Deadlock Kelvin is an interesting mix of high early game damage and mid-late game utility. Utilizing a plethora of slows and lockdowns, Kelvin can easily glide across the battlefield and be a true thorn in the enemy’s side for most of the game. However, knowing what kind of thorn you want to be at different points in the game is important for success with this character.
Understanding what to prioritize during each game phase will help you and your team close out games quickly and efficiently.
Kelvin skills and playstyles for early game
Kelvin is a strong pick for the middle lane. Due to his area denial and mobility, the large open space of mid-lane is very easy to handle. This becomes especially apparent when you have a good backline damage-per-second (DPS) Deadlock character with you.
During lane, Arctic Beam should be the first ability Kelvin unlocks. This ability is very oppressive, especially if you consistently use it off cooldown. When on cooldown, you’ll want to back off, but the moment it comes off cooldown, you should step up aggressively and use it to create pressure and harass.
Arctic Beam isn’t just good for damage; it also forces enemies to respect your space. If they don’t show respect, they risk being engaged with Arctic Beam’s slow or taking massive amounts of constant damage. Inherently, this also makes Arctic Beam a brilliant tool for farming as you can drag your beam across Soul Orbs and Troopers, and then flick it onto enemies when they are in range or in line of sight.
Frost Grenade is the next ability you will want to unlock. Use it to apply constant damage and pressure. The first talent point you gain access to should also immediately be placed into this ability. At talent 1, this ability has two charges. Coupled with its already low cooldown, this becomes a great tool for pressure as it’s spammable and doesn’t leave you open to attack. Using this ability as much as possible will allow you to overwhelm the enemy with Kelvin’s amazing early damage.
The cherry on top of Kelvin’s early pressure is Ice Path. When used in conjunction with his other abilities, it allows you to close the distance with enemies quickly. This ability not only grants you mobility but also makes you hard to hit, allowing you to gain height advantages or swiftly weave into cover.
While focusing on farm is always important, Kelvin has a mostly supportive role later in the game. This means your focus in lane is to utilize the high damage your kit does early to put lane opponents behind. If you get ahead in the process, that’s just a bonus.
Doing this is relatively simple. Start with Frost Grenade as it’s a very noncommittal way to either force an engage or poke. If you hit Frost Grenade and the enemy is out of position, immediately activate Arctic Beam. If they are managing to slip away or are using cover to their advantage, Ice Path will easily negate that as you can chase them down on your terms. Due to Arctic Beam also having a Movement Speed slow as well as a Fire Rate slow, not only will the enemy struggle to get away, but they will struggle to fight back.
Once you get Frozen Shelter, you can start looking to rush down enemies for kills. Frozen Shelter makes getting kills both safe and reliable, as it can lock down opponents and keep you alive and healthy (due to the heavy health regen it applies to all allies inside the dome).
Frozen Shelter is especially oppressive when you and your teammate are pushed under your Guardian. Popping a quick Frozen Shelter on the enemy when they are overextended and vulnerable is very effective. If they choose to attack you, you have the dome’s health regen to keep you alive, while negating all damage against nearby objectives such as Guardians (unfortunately, this also stops Guardians helping you in combat).
Similarly, if the enemy wants to retreat under their Guardian, you can easily pop Frozen Shelter and suddenly they can’t leave and are forced to fight you and your allies on your turf without the aid of their objective.
The next two talents to unlock are in Arctic Beam. Talent one gives bonus DPS, and talent two grants an additional slow, making it all the harder for enemies to escape you alive.
To prepare for mid game, the next two talent points you want to invest in are talent two of Frost Grenade and Talent 1 of Frozen Shelter. These are essential for supporting teammates, with Frost Grenade now healing allies on hit and Frozen Shelter providing bonus health regen to nearby allies. These talents are invaluable for those mid game skirmishes that come up, allowing you to apply significant healing across the battlefield.
Kelvin early game powerspikes
Kelvin has a brilliant 1500 soul powerspike. By this point, you will have consistently been harassing the enemy laner with Frost Grenade and Arctic Beam. If done correctly, you will have a decent amount of lane dominance over the enemy. At 1500 souls, you unlock Ice Path. This will allow you to run down your enemies. Coupled with the damage your grenade and beam wrack up, you become a real kill threat for the enemy.
