Valve released Minor Update 09-16-2026 on September 16 at 1:16pm Pacific. It was the last big balance patch before City Never Sleeps. PCGamesN called it "nerf-happy", and the headline change is to comebacks: how easily the team that is behind can turn a game around.
Comebacks
| Change | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Unstable Rift comeback resist for the trailing team | up to 35% | 10% + 1% per minute, capped at 40% at 30 minutes |
| Bonus souls for being slightly behind in net worth | yes | removed |
| Comeback bounties overall | slightly reduced | |
| Objective bounty share for nearby heroes | 30% | 25% |
| Guardian / Walker bounty | +10% / +5% | |
| Respawn time at 20 minutes | 35s | 38s |
Valve puts the first Rift at around 20% resist under the new formula. Part of the comeback souls that players above the enemy's average net worth would have earned now goes to the two poorest players on the team through tick gold (70% of that extra value).
Slows, parry and stuns
- All movement slows are about 20% weaker, ground dash slows about 10%. In exchange, slows now affect air drag at 35% of their value.
- Parrying now pauses your reload, and parrying during a regular dash cancels the dash and parries on the spot.
- Getting stunned pauses your reload instead of restarting it.
- Dashes and light melees no longer pause your gun's cycle time, which matters most for slow-firing heroes like Silver and Abrams.
Items
22 items changed. The ones you will notice:
- Decay: DPS −25%, duration +20%.
- Mercurial Magnum: base bullet damage 25% → 20%, scaling 0.49 → 0.38.
- Shadow Weave: now builds from Sprint Boots, cooldown 45s → 37s.
- Veil Walker: no longer builds from Sprint Boots, spirit power 10 → 6.
- Golden Goose Egg: damage penalty −10% → −15%, souls per minute 90 → 80, and stored souls now count toward net worth.
- Spiritual Overflow: builds up 35% slower, spirit power on proc 40 → 30.
- Focus Lens: damage 30% → 35%, cast range 20m → 25m.
Heroes
20 heroes were changed, mostly downward: Warden, Viscous, Wraith, Lash and Celeste all lost something in several places. Silver (health per boon 28 → 31, sprint 1.5 → 2.5), Paige, Lady Geist and Yamato got buffs, and Venator's Ira Domini now fires three bolts and works with Ricochet.
What the numbers showed
We compared the week before the patch with the 13 days after it, up to City Never Sleeps (normal mode, all ranks, data from deadlock-api.com):
| Hero | Win rate before | Win rate after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warden | 53.4% | 48.1% | −5.3 |
| Viscous | 48.4% | 45.8% | −2.6 |
| Celeste | 51.5% | 49.4% | −2.0 |
| Yamato | 48.3% | 50.1% | +1.8 |
| Silver | 44.5% | 47.2% | +2.6 |
| Lady Geist | 49.9% | 52.6% | +2.7 |
Warden fell hardest, down five points, and his pick share more than halved, from 3.4% to 1.5%. Silver got picked noticeably more after the buff, with pick share rising from 1.8% to 2.8%.
This was the last patch before the Deadlock City Never Sleeps update reshuffled the balance. The latest changes are in the Deadlock patch October 14, current win rates are on our Deadlock tier list, and every hero is on the Deadlock characters page. Comebacks matter in ranked too; see Deadlock ranks for how the ladder works.