Hello! In this blog, I want to talk over the parry mechanic in Deadlock and break it down, analysing its depth and how well I think it is implemented.

First of all, how does the parry work?

At any time when actionable, the player may press F to enter the “parry” state for 1 second. A parry pauses the player’s movement and locks out all other actions. If any enemy would perform a light or heavy melee against you in this state, they are briefly stunned for 3 seconds. Upon a successful parry, there is a 0.5 second cooldown before reuse, and a 4.5 second cooldown upon a failed parry.

On FIrst Glance…

A player may complete a match of deadlock without feeling the need to parry. It isn’t necessary for achieving victory, however it can give you a serious edge over other opponents in combat if used correctly.

Although Deadlock’s tutorial briefly touches on the parry, a new player will still likely not engage with the mechanic immediately. The game will still allow them to enjoy it without the overloading their mental stack, assuming that they are being matched with equally skilled opponents.

A player’s mind will be focused first-and-foremost on shooting enemy troopers and other enemy players, gaining them currency to get stronger like in other MOBAs they may be used to.

Only when another player begins to melee you and deal significant damage (often with reckless abandon) will the player first look for answers and find the value of the parry.

What design problem does it solve?

When Valve designed the parry mechanic, it was certainly to solve a specific design problem in the game’s combat, one which we sadly don’t have too much insider information about. However, we can make some educated guesses about the challenges Deadlock faced early in development and the perceived design goals of said solutions.

Where I believe the design problem first arose was from is the confirm/deny system during laning.

My guess is that, during laning, Valve discovered players were able to confirm/deny a little too safely from maximum distance, making laning feel boring as no players had an incentive to get close to each other to start brawling. Confirm/Deny Orbs only require 1 shot from your gun to claim, and falloff doesn’t affect them, so why not sit back and claim them safely?

The melee mechanic will have been an option proposed to solve this problem. The new attack type will now allow players to hit troopers to confirm them instead, but the reward is much greater, as a melee last-hit will claim the orb automatically too! This means the opponent has no opportunity to deny if they decide to play far away.

So why was this chosen? Well… players aren’t fighting enough in the laning stage! Let me explain.

Valve has made MOBAs before. So, why have they encountered a problem they’ve solved previously?

In DOTA 2, every character is able to last-hit with a well timed base attack, whether that be melee or ranged. It also has fog of war and destructible trees to obscure creeps and player positioning to encourage surprise attacks and aggression during laning.

Deadlock is a third person shooter with infinite vision, balanced only by a damage falloff system. There would be currently no certain way to stop enemies from just shooting your orbs and stealing your farm at a safe distance. (Assuming the game was originally tested with a blank, featureless lane layout)

The light/heavy melee system will have been one of many solutions proposed to get opponents closer to each other when laning. The melee system rewards players for getting in close to the trooper wave and doing a slow, risky attack to claim a trooper fully, denying the orb it drops and the ability to steal it, making it impossible for the enemy heroes to stop you farming better than them from a safe distance.

This is great!

This solution takes advantage of the third person view, allowing players to exploit their camera angle to get in close, hide, and take farm safely with the new option to melee. This grants a significant advantage to players who do this, encouraging you to also get close and deal damage to enemies and deter them from that strategy, creating a nice ebb and flow which encourages PvP and exciting fights to occur naturally.

I think the game’s level design does a good job in solving this perceived design problem, too (likely designed in tandem). You can tell that the layout of a lane is designed to block vision of enemy heroes and troopers. Each lane includes a big central bridge, stacks of boxes on both sides, veils, and interior rooms, all of which benefit to obscure players as they claim farm, often forcing players close and into line of sight for an encounter.

Now, I believe the parry was a solution to this solution! The melee found its place, and now there’s a new problem:

Players are reporting that enemies are spamming heavy melee against everything. It feels too powerful!

To stop this behaviour, you could look to the low-cost option of reducing the damage of the heavy melee, but… now its not so “heavy” feeling. Not to mention the lower damage could make it harder to last-hit troopers. That’s frustrating! Then, why not reduce the damage the melee does against heroes and keep it the same versus troopers? That seems like a pretty nice low-cost solution! Solved… right?

No doubt this will have been tested first, but I believe the result of that would be that the melee then felt too slow and doesn’t earn its keep anymore. It may even feel completely one-dimensional as it only feels useful for last-hitting troopers as it is suboptimal versus enemy heroes.

