Solomon brings Earth Spirit's tricks to Deadlock
Solomon shares some surprising similarities with Earth Spirit and old Techies, which probably sounds like a horrifying combination for a third-person MOBA shooter.
He places chess pieces on the ground and moves them around, creating tiles that deal damage to an enemy when they step on them; sounds a bit familiar so far?
Solomon can grab a teammate with Kingside Knight to move them to safety or push them forward for initiation. Kingside Knight seems a lot like Earth Spirit's Geomagnetic Grip, except Solomon provides a barrier when casting the spell and can then decide to move his ally or not.
If you're coming from Dota 2, Deadlock has three lanes, creeps (called Troopers for now in Deadlock), jungle creeps, farming and levelling (called Boons), but you're aiming, dashing and fighting around rooftops as well, which makes for quite a chaotic and often surprisingly fun experience. Solomon adds an interesting pseudo-sniper class, setting up pieces around terrain, with a chessboard to manage on top of that, even using right-click to move pieces instead of zooming his gun.
The Dota comparisons may help explain Solomon a bit, but things get a little stranger once you're dealing with walls, rooftops and opponents who can escape or leave the lane and the chess pieces you set up, which almost makes him feel like Broodmother in a sense where you have to decide to join a fight or continue to push a lane out.
The Bishop makes you choose your steps carefully
Setup Bishop creates a piece Solomon can leave deployed and move around as a fight develops. Moving it damages and slows enemies in its path, then activates diagonal squares that deal Spirit damage, Deadlock's version of magic damage. Upgrades give him a second Bishop and extend the squares.
For Earth Spirit players, setting up your bishops may feel familiar to placing remnants and deciding how to use them. The Techies resemblance is more about how the enemy has to react to the bishop’s “traps”.
Old Techies could warp a game so much with every part of the map being a literal minefield of danger. Solomon's squares are visible, but because he can move his pieces, that means he can often have defensive or highly aggressive options with his bishops alone.
Say you're pushing an objective and a Bishop threatens the defenders' usual approach. They can go around it, which can be the right move, except now you’re having to take less optimal paths to reach your intended destination or find yourself in bad positioning. If the detour means arriving too late, Solomon’s indirect impact can feel oppressive or at least annoying to play around, especially during the laning phase of the game.
The October 30 patch made the square tiles that bishops leave a bit more threatening on the ground, increasing their on-square Spirit scaling from 0.64 to 0.85. How magic damage scales in Deadlock is a whole article in itself; however, the short version is that Spirit, or magic-based items, actually increase the spell damage you do based on individual ability scaling, but also reduce their height from four metres to one. The final upgrade's stacking Spirit Resist reduction was moved onto the Bishop's impact rather than the persistent squares.
That changes the decision making to some extent for an opponent. Walking through bishops hurts more, but Deadlock gives you ways to get above an approach instead of going all the way around it. If you can cross over the Bishop's squares and still make it to the fight in time, Solomon hasn't really made you give anything up.
There's also a limit to how far he can leave his pieces behind. Bishop's game data lists an 80-metre recall distance, and repositioning or recalling pieces comes with its own setup and cooldown considerations. One has to wonder how often the better play is to give up on a Bishop's original position and set up somewhere else, rather than spend several moves chasing a hero or being in an awkward position where you might not have time to set up your chess traps.
Rooks and wall bounces
Comparing Rook Battery to Rolling Boulder has its limits. Earth Spirit takes himself along for the ride, while Solomon fires two Rooks that deal Spirit damage and immobilise enemies. They'll reflect back off walls, and you can reactivate the spell to split them at right angles. This means a wall behind an enemy can suddenly become something key to consider when casting the ability.
Someone avoiding Bishop's squares might run into an alley or chokepoint thinking they've found a clean escape, except now you've got a Rook that can bounce off the wall heading straight towards you and can be devastating at close range. Depending on the angle, Solomon might be able to catch someone without ever needing to follow them around the corner himself, and it also offers an obvious defensive option if enemies get too close to Solomon and he can knight himself to escape.
Of course, that also means you can get the angle incorrect or the rooks don’t hit the geometry you expect, then both pieces fly off somewhere useless.
