Deadlock Dynamo possesses one of the most impactful abilities in the game, but that alone won’t carry you to victory. His kit revolves around patiently waiting for the enemy to make a move, then dismantling their actions to take control.
Mastering this unique game of measured patience and strategy will spell the difference between winning and losing games with Dynamo.
Dynamo skills and playstyles for early game
During the laning phase, Dynamo plays reactively, focusing on farming and staying safe due to his high cooldowns and long cast times. This means that his abilities should be used to counteract what your enemies do.
Staying calm in fights and using your abilities at the right time is central to Dynamo’s gameplay. Positioning behind the Trooper wave provides a wider view of the lane and helps you monitor your opponents while farming.
It is this reactive gameplan that makes Kinetic Pulse the best first option for Dynamo. This ability completely walls off most engages due to its size, quick cast speed, and crowd control (CC).
Due to its size, simply casting this ability in the general direction of the enemy allows you some breathing room, making it an excellent option to throw out if enemies are harassing you in the open.
It is this exact reason why you want to prioritize Kinetic Pulse‘s first and second talents. Both these talents are immensely useful for counter-engaging. Talent one applies a Fire Rate and Movement Speed slow to hit enemies, and talent two gives Dynamo a weapon buff against enemies hit with the pulse.
With these talents, Kinetic Pulse becomes a potent ability that can sway fights if used correctly. While it has a long cooldown, these talents ensure you get the most out of it when used.
The next ability you will want to take is Rejuvenating Aurora, as it’s your primary tool for keeping you and your lane partner in lane for as long as possible. Stick near your lane partner, and if either of you takes too much damage, pop Rejuvenating Aurora and it will heal you up nicely.
Rejuvenating Aurora is great for disengages since you can use it while dashing, but be mindful not to cancel it by using other abilities.
When using Rejuvenating Aurora, ensure you are primarily behind cover. This may seem obvious, however, it’s not uncommon for inexperienced players to panic under pressure and use this during a fight.
The “when” of how you use Rejuvenating Aurora is key, as enemies can outdamage the healing it applies early on. The best way to use this ability is in total safety, as you will get the most out of it. It can be used during disengages to relieve pressure; however, that’s not always a good option.
Quantum Entanglement is the final non-ultimate ability you will be unlocking. This ability is often mistaken for an engage tool due to it transporting Dynamo a distance, almost like a dash.
On the contrary, this ability is utterly useless at engaging. It is slow and telegraphed, purely harming your chances of engaging rather than improving them.
Instead, Quantum Entanglement is a counter-engagement tool that excels at turning fights in your favour. It shines in counter-engagements for three key reasons:
- The Intangibility: The one and a half seconds of of intangibility it provides can completely negate burst damage from an enemy engage.
- The Repositioning: Being able to reposition anywhere within a 10 metre radius is gold dust when reacting to an engage, as you can choose a position that places you in an inherent advantage
- The Fire Rate Buff: This buff is the primary reason why the fight will be turned on its head, and when combined with Kinetic Pulse, there not many characters that can resist the damage output.
As you can see, Dynamo’s success early game all comes from reacting to what the enemy is doing. Watching carefully and not overstepping, utilizing your abilities when necessary and not wasting them. This attitude and gameplan culminate when unlocking your final ability, Singularity.
Singularity is not only Dynamo’s most impactful ability, but likely is the most impactful ability in the game. This is why it also has one of the highest cooldowns in the game. Knowing how and when you should (or shouldn’t) use it is essential and will ultimately decide whether you win or lose the game.
While this ability’s damage is nothing to sneeze at, you primarily want to use it for its CC. Singularity renders any enemy caught in its pull essentially useless, so knowing how to use it is vital for success.
Effective Singularity usage comes down to timing and positioning. There are two kinds of positions you want to be in when fishing for a Singularity.
The first and most common will be posturing aggressively, either within or in front of your Trooper wave. This means you can easily combo a dash-jump into Kinetic Pulse to ensure you get a Singularity off on specific targets, such as a backline damage per second (DPS) character.
The second, more situational position is when joining a skirmish or ganking. This is where you engage with Singularity alone and is by far the most effective way to use it. It’s also the hardest to pull off, as you will want to have either some height or a flank on the enemy. This kind of engage will allow you to use Kinetic Pulse After Singularity, utilizing its talents and knockup to their fullest.
Ensure you are farming jungle camps whenever you get the chance. Playing reactively doesn’t mean you can’t take jungle opportunities. When your team has jungle pressure after a lane push or a gank, take the surrounding jungle camps as quickly as you can. Make sure you aren’t sacrificing Trooper Souls to do this.
Your abilities and talents are excellent for this kind of reactive jungling, as you can burn your abilities and have them back in time for lane engagements with the enemy.
An efficient jungle rotation is:
- Quantum tunnel into the camp
- Use Kinetic pulse on as many of the jungle creeps as possible
- Empty your mag into the camp, starting with the highest health creep, weaving heavy melees occasionally if need be
- When all is done, use Rejuvenating Aurora to heal up any damage taken from the camp
Coming out of the early game, you want to start placing talent points into Singularity and Rejuvenating Aurora. These abilities will have the largest impact during Dynamos strongest and most prominent specialisation: Teamfights
First, you want to get the first talent of Singularity. This talent increases the radius by two metres. Coupled with a Mystic Reach, and Singularity becomes a seriously large no-go zone for the enemy team.
Next, you want to work on maxing Rejuvenating Aurora. Whilst talent one and two are excellent for both survivability and cooldown reduction (CDR), respectively, the primary reason for maxing it is talent three.
