Deadlock Mo & Krill are a deadly duo who utilize aggressive tactics and high damaging abilities to Burrow into enemy lines enemies and lock them down. Despite Mo & Krill having an explosive early to mid game, their low range and large hitbox make them a big and sometimes vulnerable target.
Knowing how to position in lane and utilize their close-range kit will help you dominate lane and fire yourself into the mid game.
Mo & Krill skills and playstyles for early game
Mo & Krill play a very aggressive lane. They love being ahead and can easily take advantage of opponents who are behind by getting in their faces and causing problems.
In lane, position yourself far more forward than you normally would on other Deadlock characters so you can efficiently utilize Mo & Krill’s mid-range weapon and short-range abilities. Playing in or around enemy Troopers allows you to use Scorn effectively and heal up during engages or when harassed. This kind of positioning also ensures you can constantly push enemies under the Guardian, where you can harass them for free.
Mo & Krill are easy to hit due to their large hitbox, so ensure you play around cover a lot. While they have the highest base health pool in the game, that large hitbox means that enemy harass can burn through that health pool rather easily. By playing around cover, you can force an opponent to chase you if they wish to harass you. As a bonus, heroes who chase you around corners will inevitably find themselves up close and personal with Mo & Krill’s close-range toolkit.
Therefore, the most efficient way to play Mo & Krill is to position aggressively while sticking to cover as much as possible.
Remember that Mo & Krill will struggle to farm efficiently when an enemy prioritizes harassment. Their large hitbox means that even securing Souls becomes a potentially hazardous effort, forcing you to ensnare Souls from a safe distance or when a Trooper wave nears cover.
Take Scorn first so you can posture aggressively in lane. Scorn gives Mo & Krill additional survivability through lifesteal and is most effective when Mo & Krill is surrounded by enemy Heroes and Troopers. Use it when the enemy gets too close, or combo it after a quick heavy melee to get off some pretty safe harass due to the healing it will give.
Scorn heals a deceptive amount, allowing Mo & Krill to come out on top in most exchanges. When low, Mo & Krill can bait the enemy team into an engage, let off a quick Scorn in the enemy Trooper wave and heal all their health back.
Taking Sand Blast second on Mo & Krill is important for farming. Mo & Krill don’t have a lot of tools for pressure or farming and are vulnerable to DPS when out of cover. To answer this, Sand Blast massively reduces incoming damage by disarming all opponents hit with Sand Blast. This grants Mo & Krill a small window to deal a ton of damage to Trooper waves in melee, while also healing as needed with Scorn.
Sand Blast is also excellent during engages, as you can Sand Blast, Heavy Melee and then disengage with Scorn.
Lastly, take Burrow, your best bet for avoiding damage, hard engaging, or counter engaging. Burrow is a great multi-purpose tool which makes Mo & Krill far more formidable and less predictable, allowing them to dive out of cover safely, or dive back in without taking damage.
As Burrow gives you a massive buff in tank stats, using it when the enemy engages will reduce the damage they deal by a large margin. The movement speed you gain when burrowed means that you have a lot of freedom to use it to disengage entirely or un-burrow below the enemy to deal a boatload of damage with a spin attack.
Much like Mo & Krill’s other abilities, Burrow is best used aggressively as it can massively disrupt enemies during fights with its knock-up and deceptive amount of damage.
Burrow also increases Mo & Krill’s Bullet and Spirit Armor while burrowed, and is best used before you commit to hard Crowd Control (CC). On recast, Burrow knocks and stuns enemies and Mo & Krill does a spin attack, dealing a boatload of damage.
Mo & Krill’s ultimate ability, Combo, is specialized in lockdown and elimination of targets. This means it should either be the first or last ability you use in an engagement. Generally, however, you’ll want to use Combo when you want to secure a kill as the ability grants a permanent and infinitely stacking health bonus for dead heroes.
As an engagement tool with massive damage potential, Combo demands respect from the enemy team, and can even deter engagements when it’s off cooldown. If the enemy team does engage or get too close to Mo & Krill, they will pop like a balloon.
