Deadlock Animation Canceling: Heavy Melee Cancels, Hidden Melee and Buffering

Animation canceling means cutting an action’s wind-up or recovery short, or hiding it behind another animation. Deadlock has fewer cancels than a fighting game, but the ones it has decide melee trades, make parries harder to land, and let strong players reposition when they look committed.

This page assumes you know the basics of melee and parry.

First, the heavy melee timeline

Every cancel on this page plays with the heavy melee, so know its phases:

Phase	What happens
Wind-up	0.36 seconds. No hitbox yet, and you’re fully vulnerable. This is what enemies try to parry.
Lunge	You travel forward about half a dash (Melee Charge adds 50% distance). Turning is slowed.
Recovery	The punch finishes. Heavy melee then has a 1 second cooldown, or 1.3 seconds if it missed.

Heavy melee cancel

Start a heavy melee, then use a cancel while you’re still lunging. The punch ends early and you keep the momentum of the lunge.

There are two kinds:

• True cancel: you’re free to act straight away. Only certain active items do this, plus one ability.
• False cancel: the punch is canceled, but you’re left briefly unable to act. Good for baiting, not for movement.

Items that give a true cancel

Item	Category	Cost
Fleetfoot	Weapon	1,600
Restorative Locket	Vitality	1,600
Fury Trance	Vitality	3,200
Colossus	Vitality	6,400
Unstoppable	Vitality	6,400
Vampiric Burst	Vitality	6,400

Abilities that cancel a heavy melee

Hero	Ability	Type
Kelvin	Frozen Shelter	True (the only ability that is)
Kelvin	Ice Path	False
Dynamo	Singularity	False
Ivy	Stone Form	False

What it’s good for

1. Baiting parries. The enemy sees a heavy melee coming and parries. You cancel, their parry whiffs and goes on its 4.5 second cooldown, and now your next heavy melee is safe. More on this in parry timing and mind games.
2. Repositioning. Lunge toward cover or around a corner, then cancel and keep moving.
3. Movement. Cancel at the end of the lunge, when you’re moving fastest, then go straight into slide bunnyhops. Valve cut how much speed this keeps on April 17, 2025, so it’s a small boost now, not a launch. Melee Charge’s extra lunge distance raises the speed you keep.

Punch extension

During a true heavy melee cancel, keep holding melee. A second punch starts immediately, and the two look like one long punch that covers about double the distance. It also skips the recovery, so you can turn again in tight spaces.

It doubles as a bait: an enemy who thinks your punch is ending will often drop their guard just as the second one arrives.

Hidden melee

Some abilities play an animation that takes priority over the heavy melee. Start a heavy melee during one of them and the punch’s wind-up is hidden (fully covered) or obscured (partly visible), which makes it much harder to parry.

One common misconception: the sound and the glow around the fist are still visible to enemies. Hidden melee removes the body animation, not every tell, so good players can still react to the audio.

Hero	Ability	How to do it
Bebop	Exploding Uppercut	Buffer heavy melee as you use it. The punch is much shorter.
Grey Talon	Charged Shot	Buffer heavy melee as you fire.
Holliday	Bounce Pad	Buffer it as you land on the pad. Only while stomping, once per pad.
Kelvin	Ice Path	Heavy melee, then cast.
Kelvin	Frozen Shelter	Heavy melee while casting, or cast then melee.
Lash	Grapple	Works for about 3 seconds after the grapple.
Lash	Flog, Ground Strike	Cast, then buffer heavy melee.
Mina	Nox Nostra	Hidden for the whole ultimate.
Mo & Krill	Sand Blast	Heavy melee after throwing it.
Seven	Lightning Ball, Static Charge	Cast, then buffer heavy melee. A three-tick window, so it’s hard.
Shiv	Killing Blow	Buffer heavy melee after the cast.
Silver	Boot Kick	Heavy melee after the cast.
Victor	Shocking Reanimation	Heavy melee just before it.
Viscous	Puddle Punch	Obscured, not hidden. Melee while the fist is rising. The easiest timing on this list.
Vyper	Screwjab Dagger, Petrifying Bola	Cast, then buffer heavy melee.
Yamato	Shadow Transformation	Buffer heavy melee after casting.

Dash cancels

• Short dash crouch cancel: tap crouch during a dash to cut it short. A precise step for last hits in lane. See movement tech.
• Dash jump cancel: dash, and while the dash jump window is open, cast an ability instead of jumping. The cast cuts the dash off and you can follow with a normal jump, travelling further than the dash alone. Results vary a lot by hero:
  • Holliday’s Bounce Pad gives a big speed boost.
  • Vindicta has to finish Assassinate and unscope before jumping.
  • Casts like Lady Geist’s Malice, Shiv’s Serrated Knives and Sinclair’s Vexing Bolt delay the jump, which makes it much harder.
• Mantle glide cancels the slow end of a mantle. See movement tech.

Melee pauses your reload

Melee doesn’t cancel a reload, and it doesn’t skip one either. It pauses it:

• A light melee freezes the reload timer the moment you swing. (Billy is the exception.)
• A heavy melee freezes it once the lunge begins.

The reload carries on when the melee ends. So if you start reloading and then melee, your gun is ready later, not sooner. Finish the reload first, or melee while you still have bullets in the magazine.

Buffering: inputs the game holds for you

Several actions accept an input slightly early and fire it at the first possible moment:

• Hold jump near a ledge and you’ll mantle automatically.
• Hold jump just before landing to buffer a raw bunnyhop when you’re out of stamina.
• Hold crouch in the air for a slide that starts the moment you land (slide storage).
• Press heavy melee during an ability to queue it, which is how hidden melees work.

Buffering is forgiving, so lean on it. It’s the difference between inputs that land on the right frame every time and inputs that land only when you’re concentrating.