Deadlock’s McGinnis
I’ve covered an agile healer and a middling-speed DPS, now let’s complete the roster with a slow tank! Between these three characters, I think there’s something for everyone who is interested in trying Deadlock but struggling to choose a starter class. The final hero in our triumvirate will appeal to players who want a massive healthpool, an easy way to heal and deal damage, and limited mobility so being bad at Deadlock’s movement systems doesn’t kneecap one’s gameplay quite as much as on other heroes. Meet McGinnis!
I played McGinnis in my first-ever Deadlock match for all the reasons mentioned above. (I was also quite lucky to have my friend Nyaptime there explaining the core fundamentals of the game as I encountered them in real time.) The quickest way to sum her up is “TF2’s Heavy and Engineer bundled into a single class”. Your core gimmick is deployables, be they turrets or heal stations or walls or massive deployments of rockets. Let’s go over all of them!
0. Services Rendered
Before we cover her abilities, I should address the minigun in the room. McGinnis’ weapon of choice is a hulking dakka cannon with a huge magazine and a firing rate that increases the longer you hold down the trigger. Its main downside, unsurprisingly, is a hefty reload time, so consider buying Active Reload to cut that duration in half. Overall it plays exactly the way you’d expect of a minigun, dealing devastating close-range damage or respectable suppressing fire at range, and you’ll find it very useful for punishing enemies who try to get in your face. And that’s before we mention:
1. Mini Turret
Probably McGinnis’ most iconic ability. You drop a sentry on the ground that will target any enemies within its 360° line-of-sight (this includes NPCs and objectives). It will prioritize any targets you’re shooting, and with certain upgrade tiers and items you can drop multiple turrets at once. These are great for supporting waves, providing suppressing fire, or complementing your own damage. In general it’s just about as versatile as you would expect spammable turrets to be in this sort of game.
2. Medicinal Specter
But what if you happen to take some damage while you’re busy dealing it? Well, have no fear! This ability drops a ring of healing on the ground that replenishes all friendly units within it for 6.5 seconds. Upgrades can allow it to bestow additional restorative buffs, increase its radius, and prolong its duration. Once again, I doubt I need to spend too much time explaining how a glorified dispenser can be useful. Plus it can’t be damaged or destroyed by enemies, so there’s really no wrong way to deploy it.
3. Spectral Wall
McGinnis puts up a barricade at a point of her choosing. This wall deals damage to nearby enemies and is composed of ‘segments’ that allow it to construct over uneven terrain. Enemies can melee the wall to break it, but each segment takes its own damage so it’s usually more efficient to just bypass it or wait for its timer to run out. Despite sounding like a defensive ability, its most useful application is probably disrupting enemy movement and abilities, either through blocking some wounded foe from fleeing or by zoning an ulting hero on the wrong side of the fight. Overwatch Mei mains will find their Ice Wall skills transferring over perfectly, including the part where they need to be careful not to piss off teammates by screwing up their engagement plans with a poorly-timed wall. Sorry!
4. Heavy Barrage
McGinnis’ ultimate is a salvo of heavy rockets that carpet-bomb a zone on the ground for a surprisingly long eight seconds. This zone is a little fiddly since it’s tied to your mouse, meaning it can sometimes be hard to aim if you’re also juking an enemy attack or combat-sliding down a ramp or something, but once you’ve mastered it you will find yourself laying down some serious AoE damage onto the spot in question. Like every other element of her kit, it doesn’t take much effort to find value in this ability, or to wield it to decent effectiveness when a teamfight blesses you with a target-rich environment.
If these abilities all sound kinda basic, it’s because they are. McGinnis has an incredibly low skill floor, but that doesn’t mean she’s not effective and equally capable of blossoming into a highly-technical problem solver at all levels of play. I have had some absolutely teeth-gnashing games against McGinni who were masterfully using their oppressive kit to lock down entire lanes anywhere they went. I must admit she’s not mechanically my type of class, but if you like what you’ve heard in this article, I highly encourage you to give her a go. She won’t let you down!