Instead, how about we let this melee attack retain its strength but be able to be hard countered?

This is where I believe the parry mechanic first came about.

In the next couple sections, we will investigate the possible reasoning behind the parry mechanic’s design through some thought experiments, hopefully finding out why this solution was chosen in lieu of other seemingly valid ones.

What happens if you removed the parry mechanic?

In an alternate reality where Valve decides to patch out the parry in the game’s current state and make no other changes, the game’s balance would, as our analysis implies, skew completely towards melee.

Let’s have a look at the knock-on effects of its removal:

1. Melee-based characters and melee item builds dominate the meta because of the lack of counterplay.
2. Heavy melee for interactions now feels like a slow and redundant choice, although it might be still satisfying to perform it. Why not just press a button?
3. Rebuttal becomes an unused item.
4. Counterspell becomes an unused item.
   • Direct counterplay to strong ultimates and abilities is heavily reduced, leading to other dominant heroes emerging such as Lash who would otherwise have to play around it.
5. There are now less options to create comeback potential and exciting moments, increasing the likelihood of hopelessness when behind, and excitement for viewership.
6. The tension created by the close-range mindgame of parry vs melee is gone.
   • Gun-based characters now want to run away and stay at the limit of their character’s effective range more often, attempting to play safer and potentially causing more defensive play patterns across the board.

In summary, melee heroes would dominate the meta, some items would be useless, and the tensions created by the counterplay of a parry will likely lead to a very stale and “snowbally” game experience.

What happens if it was replaced with a popular alternative?

What if the parry was something else? Why does it have to be a stationary parry stance? Let’s see what we can glean from this angle of enquiry.

Parry -> Dodge Roll (Dark Souls)

Tap parry button to roll in a direction -> gain 11 frames of invulnerability from all sources

Consequences of change:

• Can now be confused visually with the existing dash move.
• This propels you in a direction, similar to the dash, now making both moves lack orthogonality.
• Changes the balance of many aspects of the whole game.
  • Is not only invulnerable to melee, but now many other sources of damage, affecting primarily burst-based heroes who are now universally counterable. Sustain-based characters will be more consistent and harder to counter. This could be a valid change, depending on your combat design, but definitely an expensive change requiring balance reworks.
  • Assuming the dodge would require 1 bar of stamina, stamina items would become very popular in the meta to maximise i-frames.
• Attacks, even when dodged, are still uninterrupted, making the reward solely benefit the individual performing the dodge, as no reward extends to your team.
  • This also means interactables that require heavy melee are now without counterplay, as the lack of stun still allows the attacker to claim the interactable, reducing counterplay and potential for exciting comebacks.
• The movement portion of the dodge could feel frustrating when used offensively, as you may be on top of your opponent and now you are far away from them, which could lead to a failed kill.
• Any skill expression involved with turning a stationary defensive mechanic into a moving one through clever tricks such as an Air Dash Parry is gone.
  • This also had the effect of giving movement to parry a choice, which is now mandatory and built into the base mechanic.

Parry -> Tap to Parry (Sekiro)

Tap parry input within 12 frames of an incoming melee (may repeat with diminishing returns) -> negate the damage

Consequences of change:

• Makes the parry more of a timing test rather than a test of situational awareness.
• May increase the mechanic’s skill expression.
• Puts a strong dependency on netcode/strong network conditions to feel fair.
• Changes the high risk/high reward to a medium risk/low reward.
• Mechanic now requires a high mechanical skill to pull off something with very small, situational reward.
• Gives the player the chance to “spam” a defensive move over and over, which could feel degenerate to the attacker and undeserved to the defending player.
• Light melee is near instant, so parrying that in such a short window would require an extremely difficult read that leads to a very low reward.
• Heavy melee is very slow, and can swing wide or feigned to trick a player. However, with such a short parry recovery, there will be no room for mindgames centred around feigning melee as the defender will more than likely panic press multiple times, or abuse the fast recovery in other ways, leading to a success that feels unfair.

