Walker is worth the care

When a Walker dies it pays 3500 souls, split so that 1400 goes to whoever helped in the last 20 seconds and the other 2100 is shared evenly across all six teammates no matter where they are. But the real prize is the Extra Slot. Every Walker you crack unlocks one extra item slot for your whole team for the rest of the game. Two dead Walkers means two extra slots. In a game built around item builds, that's a massive permanent advantage, and it's why a team that's behind on kills but ahead on Walkers is often secretly winning.

One more catch. Walkers get healthier as their friends die. The first is 6000 HP, the next 9000, and the last one 12000, and they heal when another Walker falls. Don't assume the third is as soft as the first.

Shrine and Patron Siege Timing

Once both Base Guardians in a lane are down, the base opens up and you get at the Shrines. There are two of them, on opposite sides of the base, and the brutal rule is that the Patron stays completely invulnerable until both Shrines are rubble. Killing one doesn't help you touch the Patron. You need the pair.

Shrines are locked behind another gate too. They're flat immune until at least one pair of Base Guardians is destroyed, and you can't ping them from range, since damage from outside their platform does nothing. You walk onto the platform or you don't hurt it.

Take the Shrines with numbers, and watch the curse

The first Shrine has about 5000 health, but the moment it falls, the second one jumps to 10000. Plenty of teams blow through Shrine A, feel great, and then stall out on Shrine B because they assumed it was the same. It isn't. Plan your cooldowns for the second one being twice as thick.

Two things make Shrine sieges dangerous. First, the Patron actively defends them. The moment you step on a Shrine platform, the Patron fires a beam at you that deals damage and curses you, which usually forces a retreat. There's also a delayed Shrine Defense explosion, a 3.5 second windup that hits for 300 plus 20% of your max health and curses anyone caught in the blast. Second, Shrines have scaling bullet resist that starts at 60% and drops 20% for each enemy hero nearby, hitting zero only when four or more of you are on it. Translated into plain terms: bring most of your team, or you'll be plinking for nothing.

The upside of cracking a Shrine is big. The lane's troopers, plus the middle lane's, turn into Super Troopers with 60% more damage and 40% more health. Those upgraded waves do your sieging for you and keep shoving while you reset.

The Patron: two phases, one pit

The Patron is the win condition, 12000 health, and it's the only structure in the game that regenerates, healing 120 a second, plus another 75 a second from backdoor protection when no enemy troopers are around. Don't poke it. Either commit or go farm.

Phase one is unkillable until both Shrines are gone. Once they are, the Patron opens up but fights back hard. Its laser does 440 plus 5% of your max health every second as spirit damage, strips 10% off your resists, and leaves burning ground. That beam will delete a squishy hero in a couple of seconds. The window you want is right after you win a teamfight, with the enemy dead and their respawns ticking. Bonus detail worth knowing: when you drop the Patron to half health and finish phase one, any dead defender gets their respawn shortened by up to 20 seconds. So if defenders are already dead, push now, before that shortcut brings them back early.

Phase two is the Weakened Patron, an orb hovering in the base pit. Same rule as the Mid-Boss: it's immune to everything from outside the pit, so you have to walk in. Inside, it pulses 75 damage a second on up to three nearby heroes and throws a pit explosion every 15 seconds for 300 plus 20% of your max health and a curse. It also picks up 50% damage resist once a defender has been in the pit long enough, which is the game's way of saying you can't just race it down with one hero alive on the other side. Bring the team, clear the pit, and burn it.

Rejuvenation and Escalation Pickups

The two things sitting in the middle of the map that decide mid and late game are the Mid-Boss and the pickups it drops. The Mid-Boss is a neutral boss in the center pit, reachable through the tunnels off the blue lane and marked with a Rejuvenator sign. It's dormant until somebody walks into its pit, at which point it wakes up and starts beaming the closest hero for weapon damage. You can only hurt it from inside the pit. Attacks from outside do nothing.

It's a chunky target, 13000 base health that climbs 195 every minute it stays alive, on top of a regenerating shield. At half health it roars, and both teams hear it, so the second it hits 50% the whole lobby knows a fight is about to break out over the pit.