Knighting your allies
As mentioned earlier, Kingside Knight is probably the closest Solomon comes to Earth Spirit, particularly Geomagnetic Grip. Valve restored allied Grip targeting by default in Dota 7.40, letting Earth Spirit pull a nearby teammate toward himself.
Solomon takes that ability a little further and maybe crazier. Knight gives a teammate a barrier and additional stamina, then lets Solomon move them to a chosen destination. The ally is invulnerable while travelling, though that protection ends when they land.
That's useful for getting someone out of trouble, but there's more to it than simply saving them. You could reposition someone to keep fighting from a better angle, or move them somewhere they can actually get away from whoever was chasing them.
Obviously, this comes with some skill, as it can be easy to interrupt something an ally is doing or put them in a bad position, so accidental griefing is possible with this ability.
Maybe they were about to kill someone, and your intended save sends them to an unexpected position where they can no longer reach their target. You've kept them alive, congratulations, but you've also taken them out of the fight they wanted to take.
You can use Knight on yourself too, becoming the King for twice the barrier but none of the bonus stamina. Moving yourself uses a separate ability reactivation, unlike the shared right-click used for allied Knights.
Queen is a much bigger commitment
Develop Queen lands with area damage, then sends damaging and stunning squares along straight lines after a delay. Solomon can move her and repeat the attack, but he only has so many moves to work with. You can move Queen to follow them, but now you're spending one of your limited moves on someone who might just leave again.
The October 30 changes made that decision a little more complicated.
Queen cooldown increased from 210 to 240 seconds, and the stun squares take 1.2 seconds to activate instead of one. Valve also made the warning effects clearer, so opponents have a better idea of which tiles are actually going to hit them.
If that were the whole changes, you'd probably call it a straightforward nerf. Except Queen's damage scaling also went from 1.4 to 1.6, and Checkmate is now part of the base ultimate, executing heroes below 100 Health with the threshold increasing by five per Boon. The second upgrade adds another 150 to that threshold.
So there's more reason to get out of her way, even though you're getting a better chance to do exactly that. And Rook can make that pretty unpleasant. If Solomon catches someone with an immobilise just before Queen's squares go off, those clearer warnings won't do them much good unless they can escape the follow-up. Queen can threaten a lot of space, but Solomon has to decide whether the fight is worth moving her for, especially with a four-minute base cooldown. Spending every move chasing someone who keeps getting away could leave the next fight happening somewhere Queen can't help.
The hard part isn't always the chess
There's a difference between making a bad decision and struggling to get the game to perform the decision you've already made, and Solomon has a bit of both going on.
His right-click controls are shared across Bishops, Queen and allied Knights. Players have reported difficulty selecting the intended piece, particularly when trying to move an ally with a Bishop nearby.
Valve has already improved some of the placement problems. The October 30 patch increased the range for grabbing pieces from 50 to 65 metres and made them land closer to the intended position, including around walls and in hallways. That's helpful, although the grab range and the quick-click selection area are different things. And his gun took a fairly substantial hit in that same patch. Base bullet damage dropped from 30 to 25, with headshots dealing 20% less damage. Bishop's squares and Queen gained damage scaling, which makes being able to move those pieces reliably worth paying attention to.
Earth Spirit is hardly an easy hero to execute either, but when you mess up a remnant combo, you can usually work out what went wrong. With Solomon, if you meant to move your Knight and a Bishop goes sliding off instead, it's a little harder to know whether you made the mistake or the targeting behaved differently than you expected.
Solomon might not be as difficult as some people are making him out to be just yet. Some of that might simply be how clunky moving the pieces can feel right now. But he can be incredibly disruptive without having to play everything perfectly. A Bishop can make someone take the long way around, Rook can catch them trying to escape, and a Knight can suddenly move the teammate they were about to kill. There's plenty of room to screw up those same plays yourself, too. That's where the Earth Spirit comparison comes back. You can get a lot of value out of either hero without mastering everything, but trying to execute the entire kit properly while a fight is moving all over the place is where Solomon could get genuinely complicated.
