Deadlock weapon damage has always been a bit esoteric with there being many variables that raise or lower your firepower, and it doesn’t always behave as you might expect. Luckily, someone has decoded the cryptic maths and laid out exactly why your gun isn’t doing as much damage as you think it should, and which items aren’t behaving as their descriptions imply.
Every Deadlock hero has a base weapon damage which is generally increased by leveling up and purchasing Deadlock items from the Curiosity Shop. Unfortunately, not all percentage increases were created equally, with Bullet Resist percentages behaving very differently to Weapon Damage increases and so forth.
Fortunately, Redditor and YouTuber Yapistism has created a comprehensive breakdown on how weapon damage is actually calculated.
As it turns out, the mathematics behind Deadlock’s weapon damage isn’t at all simple because of Valve’s use of integers, floats, additive and multiplicative bonuses, characters who fire more than one bullet at a time, and so, so much more.
I actually got talking to Yapistism, and learned that this project started mid-November 2024, and his testing at the firing range alone for all of the characters and most items took two whole weeks.
“The idea was to explain every single one of Deadlock’s numbers: the timers, the distance, Spirit damage, melee damage, weapon damage, any number on the screen, I would explain it.”
Yapistism’s first video focuses on weapon damage, but a whole series of shorts and longer-form videos could be in the works as part of what Yapistism is currently calling the Dead Man’s Guide. In the near future, you might even find out why items like Alchemical Fire and Lucky Shot don’t appear to work as advertised.
Make sure you check out, like, and subscribe to Yapistism’s channel, so you too can find out how Valve calculates damage, and follow Yapistism as he branches out to more games and creates a hub for entertaining game math.
One final fun fact: there is, according to Yapistism, “a little Easter Egg that no one has noticed” and he is really hoping someone spots it. What it was, I haven’t a clue, as he wanted to preserve the mystery.
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