The Halloween 2026 patch, explained

Valve's Halloween update landed on 30 October 2026. It is the first balance patch since City Never Sleeps. It changed 34 heroes and 38 items, rebuilt the Mid-Boss reward, and made the six newest heroes bannable. Here is what changed, what it means when you play, and what the first matches show.

Written 2 November. Every change below is from Valve's patch notes. We checked each line against the game's data files: where a value is in the files, it matches, with one exception noted below. The rest are changes to the game's code, which only Valve's notes describe. The full list is on the patch notes page.

The Mid-Boss now drops three crystals

The Mid-Boss used to drop one Rejuvenator crystal in the middle of its pit. Now it drops three, spread around the pit. Each crystal breaks with one heavy melee and gives your team one Rejuvenator. The total is still three per kill.

Each crystal also pays the player who breaks it: 500 souls, plus 9 for every minute of the match. And the full heal from breaking a crystal now works on every crystal, not just the first one.

The boss itself got tougher and pays less:

It has 20% more health, and gains 20% more health each minute.
Items and abilities that lower its resistances are half as effective.
Its bounty dropped from 3,000 souls (plus 50 a minute) to 1,500 (plus 25 a minute).
It roars at 25% health instead of 50%.
The pit is bigger, with more cover.

What it means for you: killing the Mid-Boss takes longer, and the kill itself pays half as much. More of the reward is now in the crystals. Your team needs players near all three of them, not just one player in the centre. The crystals also take a little longer to drop (7.5 seconds, up from 6), which gives the other team time to contest them.

Falling behind costs less

Several changes help the team that is behind:

Haunted Souls are secured 25% slower in general. But they are secured up to 50% faster when your team is behind on net worth. The full bonus kicks in at a 20% gap.
Comeback gold from non-hero sources rises from a maximum of 26% to 30%.
The bonus for being behind now also raises the passive soul income of your two poorest players.

The map's other rewards moved too:

Haunts pay 10% more, and have 10% more health and damage.
Breakable boxes grow 10% less in value over the match.
Healing snacks heal 14% of your max health, up from 10%.

What it means for you: a lead is a little easier to lose. If you are ahead, close the game out instead of farming. If you are behind, the map now pays you more to catch up, so farming safely is a real option.

Moving around the city

Steam Vents now make your stamina come back 150% faster, on top of hiding you.
Slows now cut your speed harder while you are in the air.
Tunnels speed you up by 50%, down from 70%.

The six newest heroes can now be banned

Rat King, Baba, Solomon, Deadman Danny, Violet and Nurse Harrow are no longer counted as "new". They now follow the normal unlock rules for ranked, and they can be banned. All six were also changed, most of them made weaker. The changes that matter most when you play against them:

Rat King does 5% less gun damage, and his gun damage grows 20% less as he levels. Scrap Grenade does 60 damage per blast, down from 70. His ultimate, Rule, Ratannia!, is on a 180 second cooldown, up from 160, and its knock-up is half as long. If you stun or sleep him before he plants the flag, it still goes down, but without the damage and knock-up, and his ultimate still goes on cooldown.
Violet's Abstract Landscape now ends if she dies. Kill her and the ink ring is gone. It is also on a 180 second cooldown, up from 165, and Still Life's stun is a little shorter.
Nurse Harrow's fear takes 2 seconds to build, up from 1.3. Her tier 3 upgrade no longer makes her immune while channelling. She takes 50% less damage instead, so you can burst her out of it.
Deadman Danny can't use his jetpack while cursed. Slows also cut his jetpack's lift much harder, and even more if his movement is silenced.
Solomon's gun does 25 damage per bullet, down from 30, with less headshot damage. Develop Queen now finishes off heroes under 100 health even without upgrades, and that threshold grows as the match goes on.
Baba keeps stolen Spirit for 16 seconds, down from 22. If you cleanse her Threadsap, she loses the Spirit she took from you.

Some changes in Valve's notes apply only to the Street Brawl mode, such as smaller areas for Rat King's grenade and flag, and shorter ultimates for Violet and Nurse Harrow. This page covers normal matches, so those are left out.

Lifesteal went up, and so did anti-heal

Most lifesteal items got stronger. Bullet Lifesteal, Spirit Lifesteal, Infuser, Leech, Fury Trance and Vampiric Burst all heal more or hit harder. Anti-heal rose with them:

Toxic Bullets and Crippling Headshot now cut healing by 40%, up from 35%.
Decay cuts healing by 55%, up from 50%.
Healbane now stacks when more than one teammate buys it, with less effect from each extra copy.

What it means for you: against a team that heals a lot, one anti-heal item is worth more than before, and a second one from a teammate now adds to it.

One note on Radiant Regeneration: Valve's notes list its regen scaling as 0.35 down to 0.25. The game files say 0.035 down to 0.025. We go by the files.

What the first matches show

We compared each hero's win rate in the City Never Sleeps matches (from 30 September until the patch) with the first 4,198,084 hero appearances after it (counted up to 2 November). Numbers come from deadlock-api.com.

Biggest drops

Hero	Before	After	Change
Violet	51.3%	46.6%	−4.7 points
Mo & Krill	50.1%	46.0%	−4.1 points
Rat King	56.9%	53.6%	−3.3 points
Nurse Harrow	51.8%	49.1%	−2.7 points
Mirage	44.7%	43.0%	−1.7 points

Biggest rises

Hero	Before	After	Change
Deadman Danny	48.7%	54.8%	+6.1 points
Warden	46.6%	50.8%	+4.2 points
McGinnis	48.0%	51.2%	+3.2 points
Billy	47.5%	49.8%	+2.3 points
Abrams	51.2%	53.4%	+2.2 points

Violet, Mo & Krill and Rat King fell the most, and all three were made weaker. Mo & Krill lost almost half their spirit growth per boon, and every one of their abilities does 10% less spirit damage.

One result we can't explain from the patch alone: Deadman Danny's win rate rose +6.1 points, even though every balance change to him made him weaker. (His other two changes were bug fixes.) One more thing changed for him: he can now be banned, like the other five newest heroes. Who still picks him, and against whom, may have shifted. The numbers can't tell us which, so treat his rise with care.

Read all of this with care. These are the first days of a new patch, and the Halloween event's Sugar Rush buff was in every match until 2 November. Numbers move a lot early on. The tier list shows today's numbers, refreshed every night.

The Halloween event

Until 2 November, Halloween cauldrons stood around the city. Break one with a heavy melee to get a piece of candy. Eat it later for Sugar Rush: 8 seconds of extra spirit power, fire rate and move speed, plus a heal. deadlock.wiki also records one thing Valve didn't mention: you could feed candy to the troll under the bridge in the green lane, one candy per heavy melee, for a random permanent buff instead.

Sources

Valve: Halloween 2026 + Gameplay Update
deadlock.wiki: Update, 30 October 2026
Our check of every line against the game files, comparing game builds 6819 and 6833.
Win rates: deadlock-api.com. How we count them is on how we work out the numbers.