Deadlock’s first Ranked Beta Season ended on November 5, and Valve’s Season 2 announcement reworks nearly every layer of the competitive ladder. The new season starts immediately and runs for four months, closing on Thursday, March 11, 2027. Anyone who competed in Season 1 will also receive a Hideout plaque showing their highest achieved rank once the season rolls over. Valve ties the changes to how Season 1 played out and to community feedback, and almost every number in the system moves because of it.
A softer reset, applied in two passes
The reset at the center of Season 2 is deliberately gentler than the one that opened Season 1. Valve expects the average player to drop about one badge, which it describes as “significantly smaller” than the previous reset. Winrate from the prior season then adjusts that by one to two subranks, so two players at the same badge can land in different spots based on how they performed. Returning Ranked players skip calibration entirely, while anyone who sat out Season 1 calibrates as usual.
Valve runs the reset in two passes. First it redistributes the entire rank curve to fit the game’s recent influx of new players. Then the soft reset applies on top of those new numbers. Because redistribution can shift a player up before the reset pulls them down, the net result differs per person: some players will start Season 2 higher than they finished Season 1, while others fall a little more than one badge.
Loss protection shrinks at every tier
Rank-loss shields, the buffer that blocks a demotion the moment a player hits zero points, are being cut across the board. Phantom, Ascendant, and Eternus players lose shields completely; they previously held five on a full rank and two on a subrank. Everyone below keeps protection but with fewer uses: full-rank boundaries drop from five shields to three, and subrank boundaries from two to one. In practice, a Mystic I player with zero points now stays Mystic for three losses before falling to Sentinel, where it used to take five.
Faster points and a higher placement ceiling
Climbing gets quicker on both ends of the math. Points per match rise from 300 to 350, and the cost to promote from a final subrank to the next badge falls from 2,000 to 1,500 points. Steps between subranks stay at 1,000 points. A 1,500-point promotion now clears in five wins at 350 points apiece, down from roughly seven under the old 2,000-point cost. The placement ceiling also rises: the highest a new season can place a player is now Ascendant I, with up to Ascendant III possible for strong prior-season performance, up from an Oracle VI cap last season.
Four bans and a point-based hero unlock
Matches now ban four heroes instead of three, giving each team one more answer to the strongest picks. Unlocking a hero in Ranked also shifts from a win count to a point system. A hero now costs 35 points, earned at two per win and one per loss. By Valve’s math, the old 15-win requirement was the rough equivalent of 45 points at a 50% winrate, so the new bar trims the total grind and, for the first time, lets losses count toward progress. The studio still wants Ranked players to know a hero before piloting it, but now measures that partly through participation rather than wins alone.
Per-season leaderboards
Leaderboards get a backend rework that fixes several bugs and splits boards by season. To appear on a general board, a player needs at least 50 Ranked matches in the current season within the last 30 days, ranked by current badge progress. Hero-specific boards need 15 matches on that hero in the same window, ranked by badge progress plus recent win and loss performance on the hero.
What Season 2 changes for players
The softer reset and redistribution cut the climb for returning players, while the shield removal raises the cost of holding a high badge. A mid-pack player can expect a smaller drop than before, and an active player near the top of their bracket could start Season 2 higher than they finished. At Phantom and above, though, a bad streak now demotes with no shield to absorb it, which pushes top players to defend their badge by playing rather than parking on a rank they can no longer lose for free.
Deadlock is still in beta, and Valve notes these systems are tuned season to season. Season 2 runs until March 11, 2027, giving the studio four months of data on the softer reset, the shield cuts, and the point-based unlocks before it tunes again.