The next powerspike is when Frozen Shelter and talent two of Arctic Beam are unlocked. This gives you massive killing power, and the moment enemies are out of position, you can trap and kill them with ease.
Best Kelvin items for early game
Healing Rite: This is a core item for characters like Kelvin who want to put their best foot forward in the early game. This is primarily due to its brilliant healing active.
High-Velocity Mag: A really good item for last hitting, as Kelvin’s bullets are slow and can cause you to miss those Soul secures.
Ammo Scavenger: A great early game item for pressure and farming, as it gives a small amount of ammo per soul secured.
Headshot Booster: A potent item for harassing the enemy, especially as you won’t always have access to Arctic Beam. Just be sure you actually secure headshots.
Extra Health: Really good early game tank item that grants you much more survivability.
Extra Stamina: Your standard stamina item for skirmishing.
Mystic Reach: Increases Frost Grenade‘s radius, making it easier and more consistent to hit for healing and dealing damage.
Kelvin mid game skills and what to max first
Coming out of the early game and the laning phase, Kelvin shifts focus to a more supportive game plan. Unlike other roamers, he aims to enable his teammates and push the team forward together.
Utilizing Kelvin’s mobility and lockdown, look to see which teammates are winning their lanes. Helping players who are already ahead is key to supportive gameplay and is what Kelvin excels at. Using the plethora of slows in his kit while healing and keeping teammates alive, Kelvin aims to enable other players. While Kelvin does have really solid damage, going into the mid to late game, his damage falls off in comparison to other characters. Using his massive utility, you instead want to make sure your team is in a position to work together to take the win!
Ice Path is the true key to all of this, making Kelvin one of the best and most adaptive gankers in the game. Having the ability to rotate to a lane high and fast to get the drop on unsuspecting enemies all the time is potent. However, timing your roams is important, as if the enemy sees you coming, they can easily back off. Roaming when your lane opponents are pushed under a Guardian or after the enemy Guardian is taken is crucial to successful ganks. During these key moments, the enemy team has a distinct lack of pressure and control over the map, making your movements and decisions harder to track.
Being a primarily supportive character does not mean Kelvin is unable to take kills or should fight alone. On the contrary, he absolutely can, especially against characters that struggle in 1v1 scenarios. However, fights like that may force you into using Frozen Shelter – one of your best utility tools – when you should be saving it for skirmish potential. Don’t tunnel vision for a kill on a side lane and risk compromising future fights.
If Frozen Shelter does happen to be down, you should play safe:
- Position on the sidelines of fights and utilize Frost Grenade’s damage and healing as best you can.
- If enemies get too close or run away, pop Arctic Beam and go crazy.
- If you ever need to reposition, chase down, or if Frozen Shelter expires, pop Ice Path.
Kelvin can take jungle creeps; however, unlike other heroes, it’s not his primary goal, nor is it massively safe. Instead, lane dominance and team play are priorities for Kelvin’s mid game.
Ice Path can be limiting in its usefulness when within the jungle. In lane, it’s designed to give Kelvin a lot of three-dimensional freedom. This means that after a fight, rather than creating jungle pressure, Kelvin should immediately prioritize hard shoving the closest lane as far into the enemy base as possible. With Ice Path at his disposal and infinite slows across his entire kit, Kelvin is one of the few characters that can do this kind of hard shoving incredibly safely. As long as you keep an eye on the minimap so you don’t get ganked, Kelvin will rarely die when shoving lanes like this.
Ensure you don’t just AFK farm. You are still aiming to play around teamfights and teammates, NOT becoming a farm-bot or split-pusher. These lanes should only happen when significant pressure has been placed on the map, whether that is an objective take or a team fight win.
During the mid game, the two skills that become truly influential in your strategy are Frost Grenade and Ice Path. Both of these abilities want to be spammed and available at all times. Therefore, you want to unlock talents one and two of Ice Path, then max Frozen Grenade.
Frost Grenade‘s final talent gives it a massive boost in damage, almost tripling it. This makes Frost Grenade start to really hurt on hit. You can make Frost Grenade even more potent by purchasing Extra Charge and Rapid Recharge enabling you to spam this ability as much as you want.
Going into the late game, the two abilities you want to look to max are Arctic Beam and Ice Path, respectively. Arctic Beam’s final talent is excellent for teamfights and wave clear as it reduces the fire rate of nearby targets. This massively helps with that hard shoving discussed earlier. The less time you spend hard shoving Troopers, the safer you are, and by proxy, the more helpful you are to your team.
