Deadlock Practice Drills: Movement, Aim, Last Hits and Parry

Matches are a slow way to practise mechanics. A dash jump you need once a fight, you can repeat fifty times in five minutes on your own. These drills are built for the three practice spaces the game gives you. Each takes about five minutes.

Where to practise

Space	How to get there	Best for
The Atrium	Walk through the doorway to the left of the main hall in your Hideout	A quick warm-up with no loading screen. Static friendly and enemy bots, a rope, a jump pad and a soul well. A machine toggles fast cooldowns and infinite stamina.
The Sandbox	Play menu, or the teleporter in the Atrium	Everything else: troopers and Guardians that fight each other, a Walker, test dummies, a shooting range, a parry gym and a jungle camp. Full settings panel.
Explore NYC	Play menu	The real match map on your own, with the same settings as the Sandbox. Crates and jungle camps first appear after 5 seconds. Ideal for learning routes, ziplines and boost spots.

The Sandbox and practice tools page lists every setting and console command.

Settings you’ll use in every drill

• Fast Stamina or the Atrium’s infinite stamina: for learning a movement input. Turn it off again before you finish, so you practise inside your real stamina budget.
• No Cooldown (cooldowns drop to 1 second): for ability combos.
• No Reload: for pure tracking practice.
• Game speed: slow the game down to learn a timing, then return it to normal. Console: host_timescale_dec, then host_timescale 1.0.
• Max Level and All Perks: try your hero fully upgraded. Console: givelevelupgold 35 and giveallupgrades.

Movement drills

Run these in the Sandbox or Explore NYC. The techniques are explained in advanced movement tech.

1. Dash jump window (2 minutes). With infinite stamina, dash jump across an open street twenty times. Watch the bars turn blue, and press jump inside that 0.25 second window every time. Then slow the game down and notice exactly when the window opens.
2. Dash slide into slide hops (2 minutes). Dash slide, then chain slide bunnyhops down a straight street. Count to “one” on every slide before jumping, so no slide is shorter than half a second.
3. Fast climb and mantle glide (1 minute). Climb every wall you pass without an air jump: hold forward, jump twice. Hold crouch at the top of every mantle and slide off.
4. Corner boosts (Explore NYC). Pick the three buildings you fight around most in your lane and find one edge or rounded corner on each that boosts you to the roof. Repeat until you hit each first time.
5. Zipline starts (Explore NYC). Ride a zipline, crouch while you’re being pulled up to it, and drop off into a zip dash. This is how fast players reach the middle of the lane first.

Finish every movement drill with stamina back to normal and run your favourite route again. If it falls apart without free stamina, you’ve learned something about where you’re wasting bars.

Aim drills

1. Tracking (2 minutes). In the Sandbox, the dummy that runs across the front of the shooting range is your target. Turn on No Reload and keep your crosshair on its head. Strafe while you shoot.
2. Strafe and shoot (2 minutes). Turn reloads back on. Shoot the static dummies while strafing left and right, never standing still. Reload behind cover, not in the open.
3. Flick to orbs (1 minute). After each trooper kill in the next drill, flick up to the floating soul orb as fast as you can.

Last-hit drills

The garden on the left side of the Sandbox has troopers spawning behind each Guardian and fighting each other. It’s the closest thing to a real lane.

1. Gun last hits and orbs. Take only the killing shot on enemy troopers, then shoot the floating orb. When one of your own troopers dies, shoot its orb too: in a real match, that’s how you deny the enemy those souls.
2. Melee last hits. Finish low troopers with a light melee. You get the floating half of the souls instantly, and there’s nothing left for the enemy to deny.
3. Step-in last hits. Use a short dash crouch cancel to step in, light melee, and step back.

Parry drills

1. The gym dummy (3 minutes). The Sandbox gym has a dummy that throws melee at you. Parry only when the wind-up starts. Count your whiffs; the goal is zero.
2. With a friend (2 minutes). In the Atrium or a custom match, one of you attacks and the other defends. The attacker mixes real heavies, fakes and light melees. Swap every ten attempts. This is the only way to practise reading baits, because bots don’t fake.

Hero combo drills

1. Spawn an enemy hero in front of you from the settings panel.
2. Set Max Level, All Perks and No Cooldown.
3. Run your hero’s main combo ten times, including any hidden melee your hero has.
4. Set the enemy to half health and practise the finishing sequence you’d use on a fleeing target.
5. Turn No Cooldown off and run the combo once at real cooldowns, so you know what you can do in a single fight.

Bonus: Make Mimic makes a bot copy everything you do. Set one up in front of you and watch your own movement from the outside. If your dodging looks predictable from there, it is.

Jungle drill

Use Spawn Camp (console: citadel_spawn_nearby_neutrals) in the Sandbox storage room, or clear real camps in Explore NYC, and time how long your hero takes to clear one. Try a different order of abilities and melee until the time stops dropping. A faster clear is free souls in every match. See jungle farming.

A 20-minute daily routine

Minutes	Drill	Where
0 to 5	Dash jump window, slide hops, fast climbs	Atrium, then Sandbox
5 to 10	Tracking and strafe-shooting	Sandbox range
10 to 15	Last hits and orbs	Sandbox garden
15 to 20	Parry gym, or your hero’s combo	Sandbox

Once a week, swap the first block for a corner boost and zipline session in Explore NYC.