The four strongest climbing picks in Deadlock right now are Graves (56.6% win rate), Victor (56.4%), Seven (54.9%), and Kelvin (53.9%) — all S-tier, and two of them badly underpicked. Haze, Lady Geist, and Infernus are worth learning too, but for different reasons: all three sit near or below the 49.8% roster average in ranked while performing noticeably better in standard queue, which is where most low-rank players actually are.
Nobody is stuck in low rank because they picked the wrong hero.
You're stuck because of a handful of habits. But hero choice removes variables, and in a game mode where your teammates are the largest variable you don't control, that matters more than usual. This list is not the strongest heroes in Deadlock in the abstract. It's the ones that convert your effort into wins with the fewest things standing in the way.
We'll get to the seven. First, what's actually happening in your games — because picking a new hero without understanding that just means losing on someone else.
Why you're actually stuck Five things, and you're probably doing at least three.
You stop farming when a fight starts somewhere else. Souls come from waves, camps, and objectives. Rotating for a fight you'll arrive late to costs you two waves and a camp, and you lose the game twenty minutes later because you're three items behind. Low-rank Deadlock isn't decided by kills. It's decided by whoever kept farming.You fight without a reason. Not every enemy you see needs to die. Fighting at a soul deficit, without your ultimate, or in a lane you can't hold is how good players get punished by worse ones.You die to the same thing repeatedly. Getting picked off walking alone in the mid game is the single most common death in the game. Assassins hunt for exactly this.You buy items on autopilot. Running the same build regardless of the enemy comp leaves enormous value on the table. Anti-heal against sustain, Metal Skin against a bullet carry, Debuff Reducer against heavy crowd control — these decide games.You blame the team. Occasionally correct, completely useless. The only variable across a hundred games is you.Every hero below helps with at least one. The top four help with several.
A note on the numbers Ranked arrived in Deadlock on July 30, 2026 with Beta Season 1, which runs to October 7. That's important context: bracket-level win rate data is only about a month old, and most trackers only apply rank filters to ranked matches from that date forward.
Across all 38 heroes the average win rate sits at 49.8%, with six heroes above 53% and nine below 47%. That's a top-heavy meta, which means hero choice carries more weight right now than it does in a balanced patch.
Where a hero's ranked and standard queue numbers differ, we've said so. That gap is the most useful signal in this whole article for a low-rank player.
Tier one: the four that are genuinely S-tier 1. Graves — 56.6% win rate, highest in the game
If you take one hero from this list, take this one. Graves posts the single highest win rate in Deadlock at 56.6%, on a 37.3% pick rate — meaning she's both strong and heavily played, which is the combination that suggests the number is real rather than a small-sample artifact.
She's an attrition and control mage with immense teamfight presence and a lot of AoE tools, and she is a formidable split-push threat that can't be ignored if you care about keeping your base intact.
That last part is why she climbs. Low-rank games are chaotic and unfocused, and Graves punishes that better than anyone. Borrowed Decree creates a gravestone that summons ghouls over time, and those ghouls shamble toward the enemy base dealing melee damage before exploding near a hero or objective for spirit damage and a brief slow. Enemies can destroy the gravestone with two heavy melees. In a low-rank game, half the time nobody does, and you get free objective pressure while both teams brawl pointlessly in the jungle.
The rest of the kit is equally low-effort. Jar of Dead passively collects death when anything dies nearby, then throws a jar summoning Deadheads that repeatedly deal spirit damage — they follow you when no enemies are near and prioritise whatever your weapon is targeting. Grasping Hands unearths a line of hands that damage and immobilise anyone passing through, with an alt-cast to rotate the wall. Essence Theft has your weapon steal weapon damage and spirit resist over time, up to a maximum per target.
Positioning is what separates good Graves players, since her potency depends on placing Grasping Hands and Borrowed Decree well. She's excellent at objectives and sieging.
One caveat: a June 2026 patch reduced Jar of Dead and ghoul damage. She's still the best hero on this list, but she was even stronger before.
2. Victor — 56.4% win rate, and almost nobody plays him
Victor is the best-kept secret in the current patch. He posts around 56.4% in ranked — a second tracker has him at 56.8% — on a pick rate under 3%. That combination is rare and it's exactly what you want when climbing: a hero opponents haven't learned to play against.