Due to the aggressive playstyle that Mo & Krill live by, Scorn must be the target for your first three talent points. Talent one lowers the cooldown, and two increases the damage (and subsequently the healing). This means that not only will you Scorn more often, but you will heal for more each time it is used. This makes Mo & Krill’s playstyle far safer and more effective.
Burrow becomes your bread and butter later on, and it will be your priority until max as you transition into the mid game. Timing Burrow’s use can be tricky, so the extra time provided by investing a talent point into Burrow can allow you to catch out nearby opponents.
Burrow‘s second talent increases its spin attack damage and radius, making it Burrow Mo & Krill’s highest damaging ability after their ultimate, with burst damage akin to an assassin. Once talent two is unlocked, this ability becomes incredibly hard to ignore. Any enemy caught in it is in for a world of pain and is in danger of a quick Scorn–Combo combo finishing them off.
Something to keep in mind is that Mo & Krill are slowed when damaged while underground in Burrow. Here, Sand Blast can disarm opponents and give you the window you need to Burrow up to them.
Mo & Krill benefits massively from having the first Guardian taken. This opens up the Deadlock map to them and allows them to start aggressively sniffing around in the enemy jungle. While Mo & Krill aren’t quite as quick at roaming and jungling as other characters, they have a lot of tools that make them very effective at it. Scorn and Burrow combined with their high health pool give them enough damage and survivability for a healthy jungle clear. Burrow and Combo also give them enough mobility, lockdown, and damage to gank and kill almost any hero they come across.
Mo & Krill early game powerspikes
Mo & Krill have a powerful early game and gain a minor power spike at 1500 souls. Here, Mo & Krill have all their abilities unlocked and can afford three Weapon items. With all three abilities and items like Restorative Shot and Close Quarters, you start dealing really solid damage with decent staying power. To top off with items like Monster Rounds and suddenly you’re pushing the enemy in, harassing them, and out-healing them all with just three items.
The next powerspike Mo & Krill have is when you get that second talent of Burrow. The damage increase you get is truly unmatched. Combined with Combo, these abilities can annihilate most enemy’s health, either turning an enemy engage in your favor or catching unsuspecting enemies off guard.
Best Mo & Krill items for early game
- Restorative shot: An excellent sustain option as Mo & Krill will tend to harass aggressively during most parts of the laning phase.
- Mystic Reach: A base increase to Scorn’s range will increase its effectiveness both in survivability and harass, as increased range means more targets are affected.
- Mystic Burst: Another excellent item for Mo & Krill as all their abilities will benefit from the damage boost. Scorn particularly benefits as its healing is based on damage done so the bonus damage Mystic Burst deals will also add to the healing done.
- Sprint Boots: A great item for repositioning early, especially on a character that loves to be aggressive and posture in the enemy’s faces.
- Rapid Rounds: A standard item for increasing your weapon damage output early on. Mo & Krill have to use their weapon a lot during the laning phase, so they benefit from having an item that increases their fire rate.
- Monster Rounds: As Mo & Krill love to push the enemy under their Guardian, Monster Rounds are a massive boon for Mo & Krill’s wave clear, allowing them to spam Scorn and constantly demolish the enemy Trooper wave.
Mo & Krill mid game skills and what to max first
Mo & Krill like to do two things during mid game: farm and fight. This is because they want to build up their items and utilize the high-damage spikes they gain at this point in the game.
With Mo & Krill’s highly aggressive playstyle, they can easily control certain parts of the map. Push waves to free up the area for roaming, but avoid staying in lanes, you’re more useful in the jungle applying pressure.
By keeping a presence on the map as much as possible you can quickly snowball a lead. With Scorn it’s very easy to sustain on Mo & Krill, meaning you rarely ever have to return to base to heal (unless you die, of course). This gives you a MASSIVE amount of tempo and you can essentially rotate between objectives and jungle camps.
Ensure you are taking camps on the enemy’s side of the map. This creates pressure in two ways:
- Your physical presence on their side of the map allows you to react aggressively both for ganks and objectives.
- Taking enemy camps both removes resources they can utilize and forces them to overstep to regain those resources, making them easy prey for you and your team.
Mo & Krill especially thrive at this because of their high health and healing from Scorn, allowing them to stick around far longer than other heroes might manage. If you do meet an enemy hero, you can either outright kill them with Burrow and Combo‘s insane damage, or use the same abilities to lock them down so your team can come help.