Talent three removes Rejuvenating Aurora‘s movement and ability restrictions, allowing full mobility during its cast. This makes it an excellent teamwide heal that can be used during teamfights. Furthermore, its healing gains an additional percentage-based heal, making it scale nicely into the mid to late game.
Dynamo early game powerspikes
The first prominent powerspike Dynamo receives is when he has the first two talents of Kinetic Pulse and has purchased Extra Charge. Extra Charge allows Kinetic Pulse to be utilized more often and with fewer drawbacks due to the lower cooldown. This makes an already quite scary and impactful ability even more potent.
The second, more obvious powerspike is when you unlock Singularity. While using this ability effectively is especially hard, if you manage to catch both your opponents in it during a fight and your teammate is alive or you’re being ganked, you effectively win the fight.
Best Dynamo items for early game
High Velocity Mag: An essential early game item as it makes Dynamo’s weapon almost hitscan, improving farming and harassment.
Mystic Reach: Excellent item for all of Dynamo’s abilities, especially Singularity and Kinetic Pulse
Extra Charge: Turns Kinetic Pulse, an already potent ability, into a spammable nightmare for the enemy.
Healing Rite: Great item to have alongside Rejuvenating Aurora for survivability and healing.
Headshot Booster: A brilliant item that synergises with High Velocity Mag, giving Dynamo a little bit more harass power.
Dynamo mid game skills and strategy
Dynamo’s mid game strategy entirely revolves around waiting. Imagine him like a kind of crocodile, lying in wait for unsuspecting opponents; however, instead of snapping down on the leg of an unsuspecting gazelle, dynamo becomes a black hole in the middle of a juicy teamfight.
As a character, Dynamo is so specialised in teamfighting that it’s actually disadvantageous to do anything other than prepare for the next teamfight. Being the player who is most ready for a teamfight on the best teamfighting character in the game means that, ultimately, you will always have the upper hand in those critical game-changing fights.
This kind of playstyle means you shouldn’t get caught up in lane activities anymore. You can push the odd lane that’s crashing into your guardian, but you never want to get caught up in 1v1s or stick around in lane to slow push a wave. Being in a lane means being trackable and vulnerable. You get caught out, you may burn Singularity or die. Both of these situations will make teamfights far harder. You get spotted on a side lane, the enemy may choose to engage on your team on the other side of the map
Keeping these factors in mind, you ideally don’t want to be in lanes much. In fact, you barely want to be spotted at all.
Ultimately, you want to lie in wait in the jungle, farming as many camps as you can to build up souls to buy items that will further improve your teamfighting.
Unlike other junglers, you aren’t looking to build pressure or strategically roam on enemies. You’re there solely to take camps and lie in wait for a teamfight to happen.
Looking for teamfights means it’s essential to have a keen nose for where and when teamfights will take place.
Playing around your team and keeping an eye on their movements or decisions will allow you to have an idea of whether a teamfight is brewing or not. If your team begins to cluster around and force themselves onto objectives or lanes, this will inevitably attract the attention of the enemy team, potentially leading to a teamfight.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, keeping tabs on what the enemy wants and anticipating their moves is also a brilliant strategy. Watching and waiting to see what lanes and objectives the enemy team wants to try and push, so you can be the one to contest them and almost force a teamfight situation.
With these strategies in mind, you can be very versatile in your game plan depending on what jungle camps are up and where you need to be at what time.
To lean into this strategy, the next ability you want to be maxing is Singularity. Talent two and three will not only increase the duration of the ability, but also drastically increase the percent health damage by almost four times. As you can guess, this makes this ability even more monstrous to deal with for the enemy team.
Finally, ensure you max Kinetic Pulse for the extra damage and charge. Couple this with a rapid recharge and Kinetic Pulse is a potent tool for disruption and teamfighting.
Best Dynamo items for mid game
Kinetic Dash: As Dynamo loves to dash-jump, this is an excellent item for both mobility and fighting power.
Rapid Recharge: Similar reasoning to Extra Charge, this just increases Kinetic Pulse‘s effectiveness.
Phantom Strike: This item is perfect for engaging with Singularity as it teleports you directly on top of a targeted enemy, allowing you to appear in the middle of the enemy team.
Majestic Leap: An incredible mobility item that can be synergised with Phantom Strike to essentially fly in from nowhere and teleport into their team. It’s perfect for Singularity.
Superior Cooldown: Imbue on Singularity to greatly reduce its cooldown.
Dynamo late game playstyle and aims
Dynamo really has very little he changes from mid to late game. Your game plan is almost identical: wait.
The key difference in the late game is that you should be grouped with your team, where you’re most useful and threatening. Do not stray to the opposite side of the map, where you contribute nothing and cannot fully utilize your kit.
To play Dynamo effectively, always remember: wait and react. He is not a proactive character and should not be treated as such. He does not repeatedly overpower the enemy with pressure and power like other characters can. Instead, Dynamo waits, watching for those few key moments during a game where he, and only he, can utterly cripple the enemy team beyond recovery.
Best Dynamo items for late game
Unstoppable: Use during Singularity to prevent CC while it’s channeling.
Refresher: One of the best items on Dynamo, as it allows you to essentially use your ultimate twice. Devastating.
Arcane Surge: The natural upgrade to Kinetic Dash, as it increases both the range and duration of your next ability after a dash-jump, making it a flat buff to Singularity.
Superior Duration: Imbue on Singularity to greatly increase its duration.
Veil Walker: The flanking item that any character who wants to flank effectively needs. This will allow you to traverse the jungle unseen.