His design punishes over-commitment, which is the defining low-rank behaviour. Pain Battery charges as he takes damage, then activates to deal spirit damage in a radius. Aura of Suffering deals spirit damage over time to enemies and to himself, ramping the longer it's active. Jumpstart costs 15% of current health and returns 100 health regeneration plus a +4 m/s speed boost, both decaying over four seconds on a 22-second cooldown. Shocking Reanimation revives him to 60% health after a channel and explodes for damage and a stun.
The thing most guides get wrong, and it will save you a lot of frustration: Aura of Suffering's self-damage is pure damage and cannot be reduced by spirit resistance. Plenty of advice tells you to stack spirit resist so you can hold it longer. That's simply not how it works. Build spirit power, then cooldown reduction, then sustain like Spirit Lifesteal. The self-damage is non-lethal, though it can still trigger your ultimate.
The trick worth learning: keep the aura active while you're dying. It ticks through the revive channel and auto-reactivates with a fresh ramp when you reanimate, so you stand back up inside your own damage zone alongside the stun. Don't use Shocking Reanimation as an escape — bait them into committing, die inside the group, and let the AoE and roughly 1.5-second stun catch several people.
He's also one of the best objective contesters in the game, since the reworked Urn capture is a king-of-the-hill sit and Victor can solo-hold against divers who can't burst through his sustain.
Anti-heal is his hard counter: Healbane, Decay, and Toxic Bullets all hurt, as do long-range kiters who chip him from outside aura range and never brawl.
3. Seven — 54.9% win rate, and the lowest effort on this list
Seven is the most straightforward damage in Deadlock and the reason he shows up on every beginner list. At 54.9% he's third-best in the game while being one of the easiest heroes to execute.
The play is Power Surge. It charges your weapon with a shock effect so bullets proc shock damage on the target, and that damage bounces to nearby enemies. You're adding spirit damage to every shot while making it hit everyone clustered around your target. In low-rank games where people group up constantly, that's absurd value for one button.
Build weapon damage early and pivot into spirit late, focusing Power Surge with Surge of Power in mind. Then run at groups and hold left click. Maxing Power Surge is the best way to unlock his damage, and a full clip with it active usually just ends the fight.
Two practical notes. Reload before activating it — the window is short and burning half of it on a reload animation is the most common Seven mistake. And magazine size items make that window considerably more forgiving.
Most players build him around Storm Cloud and treat Power Surge as an afterthought. That's backwards for climbing. Storm Cloud is flashy but easily walked out of. Power Surge is reliable damage every fight.
4. Kelvin — 53.9% win rate at a 19.9% pick rate
Kelvin is the most underrated pick in the current patch: S-tier results on a pick rate under 20%. He won't top your damage chart. He's here because he keeps you alive long enough to learn everything else, and because his kit produces value even when your team ignores you.
Frost Grenade explodes in freezing ice that heals allies while dealing spirit damage and slowing enemies. Arctic Beam fires freezing energy that damages and builds movement and fire rate slow the longer you sustain it, at the cost of your own move speed while channeling. Frozen Shelter freezes the air into an impenetrable dome — allies inside get rapid regeneration, enemies are slowed, and objectives caught inside become invulnerable and frozen.
The underrated ability is Ice Path, a floating trail of ice that gives movement bonuses to you and your allies, grants you 60% slow resistance, and can be travelled up or down. Use it to reach angles nobody is covering. Just remember enemies can walk on it too — a badly placed path is a highway into your own backline.
The single thing most Kelvin players miss: Frozen Shelter can be cast on another hero. You can save a diving teammate from across the fight. At low rank, where somebody dives every thirty seconds, that alone wins games.
Tier two: the three that need honesty These next three are worth learning, but not because they're statistically dominant. All three sit at or below the 49.8% roster average in ranked play.
Here's the part that matters for you. All three perform meaningfully better in standard queue than in ranked:
Hero
Ranked
Standard
Difference
Haze
49.1%
51.4%
+2.3 points
Lady Geist
48.5%
50.5%
+2.0 points
Infernus
48.1%
50.3%
+2.2 points
Standard queue is where the broader, less practised population plays. That two-point swing is real evidence these heroes punish inexperience specifically. But be clear-eyed about what it means: it moves them from underperforming to roughly average, not to carrying. Pick these because the playstyle suits you, not because a tier list told you they're free wins.
5. Haze — 50.1% overall, highest ceiling here
Haze is a classic hard carry: weak early, devastating late. That profile is exactly why her ranked number is unremarkable and her standard number is better — low-rank opponents don't punish her weak laning phase hard enough to stop her scaling.