Parry -> Held Block (Mortal Kombat)

Hold block button (no startup/recovery) -> character stands in place + melee attacks deal reduced damage to you

Consequences of change:

• Removing the commitment removes all risk besides positioning.
• Lessons room for skill expression.
• Changes the outcome of high risk/high reward to low risk/low reward.
• The removal of the stun to the attacker allows the enemy to still succeed on their intended melee, whether this be to you or to an important interactable, removing many forms of melee counterplay.
  • Fails to disincentivize degenerate melee options.
• As melee characters scale in power, the reward for the blocker remains low and arrests their other options to output damage in response, making its reward diminish as the match progresses, leading to melee characters becoming more unbalanced late-game.
• Holding block when hiding close-quarters and “turtling” would likely become a strong strategy to both block LoS of guns and reduce damage from surprise melee attackers in the early game.
  • Risks leading to slow, defensive play patterns and longer overall match times, as the laning stage will drag on for a while – a problem Deadlock has battled in earlier builds.
• The lack of a high risk/high reward option makes the match feel less exciting.

What can we learn from this?

The biggest trend to this exercise is that a risk/reward imbalance tends to make the mechanic break down. The stun granted by the successful parry removing the effect of the opponents melee attempt seems to be a very important part of its reward. Removing the effect of the opponents attack AND stunning them allows you to completely deny important elements of the match from the opponent and gives you an opportunity to kill them easier. This makes a player who is skilled at parrying not only able to express their skill to great effect, but also able to deny significant elements of a match from the enemy, which may lead to a kill, which then may lead into a team dying, which is the optimal advantage state for a team in Deadlock. When there is no enemy team present to stop you, there is no one to stop pushes, towers being taken, and mid-boss being taken (which is currently a game-ending level of advantage).

To add, the reward of the stun in the current implementation is important as it both allows the risk AND reward to scale into the late-game, keeping it a deep and relevant mechanic a player must make important decisions around all throughout a match.

Valve also decided the parry had the player stand in place to perform it. This is likely because excessive movement and rolling in Deadlock may have been frustrating, so instead they made it stationary and allowed skill expression via movement tricks to turn it mobile. This also allows the mechanic to retain a low skill floor to remain accessible enough for new players whilst having the depth to warrant a high skill ceiling for pro-level players to master.

Lastly, Deadlock is a 12 player multiplayer game hosted on a dedicated server. Whatever mechanic you would design for this game will be at the mercy of network stability. The Sekiro Parry example would have the potential to suffer greatly to a slight net jitter and be very unfair. I believe this and the fact the parry isn’t primarily a timing test, but a test of situational awareness, is why Valve designed it to be relatively forgiving on timing, instead coming with great risk.

Analysing the Mechanic’s Depth

I now want to analyse Deadlock’s parry, and whether I think it is deep enough a mechanic to warrant a healthy, engaging, and replayable competitive online gaming experience, touching on the parts I find particularly interesting or worrying in a design sense.

Deadlock is still in development, therefore the game still has potential to be ripe with a good many flaws, which I believe to be a space worth some analysis.

Relationship with Other Systems

Melee Attacks

The most direct relation the parry has to systems is, as mentioned previously, the melee attacks. Specifically, the Light Melee and the Heavy Melee attacks.

Light Melee is a near instant, universal melee move that does a small amount of damage to an enemy in front and in close range of the player. It can be used to secure troopers completely upon last-hit, and has small interactions with elements around the map. It can hit multiple targets.

Heavy Melee is a slow, telegraphed, more powerful universal melee move. When used, the player pauses for a moment, raising their fist as they glow and a loud sound effect plays, before launching forward with root motion, dealing a sizable chunk of damage to enemies at the end. It can hit multiple targets.

The parry mechanic is able to hard counter both. A well-timed parry will successfully stun any opponent attempting to melee you. This is an integral part of the close range mindgame in Deadlock’s combat, especially when against strong melee heroes.

Items

There are two items in Deadlock, which grant additional features to the parry mechanic when purchased.

These items were added fairly recently in May 2025, 9 months after the game’s first closed beta released on Steam.

I believe Valve’s design goal with these items was to directly add depth and value to the parry as elegantly as possible by using other available systems, therefore deciding to tie it directly into items for the first time. This adds a lot more decisions for the player to make about laning and hero counterplay with very little added complexity – the player already makes plenty of decisions about items during play. It also allows players to make an active choice to engage more with the mechanic as a form of skill expression or ignore it completely if it doesn’t interest them.

Map Interactables

Below are three very important map interactables that are related to the meta-relevance of the parry:

You may have noticed that each of the above interactables require a heavy melee to activate – a committal, slow, loud, and telegraphed move. The reason for that is so that the parry mechanic has direct counterplay to many of the aforementioned systems, therefore allowing a skilled player to make a devastating play against an enemy hero/team that could potentially shift the tides of a whole match.