The Rejuvenator: your base-push insurance

Kill the Mid-Boss and a green Rejuvenator crystal spawns above the pit and slowly drops over 6 seconds. Once it lands, you smack it with a heavy melee to claim it. Each heavy melee hands your team one Rejuvenator credit, up to three per kill, and the first person to punch it heals to full health. The catch is that either team can grab it. If you kill the boss but get driven off the pit, the enemy can walk in and steal your pickup off your own kill, so clear the pit before you start punching.

What the Rejuvenator gives you is the green light to siege. The buff trims your team's respawn timers way down, supercharges your trooper waves, and for a big stretch of the game's life it also juiced your fire rate and spirit damage. The headline feature is that it lets a dead teammate pop back up, so a trade that would normally cost you the push instead costs you nothing. It only lasts a few minutes, so the play is always the same: grab it, then immediately go hit a base objective while it's live. Sitting on it to farm wastes the whole thing.

Escalation: the pickups that get scarier over time

The other half of the picture is that several objectives scale up as the match drags on, so ignoring them is a slow bleed. The Mid-Boss's own reward escalates every time it dies. Each successive kill hands out stronger permanent buffs to your team, and the trooper buff it grants ramps up with each boss death, so the third Mid-Boss is worth a lot more than the first. The boss's bounty scales with the clock too, 3000 souls plus another 50 every minute, which makes a late-game boss a much fatter prize than an early one.

The Soul Urn sits in the same category. It spawns around the 10 minute mark as a side objective you carry to a dropoff point in the side lanes, and it keeps coming back through the match, so it's a recurring scrap rather than something you grab once. None of these are worth skipping once the map opens up. A team that keeps taking the escalating pickups pulls ahead for free, even with fewer kills, because each one is worth more than the last.

Grouping Up for Safe Objective Pushes

Almost every thrown game in Deadlock comes from the same mistake: one or two players wandering onto a high-tier objective alone and dying for nothing. Structures are built to punish solo dives. Guardians are immune with nobody in range, Walkers stomp anyone who gets close, Shrines curse you, and the Patron melts loners in seconds. You take these things as a group, on your terms, or you don't take them.

Set the table before you commit

A safe push starts before you touch the structure. The prep work is boring but it's what keeps you alive:

• Win the fight first. The cleanest objective takes happen right after you kill one or two enemies. With the defenders dead and on respawn, you've got a window where nobody can contest. That's when you go.
• Shove the wave in. Backdoor protection stays up on Walkers, Shrines, and the Patron until your trooper wave reaches them. Clear the enemy wave, push yours forward, and let the troopers walk the protection off. Trying to brute force a backdoored structure wastes a ton of time and often baits you into a bad fight.
• Grab the Rejuvenator on the way. If the Mid-Boss is up and you can take it, do that before you siege. The respawn cut and the safety net it hands you turn a risky base push into a low-risk one.

Use the map's gifts

The game hands you tools specifically for sieging, and ignoring them is leaving speed on the table. When you kill both Base Guardians in a lane, your team gets a permanent zipline speed boost in that lane for the rest of the match. That means faster rotations, faster reinforcements, and a quicker escape if the fight turns. Route your pushes through lanes where you've already cracked the base guardians.

Super Troopers are the other gift. Once a Shrine falls, that lane and the blue lane start spawning beefed-up troopers with 60% more damage and 40% more health. Those waves will shove the base for free while your team groups up. Let them do the chipping, then move in and clean up the structure.

Know when to trade instead of force

Sometimes the enemy beats you to the objective. Two of their players are hitting your Walker while four of yours are across the map. The wrong play is to sprint back alone to "save" it and die in a 1v4, which loses you both the Walker and a hero. The right play is usually to trade: take an objective of equal or greater value on the other side of the map. If they're pushing your Walker, push their Walker, or grab the Mid-Boss, or take a Shrine if a base is already open. Forcing a fight you're outnumbered in, around a structure that hits back, is how leads evaporate.

Late game, the math flips in your favor. Every structure's damage resist has decayed past zero by the 15 to 18 minute mark, so objectives melt fast and a grouped team can chew through a Walker, a Shrine, and into the Patron in a single good fight. That's the payoff for grouping up patiently all game. One clean teamfight late, with a Rejuvenator live and the wave pushed, ends the match.