Fixation increases your bullet damage on whatever you're shooting, gaining a stack per hit and two per headshot. Smoke Bomb makes her invisible with sprint speed; attacking removes it, using items doesn't, and close enemies can see through it. Sleep Dagger damages and sleeps a target, doesn't break invisibility when thrown, and doesn't interrupt channeled abilities.
Two mechanics worth internalising. Smoke Bomb has a 1.5-second fade after casting during which you're still visible, so popping it while someone stares at you accomplishes nothing. And Fixation's extra weapon damage is reduced by falloff, though its Tier 1 spirit damage isn't — closing distance is worth more than it looks.
Sleep is no longer a full stun. Sleeping targets move at 2 m/s but can't take any other action, including stamina, mantle, or parry, and they wake on damage. Plan around a crawling target.
Bullet Dance changed substantially, and returning players get caught by this: it's no longer a radius around her, it's a cone in the direction you're aiming , fixed at 65 degrees and impossible to widen. The cooldown dropped from 165s to 145s in exchange. You can slide and use active items while channeling, and it ignores Disarm.
She's here because she punishes exactly what low-rank enemies do — standing still, grouping in corridors, ignoring stealth. She's ranked fifth because if you can't farm patiently through a rough lane, she does nothing for you.
6. Lady Geist — 49.4%, but trending up
Lady Geist posted the biggest weekly gain on the entire roster recently at +0.9 points, which is worth knowing before you write her off. She's also the most-picked hero in her tier at 25.4%, which usually means a chunk of that win rate is people playing her badly.
Every low-rank game contains a dozen unplanned solo fights, and Geist wins most of them. She has high base weapon damage, one of the largest health pools in the game, and Malice, which stacks a damage amplifier up to 75% on a single target. That amp applies to everything, so your revolver benefits as much as your abilities — which is why she works as a gun hero despite most tier lists filing her as an ability brawler.
Essence Bomb costs health to throw and deals spirit damage. Life Drain tethers an enemy and pulls their health into yours. Soul Exchange swaps health totals outright, flipping fights you look like you're losing.
For items: Headshot Booster early for consistent poke, since her revolver headshots hit hard once Malice is stacked. Then Monster Rounds, Kinetic Dash for mobility and ammo, Bullet Resist Shredder for fighting and farming, Crippling Headshot as your biggest spike, and Leech to become very hard to kill.
The discipline required is health management. Her abilities cost her own health, which is what the oversized pool exists for. Trading recklessly at low HP is the only way Geist players die.
7. Infernus — 49.5%, the weakest pick here
Infernus is currently below average, sitting around 49.5% across roughly 14,000 tracked ranked games, with daily figures bouncing between 48.9% and 49.9% through August. His win rate slid from about 51.2% in April as the meta shifted toward heroes like Graves and McGinnis. He also has his hardest matchup against Graves at 44.3%, which is awkward given Graves is the most-picked hero on this list.
He's still here for one reason: he has the best laning phase of any hero listed, and low-rank games are decided in lane more often than they should be.
Afterburn is the hero. Your bullets build a burning effect, and both bullets and abilities refresh its duration. With a high fire rate that's continuous damage the enemy can't out-heal, and the 1 AP upgrade triples burn damage for around 1,000 souls — one of the best value spikes in the game.
There's a detail almost nobody knows that will immediately improve your laning. Afterburn's build-up is affected by distance falloff, so at 50% damage range a body shot builds half the burn. But refreshing an existing burn is not affected by falloff. Close to apply, then maintain from safety. Also: duration refreshes 0.5s on body shots and 1s on headshots, light melee gives 20% build-up and heavy melee 35%, and the burn ticks every half-second for half its DPS.
Catalyst spews napalm that slows enemies and amplifies the damage Infernus does to them. Catalyst plus Afterburn is heavy single-target burst, which is how you force people out of lane. Flame Dash moves you forward at speed leaving a burning trail, grants 50% slow resistance, and can be held on M1 to go faster. Concussive Combustion turns you into a living bomb stunning everyone nearby after a delay — activate it, then Flame Dash in, or prime it from a zipline or with Warp Stone.
Healbane counters him hard, and vertical heroes like Vindicta and Grey Talon kite him out of the game.
Picking one If you want
Play
Win rate
The best hero, full stop
Graves
56.6%
A strong pick nobody expects
Victor
56.4%
The lowest effort
Seven
54.9%
To stop dying
Kelvin
53.9%
The highest ceiling
Haze
50.1%
To win every 1v1
Lady Geist
49.4%
The best laning phase
Infernus
49.5%
If you just want to climb as fast as possible and don't care what you play, the answer is Graves or Victor. If you want to climb while learning something you'll enjoy long-term, pick anywhere on this list and commit.