It adds comeback potential.

Example:

The entire enemy team has just killed the Mid-Boss, and you hear the Rejuvenator descending. You run down and jump in front of the Rejuvenator, parrying right at the moment the whole team attempt to heavy melee it, stunning them all for 3 seconds. Your teammate playing Dynamo drops in after they’re all stunned and casts Black Hole, allowing you to wipe their whole team and take every Rejuvenator before pushing and winning an otherwise lost game.

Deadlock is evidently built around the heavy melee for this reason. A different Deadlock where instead you walk up and press E to interact with every map interactable would not only be very dull indeed, but heavily unbalanced for reasons I’ll get to soon. The fact that this, then, feels like a lode-bearing mechanic holding up the game’s systems is often a great indicator that its is a deep one.

The Importance of Comeback Potential

The ability to make a devastating high risk/high reward play in many places throughout Deadlock give it, in my opinion, a great feeling that you can come back at any point with the right decisions and/or teamwork. The parry contributes directly to this as it’s useful in such a variety of areas.

This has a couple of positive effects on the player experience:

1. The psychological effect of giving players hope throughout a match grants them better overall enjoyment of it, as they feel that their agency is always potentially impactful.
2. The game is more exciting to both play and watch, as it feels like the scales could tip at any moment.
3. It rewards players who have the ability to adapt, raising the skill ceiling and rewarding skilled players who put in the hours.

Replayability

Layers of Mastery

Generally, movement is locked when you parry in Deadlock. However, a skilled player is able to perform moves such as an Air Dash Parry, which propels you in a direction whilst in an aerial parry, allowing you to dive in front of another player whilst parrying at the cost of 1 stamina bar. This can be useful for surprising someone attempting to safely last hit a trooper.

There are also other techniques employed by players to get around the parry, such as a Heavy Melee Feint. This falls under a form of counterplay, which we will dive into now in more detail.

Counterplay

Counter Options

Heavy Melee Feint is where you simply aim away from the parrying enemy player at the last moment, baiting their parry out. This will make it unsuccessful due to the melee not landing, putting it on a long cooldown. This allows you to follow up with a guaranteed heavy melee to punish it – or other greater forms of damage like abilities.

Active Item Feint is a more situational and advanced way of baiting a parry like before, however it requires activating a specific active item. The items Fleetfoot, Fury Trance, and Unstoppable have active components, allowing the player to press a button to activate a built-in effect. The effect doesn’t actually matter, but instead the activation itself. Activating one of these during a heavy melee will pause its animation briefly before continuing, effectively throwing off its timing to get around enemy parries.

Light Melee is a common option against people that are good at parrying heavy melee. On many characters, the light melee isn’t very damaging unless you build melee-based items, so this is more common on those playstyles. This technique involves weaving in light melee attacks when close to your opponent, instantly dealing a chunk of damage and forcing them to either parry wildly or read you before you do it. This is seen more at higher levels of play.

Hiding Before Heavy Melee is where you attempt to keep your character hidden around a corner or in a veil so the enemy doesn’t see you before you perform it. This can be a form of surprise or simply taking advantage of the enemy player not paying attention to sound cues – therefore this is one that you should use when their mental stack is overloaded with other distractions.

These options (the ones evident to me as a player!) clearly show that the parry mechanic adds many more decisions players can make during combat, coaxing them into interesting mindgames the players are forced to play as they become more experienced.

Conclusion: Is it Deep?

Judging from what we’ve learned through exploring Deadlock’s many related systems and relevant player behaviours that arise as a result of this single mechanic…

I would say that it is deep!

Valve’s approach feels modular to me. Their use of the game’s many important systems such as the Item Shop to further enhance the parry is a very elegant, low cost solution that could be added to easily in the future. I think it’s safe to expect at least a couple more parry-related items coming before release.

As far as I know, the parry/melee dynamic is new to MOBAs. The only other successful third-person MOBA that comes to mind is Smite, and that did not feature similar system. It gives Deadlock this “fighting game” feel to its combat flow, granting the player many options to pressure the opponent, trying to overflow their mental stack and take advantage of openings. It is a game that is very gratifying in its rewards, giving creative players plenty of options to cause creative problems for the enemy and be rewarded for their experimentation.