During the mid game, Mo & Krill like to play slow around objectives, whittling at the enemy’s defences bit by bit. They don’t excel at taking objectives but have that staying power that allows consistent rotation between objectives. If Guardians are up, take them one by one with your team while taking camps. If there are no Guardians up, start on the Walkers, etc.
By mid game, you should have Burrow maxed and two points in Scorn. The next three talent points should be sunk into Combo’s first two talents. This will increase the duration of Combo and give you Bullet Resistance for the duration. Combo is an instrumental ability with a relatively low cooldown allowing it to be used in most fights, utilizing the first two talents brilliantly.
After putting three talent points into Combo, finish maxing Scorn to have it apply a debuff on the enemy that causes Mo & Krill to deal 15% extra damage to them. This effect stacks and lasts 16 seconds, meaning Mo & Krill can use it multiple times during their damage rotation and ramp up their damage numbers. This makes Scorn a brilliant and spammable tool for both survivability and damage.
Best Mo & Krill items for mid game
- Torment Pulse: As Mo & Krill love to be in the enemy’s face, an early Torment Pulse is an amazing item for damage. Combined with Monster Rounds, it acts as a brilliant tool for jungle camp clears.
- Mystic Vulnerability: An excellent item for a frontline tank like Mo & Krill, as their AOE Scorn will apply a Spirit Resist debuff to all enemies around them.
- Return Fire: Mo & Krill are easy to hit with their large hitbox. Return fire turns that inherent negative into a positive, as enemies will either be forced to take damage when damaging you, or be deterred from harassment.
- Duration Extender: All of Mo & Krill’s abilities benefit from Duration Extender, especially Combo and Burrow. Increasing their duration not only allows for safer engages, but also longer CC and an easier time securing kills.
- Warp Stone: An excellent item to have when you are ahead. Warp Stone buffs Spirit Power and can be utilized with Burrow to create unique engage opportunities.
Mo & Krill late game playstyle and aims
During the late game, Mo & Krill likes to lean into that playstyle of whittling away at the enemy’s objectives. Instead of focusing on a single lane, Mo & Krill excel at chipping away at multiple enemy defenses over time. Once all the Walkers are taken, begin taking all the base Guardians slowly. If you’re left unchecked, all the enemy’s lanes will have Trooper waves swarming their base before they know it.
You can effectively chip away at the enemy’s defenses by knowing when to back off. Do not overstay for an objective, just rotate onto a new one.
While Mo & Krill excel at forcing kills, forcing objectives isn’t really what they’re about. When doing this later on, Mo & Krill have to be careful not to get completely jumped by the enemy team. Late game enemies have higher health and far more mobility. This means that not only are they harder to kill, but they are far quicker at reacting and roaming to fights. When you catch an enemy out and Combo them, whilst it does CC them, technically you are also CC’d and a free target. Knowing when not to tunnel-vision for a kill, to cancel a Combo early, or to use Burrow to run and not fight may well save your skin.
Utilizing all these factors, you can efficiently begin storming the enemy base at all sides. Then, all it takes is one good team fight and you can fell the enemy patron.
Best Mo & Krill items for late game
- Superior Duration: Having Superior Duration is a massive buff to Mo & Krill’s skirmish game and is a significant upgrade to Duration Extender. Combined with engage items like Warp Stone and you become a real force to be reckoned with.
- Phantom Strike: An amazing late game engage item. Whilst you can’t get it as early as Warp Stone, this item specializes in engages as it applies debuffs to the enemy it’s used on.
- Improved Bullet Armor: Having good tank stats late game is really important for Mo & Krill their large frame makes them an easy target for Bullet Damage.
- Improved Spirit Armor: Always a good option later on as enemies start dealing more damage. Especially important for Mo & Krill as they are always in the enemy’s face taking the brunt of their damage.
- Metal Skin: A core item for survivability if you’re dying too quickly during team fights due to weapon damage.
That’s about all you need to know to get started with Mo & Krill and this beginner’s build. Of course, the Deadlock meta does change quite frequently, which is why you should always check the main Mo & Krill page to get up-to-date statistics on the best Mo & Krill items.