Either way, play thirty games on it. Not three. Hero-hopping is the second-fastest route to staying exactly where you are.
If you'd rather pick by role These seven are the climbing picks specifically. If you'd rather learn a role properly, we've covered each in depth:
One thing that isn't a hero Low-rank games are messier than high-rank ones. More people on screen, more abilities firing at once, more moments where you're tracking four things and reacting to a fifth. That's partly a frame rate problem, and it's the kind of thing players assume is their reflexes.
If your machine is struggling, the mainstream gaming laptop worth looking at is the Acer Nitro V 16 AI . It runs AMD Ryzen AI 200 Series processors with GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics, and the 16-inch WUXGA display goes up to 180Hz with a MUX switch for direct GPU output. NVIDIA Reflex is the relevant feature for climbing, since lower system latency shortens the gap between deciding to dodge Concussive Combustion and actually dodging it.
The 16:10 panel helps more than the spec sheet suggests, too. Extra vertical space matters in a game built around ziplines, rooftops, and enemies above you.
The wider Nitro range covers more configurations if you want a laptop for everyday use and gaming rather than a dedicated gaming machine.
Side note: If you're playing long ranked sessions or streaming while you climb, the Predator Helios series is worth a look for a high performance gaming laptop with stronger cooling and higher refresh rate displays.
The honest summary Pick one hero. Learn its farming pattern before its combos. Stop rotating for fights you'll arrive late to. Buy one situational item per game based on what the enemy actually picked. Watch your own deaths and ask what you could have done ninety seconds earlier.
Do that on any of these seven and you'll climb. Do it on Graves or Victor and you'll climb faster, because the numbers are doing some of the work for you.
Deadlock's City Never Sleeps update is live Valve just released City Never Sleeps, the biggest Deadlock update since the game entered testing. The map has been overhauled with new district-themed enemies, sub-areas, and activities, and there's a new merchant called The Broker who can swap your items for powerful corrupted versions. Add in a new ping system, a revamped HUD, improved shop, and hundreds of new voice lines, and Deadlock feels like a whole new game. If you haven't played in a while, now is the perfect time to jump back in.
Six new heroes are also on the way: Nurse Harrow, Deadman Danny, Baba, Solomon, The Rat King, and Violet. They'll be released two at a time over the next three weeks, starting October 2, in an order decided by player votes. You can cast your votes just by playing matches. We'll be updating this list as each new hero arrives, so check back to see where they land.Frequently asked questions
What is the best hero in Deadlock right now? Graves, at a 56.6% win rate — the highest on the roster — with a 37.3% pick rate that makes the figure statistically reliable. Victor is close behind at around 56.4% and is far less commonly played.
What is the easiest hero to climb with in Deadlock? Seven. Power Surge adds shock damage to every bullet and bounces it to nearby enemies, so a full clip into a grouped team wins most fights with almost no mechanical demand. He's also third in the game at 54.9%.
Which Deadlock hero is most underrated? Kelvin. He posts S-tier results at 53.9% on a pick rate of just 19.9%, meaning most players haven't caught on. Frozen Shelter can also be cast on an ally, which is the single most underused ability in the game.
Does hero choice actually matter for ranking up in Deadlock? More than usual in this patch. The roster average is 49.8%, with six heroes above 53% and nine below 47%. In a top-heavy meta like this, playing an S-tier hero is a measurable head start.
Should I stack spirit resistance on Victor? No. Aura of Suffering's self-damage is pure damage and can't be reduced by spirit resistance. Build spirit power, then cooldown reduction, then sustain items like Spirit Lifesteal instead.
Is Haze good for climbing in Deadlock? She's borderline, at around 50.1% overall and 49.1% in ranked, though she reaches 51.4% in standard queue. She's a hard carry who's weak early and devastating late, so she rewards patient farming and punishes impatience.
How does Haze's Bullet Dance work now? It fires within a 65-degree cone in the direction you're aiming rather than a full radius, and that angle cannot be increased. The cooldown was reduced to 145s in exchange. You can slide and use active items while channeling.
Why do I keep losing games in Deadlock even with good stats? Usually farming. Kills and KDA don't win Deadlock games, soul advantage does. Abandoning waves and camps to chase fights across the map is the most common reason a player with a strong scoreboard still loses.
When did ranked launch in Deadlock? Ranked arrived on July 30, 2026 with Beta Season 1, which runs until October 7, 2026.
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