While Kelvin’s damage isn’t as much as other characters, with Ice Path‘s final talent, your overall damage output will become a real pain for enemies, especially with Frost Grenade and Arctic Beam‘s spread damage.
While you can plug more points into Frozen Shelter, the final two talents aren’t entirely as valuable mid-late as Ice Path and Arctic Beam. As long as Frozen Shelter is used effectively, it will likely always be up, making talent two a waste this early. The Spirit Power scaling on talent three does very little unless you have significant spirit power for it to scale off of, making this talent far more potent later on in the game.
Best Kelvin items for mid game
Sprint Boots/Enduring Speed: An item that is core to roaming as a whole. Combined with Ice Path, this item will allow you to fly from lane to lane with ease.
Slowing Hex: Combined with Ice Path and Sprint Boots, this item makes your already good engage even better by silencing their movement-based items and abilities.
Basic Magazine: An effective and cheap option for some extra ammo.
Fortitude: An excellent tank item that also gives movement speed, both being stats that Kelvin utilizes effectively.
Superior Cooldown: Allows you to utilize your kit more often, increasing your tempo on the map and allowing you to peel for your team more effectively.
Kelvin late game playstyle and aims
Kelvin wants to group up and keep his team alive during the late game. While Kelvin has good damage, it falls off during the mid to late game, so utilizing the other aspects of his kit, most prominently his peel, healing, and lockdown, allows him to enable other teammates.
Rarely should you be alone in the latter parts of the game. Kelvin can push waves in mere seconds with Ice Grenade and Arctic Beam, so you have no excuse for simply sitting in a lane alone for prolonged periods. Instead either shove the lane with a teammate or shove the lane quickly, then use Ice Path to reposition to an area of the map that has your teammates.
Ensure you don’t get picked off. This may seem obvious, but a character like Kelvin should never be caught out. With Ice Path and little reason to ever be in a situation where you overextend for a kill, Kelvin should rarely die outside of teamfights during the late game.
Being alive means more healing and peel for your carries, and more healing and peel for your carries means an easier time during teamfights.
Something that many players forget to utilize is Kelvin’s weirdly consistent healing.
Due to Frost Grenade mostly being used as a harass tool early, players often forget that this spammable ability can also be spammed on their teammates. Kelvin’s Frost Grenade heals for a decent amount later on due to the healing having Spirit power scaling. Running around using Frost Grenade off cooldown to heal teammates as much as possible is an underrated strategy that many Kelvins haven’t seemed to utilize in the past.
This strategy really plays into Kelvin’s game plan, whereby he likes to sit a little off from the battlefield in relative safety so he can get off consistent Frost Grenades for both healing and damage. This positioning also means that if need be, Kelvin can dive into the thick of it with Ice Path to get off a game-changing Frozen Shelter.
Best Kelvin items for late game
Rapid Recharge: A straight buff for Frost Grenade, giving it a lower cooldown and an extra charge. This is essential for supporting teammates, as Frost Grenade heals allies on hit, and Frozen Shelter provides a massive fire rate slow to enemies within.
Fleet Foot: A cheap but amazing item for mobility. Fleet Foot also removes the movement speed slow you receive while shooting, which is excellent on Kelvin as he loves to stay mobile with Ice Path.
Pristine Emblem: The Bonus Damage to enemies above 50% HP is very potent for Kelvin as he will rarely ever kill a hero with a single Arctic beam use, so with this item at least hes dealing as much damage as possible during its cast.
Surge of Power: You can choose to either imbue your Frost Grenade or your Arctic Beam with this item. Both have their advantages, namely the damage increase on Arctic Beams talent three and the bonus healing the Spirit Power will give Frost Grenade. Ultimately its your choice what you choose, but I would suggest Frost Grenade for that bonus healing.
Superior Stamina: A really good standard item to build for fights and mobility.
Playing Kelvin effectively means knowing your priorities so you can close out the match. While it may seem like Kelvin’s kit wants to rain hellfire (or rather hellfrost) on enemies as you skirt around the battlefield nimbly drilling into anyone in your way with a beam of frost, that isn’t the case. Instead, the important thing is to play around your team, play around your healing, and not just think about that next kill.
