It may be the weekend, but that hasn’t stopped Valve from releasing a small Deadlock patch that is focused on nerfing Bebop, who has been far too strong over the past few days.
The new Deadlock patch, which launched overnight, only features eight changes, but six of them are targeted at Bebop and all of them are significant nerfs. You can see all the Bebop changes below, but in simple terms pretty much everything that his ultimate can do has been nerfed, from cooldown to damage and slow.
His Hyper Beam cooldown has gone up by 13 seconds while its duration at level one has gone down by eight, meaning the uptime is now significantly less. The slow has been given a 10% drop, and the DPS has been dropped by 15. So in simple terms, all those ultimate focused builds are now pretty useless.
The nerf hammer has been thrown at Bebop so hard because the last patch, from earlier in the week, buffed him a little too much. After being a slightly underwhelming hero in Deadlock for a while, a round of buffs in the last patch turned him into something of a monster, especially when you focused on using his big laser beam ultimate. He was so powerful that you’d see someone play him in almost every match, which is obviously not ideal, when it comes to balance.
Elsewhere in the patch notes, McGinnis gets a tiny buff to Medicinal Specter, with its radius spirit power being reduced from 0.07 to 0.05, which is probably a change so small most players won’t even notice it. Then there’s also a nerf to Ammo Scavenger, with the buff duration dropping from 40 seconds to 35.
While this isn’t a major patch, it is interesting that Valve has released a patch that is all nerfs. In Dota 2, where Deadlock was teased during a major tournament yesterday, it’s rare that we see a patch that is only nerfs, even if it is designed to take down some of the top heroes in the current meta. However, this could just be something that we see during this early testing phase of Deadlock.
Deadlock Bebop Nerfs
Hyper Beam cooldown increased from 117 to 130
Hyper Beam T1 reduced from -38s to -30s
Hyper Beam end radius reduced from 5m to 4m
Hyper Beam slow reduced from 40% to 30%
Hyper Beam DPS reduced from 220 to 205
Hyper Beam DPS spirit scaling reduced from 3 to 2.7
