As if the creativity of the Deadlock team at Valve were in any doubt after the launch of the City Never Sleeps update, its fifth new hero continues to prove that there’s almost no-one better at cool and clever character designs. The painterly Violet has just joined the roster of the hero-shooter MOBA, bringing with her a kit that lets her create geometry on the map to help allies and hinder opponents. Dry your tears, fellow Nurse Harrow believers, because Violet is more than enough to tide us over – although you might want to stop short of letting her draw your portrait.
Violet’s basic attacks fling globs of paint out from her brush, and while they do travel pretty quickly her fire rate is slow, so it’s certainly not going to be her mainstay. She more than makes up for that with one of the most distinctive ability sets in Deadlock to date, however. Her attacks come alive with Living Ink, which allows your next three bullets to be manually steered as they fly through the air, landing with a bigger splash that adds more bullet and spirit damage. As an added bonus, every empowered hit you land on a hero reduces all of your ability and item cooldowns.
There’s still more, however, as while Living Ink is active you can right-click and drag to paint a solid stroke of color through the air. This blocks all characters and projectiles from moving through it, and while it can be destroyed with a heavy melee attack, doing so will hurt you. This can naturally be used to block doorways to aid your escape, or impede enemies from getting away, but you can also lay down paths to climb on and catch people off-guard from unusual angles. Rank Living Ink up to reduce its cooldown, increase your draw distance, gain a stacking fire rate bonus, and improve the cooldown-reduction effect.
Next we have Flow State, which sends a large brush flying out in front of you, painting a trail on the ground in its wake. This grants bonus slide distance for you and allies, allowing Violet to zoom along behind it, and because you can direct the brush you can use it to soar around the map at speed. One particular early trick players have discovered is to fire it behind you and then quickly turn your aim so you can slide almost touching it, making it much easier to turn as you navigate the Cursed Apple’s backstreets.
While the path benefits your teammates, any enemies the brush and its trail passes through will be inflicted with a two-second, 60% fading movespeed slow. If you prefer, you can re-activate Flow State to flick the brush forward, dealing a burst of spirit damage in an area and ending its path early. As it ranks up the slide gains huge stamina regeneration and a growing damage amp that can reach as high as 20%, along with improved cooldown, extra flick range, and a longer duration on the paint trail.
Still Life focuses on an enemy within 25 meters, causing Violet to pull out a canvas and begin painting a sketch of them. This deals constant spirit damage over time as long as she can still see her muse, and upon completion the subject will be hit with an additional damage burst and a one-second stun.
The finished sketch then falls to the floor, and if you pick it up you’ll gain a permanent stat bonus (similar to those from gold statues), with the type based on the hero you were drawing. Ranking Still Life up applies health regen on cast and sketch pickup, causes your target to deal 35% reduced damage while being painted, and finally boosts Violet’s movespeed, lowers the cooldown, and raises the stun duration.
Finally we have Abstract Landscape, Violet’s ultimate ability. This creates an 18-meter-wide circle of towering ink walls, blocking vision and granting spirit power to allies within. Enemies inside are revealed, and while they can walk out, doing so will shatter the panel they pass through, damaging them and applying a two-second silence and 30% movespeed slow.
The circle is almost exactly the size of the Midboss room (the whole thing, not just the pit in the center), so you could use it to block all the entrances at a key moment, or apply it more offset to just cut off vision from half the room. As you level Abstract Landscape up, the cooldown is reduced, then the buff gains more spirit power and spirit lifesteal on top, and finally the walls last longer, apply more silence, and aren’t destroyed when enemies walk through them.
Violet is playable in Deadlock right now, and she makes five out of five new characters that I’m enjoying so far. Given that Nurse Harrow was my original day-one pick, I’ll be very sad if her kit falls short, but at this point I have no reason not to believe that Valve will deliver. She’s due to round out the City Never Sleeps lineup on Tuesday October 20 at 2pm PT / 5pm ET / 10pm BST / 11pm CEST, so we won’t be waiting long to find out.