Awesomenauts – Deadlift Guide

Details on how to build and play as a Deadlift. Includes both advanced and basic tips to further enhance or start your deadlift experience.

Introduction and Tips for Deadlift Gameplay

All credit goes to eGGii!

Hello everyone! Welcome back to one of my In-depth Awesomenaut guides! As requested by one of our community member, this guide will be covering all of the essentials to become an effective Deadlift player!

Tips for Deadlift

Dont always use your Protective Pose (shield) immediately: Numerous players believe that diving into a teamfight with a shield up is more effective than waiting to use your shield. This may cancel out a limited amount of damage, at first, but the more effective method is to hold on to shield until your team really needs it. Knowing when to use your shield is extremely essential when playing as a Deadlift. Lets look at a few examples of how holding on to your shield is significantly better than using it before a team fight, or a fight in general.

Against a Clunk: By holding onto shield, you can wait and use it until clunk uses his explosion, canceling out all the main damage that he will dish out. Note that many Clunk players snare bite into an explosion, make sure you do not use Protective Pose (Shield) when you get biten. The bite will take out a clunk of your shield that is needed to block off the explosion damage for your team. If you were to use your shield as soon as you are biten, the other team, in addition to clunk will destroy the shield before he explodes.

Against a Derpl: Most Derpls build either a Nuke-based or a Snare-based style, sometimes a hybrid. The main factor you need to consider is: Does the Derpl have silence on snares? By knowing this, you will know when you should use your protective pose. For example, if the Derpl bought silence on his snares, then you would want to use shield prior to being snared. Many Derpls use nuke immediately as soon as someone is snared, in the fear that you will get away before Derpl can kill you. Only problem about this is when you shield before you are snared, Derpl’s siege-mode bullets will be destroying your shield. Note thatou may not shield all the damage, but you would get the majority. Baby Kuri Mammoth is an effective upgrade to get against a Derpl, but if they dont get silence then you need to wait and use your shield as soon as you see Derpl activating his Nuke.

These are the main two nauts you would want to watch out for when holding your shield, but if you use this logic of: who will and when will they dish out their maximum damage, then you yourself will determine when is the best time to use your shield for yourself or your teammates.

Power Lunge (Leap) can cancel bouncer movements, but if you hit the ground it wont stop momentum: Using Power Lunge on a bouncer can create numerous escape possibiilities or positions when can be good for dealing poke damage. In this video, it will show the different ways of how bouncer and lunge mechanics work together:

Note: When protective pose is active, it will cancel all momentum from Deadlift’s movements. But when you use protective pose and Lunge + bouncer (what is showed above), you will still slide.
Also as a side note, the ground in this trick can also be an Awesomenaut or a creep, and the momentum from the bouncer will still carry on.

Make sure you have uppercut on AA when you buy Lightning-Start Protein Shark (Stun after landing a Power Lunge): With the L-S Protein Shake, your next AA will Stun the enemy for .4 seconds. The uppercut AA of Deadlift will deal extra damage and pierces through enemies. By autoattacking once to switch between the different types of AA, you can plan out when you will lunge and what AA mode you should have on. For example, if i was on the normal AA and i was planning on lunging in, I would AA the air once to switch to the uppercut, then I would go. This works extremely well when fighting multiple enemies.

Build Order and How to Use

My Personal Build Order for Deadlift:

Rodeo-Red Lenses + Poefluma Fly Swatter: These two upgrades work extremely well together, and gives you a very good hand on early game to late game. Rodeo-Red lesnes will give your lunge extra AoE damage (180dmg at level 1, AoE Range is the size of the shield), and will break the shield after using power lunge. With the Poefluma, it will heal you 225 Health at level 1, and will heal you as soon as you land your lunge. By getting this early game, you will be able to dish out unexpected damage and will allow you to stay in very close fights early game due to the healing. Overall, I grab these two every game, and believe that this is a huge and important upgrade that should be bought.

Lighting-Start Protein Shake (Stun on AA): This upgrade gives your next AA hit to stun the enemy for .4 seconds. This is very good to combo with the lunge, and overall a good item to buy. .4 seconds may not seem like a lot, but that short amount of time will disrupt the enemy movements and make securing kills significantly easier.

Holotech (Dmg on Lunge) and Sweat-WOW-bands (Heal on AA): Deadlift strives on having a good early game, and getting base damage on Power Lunge, in addition to the Rodeo-red lenses allows you to dish out high damage. The Sweat-WOW-bands allows you to be out for longer, general sustain which i found pretty helpful. Note that the description says that when an enemy is hit, you will heal X amount of health. This does not stack. If you were to hit 1 droid, then you would heal lets say, 100 health. If you hit 2 droids stacked on top of eachother, you would still heal only 100 health.

Bov. Coat (Shield Health) and Chicken Comic (Slow on Shield): One of your roles as Deadlift is to take damage away from your teammates that will either allow them to stay out in lane longer, or prevent them from dying. By getting more health on your shield, you will be able to block off more damage than before. With slonw on shield, you could either use it to block off and slow down an assassin from your low-health teammate, or use it to catch up to a fleeing enemy. Both of these upgrades work together pretty well, but the slow on shield can be replaced by any of the other upgrades besides Triple cowbells (reduce delay time).

Weighted Nose Ring: I found this helpful for targetting high-damage enemies such as Clunk or Vinnie to help fight them during a teamfight or alone. This upgrade will cripple your opponent and make them deal 12% less damage for 2 seconds. This is mostly personal preference, but it can be replaced with cooldown or range on lunge. I dont recommend the extra knockback on lunge just because it wouldnt work well with your stun AA and slow on shield.