Deadman Danny Deadlock Guide: Abilities and How to Play Him

Who is Deadman Danny?

Valve introduces Danny as the most valuable salesman of Fairfax Industries, and his hero card makes the pitch for him: a skull-faced pilot in goggles and a yellow jacket, strapped to a winged jetpack and giving a thumbs-up. The game tags him Reckless, High-flying and Explosive. He fights with the Chimera Peace Bringer, a rocket launcher, and flies over New York on the company's Chimera Mk1, sold as the latest in self-adhered aviation technology. The company's name is already on the map: the Old Fairfax Factories sit on York, the yellow lane of the new map.

Base stats

Deadman Danny's gun and charged rockets

The Chimera Peace Bringer fires four shots a second for 60 DPS and takes 3.2 s to reload, with damage falling off between 18 and 47 m. Hold fire and it charges a rocket: after 0.8 s the rocket fires on its own for 48 damage and explodes in a 2.5 m radius, still dealing 70% at the edge. Charged rockets fly at about 66 m/s against 178 m/s for a normal shot, so lead moving targets.

A charged rocket that explodes next to Danny knocks him back and costs him 5% of his max health as spirit damage, so spirit resist softens it. That makes it a rocket jump, paid for in health, on top of the jetpack. Since October 14 a rocket against a wall pushes him about 30% harder than before.

Deadman Danny abilities

How his jetpack works

• You do not have to wait for the overheat: pressing the ability key starts the dive early.
• Every hit of Jettison Fuel vents heat from the jetpack, so the spray buys him more time in the air.
• After an overheat the jetpack stays off until it has fully cooled down.
• He always explodes when he dies.

Items Deadman Danny can't buy

Danny can't buy six items. His shots never deal headshot damage, so the shop locks all five headshot items, and Ricochet is locked for him as well. Three more stay in the shop but do nothing for him: they only work on abilities with charges, and none of his four abilities has any.

Deadman Danny build: what players buy now

The buffs turned Danny into a spirit hero in the shop. On his first day Improved Spirit was in 67% of games and Tankbuster in 48%, and Swift Striker, the gun upgrade 76% of players bought, sat in the middle of the build. Now both spirit items are near the top of the list, Swift Striker has dropped out of it, and High-Velocity Rounds is the one gun item nearly everyone still opens with. We list how often items are bought rather than their win rates, because late items always look better: only games that last long enough get to buy them.

Two builds to copy: the popular hybrid and the spirit nuke

Two published builds stand out in the in-game browser. SN|P3R's Hold My Beer is one of the two most played Danny builds since his release and mixes gun and spirit items. Yeski's Spirit Nuke stops buying gun upgrades after lane, has the best record of any Danny build with a real sample, and still shows up in fewer than one Danny game in fifty. Switch between them below.

The wider numbers point the same way once you compare items bought at the same point of a match, which takes out the edge late and expensive buys always have. Among tier 4 items bought between minutes 20 and 30, Spirit Burn won 61.7% of 1,283 games, against 52.3% for the far more common Boundless Spirit. It blows up a target that takes 500 spirit damage within 5 seconds, and Danny's combo stacks Strix Salvo, the Chimera dive and the backblast inside that window. Enchanter's Emblem bought before minute 10 won 51.5%, six points above other tier 2 items bought that early. Gun upgrades go the other way: Swift Striker and Titanic Magazine bought between minutes 10 and 20 won only 40.5% and 37.4%.

How to play Deadman Danny

1. Lay Strix Salvo across the path enemies have to take, then cash in the marks with charged rockets before they run out.
2. Open with Jettison Fuel on the target you want to kill. The bullet resist shred makes every rocket after it hit harder.
3. Make the Chimera dive count. Steer it into a hero, or start it early with the ability key when one is under you, because an empty dive leaves you stunned.
4. Keep Close the Deal as a finisher for a target that is already low, and let your team use the stun when you land.

Deadman Danny tips and tricks

Players have been taking Danny apart in the sandbox since his release. These are the most useful finds from the community wiki and the official forum, checked against the game files where the files hold the numbers.

Movement

• Crouch rocket jump for height. Crouch, aim at your feet, hold fire and jump a moment before the rocket goes off. Keep crouch held through the jump, since crouching adds 12% to the push.
• Dash rocket jump for distance. Aim at the floor about 30 degrees ahead, or straight at a wall about 4 m away, hold fire and crouch, then jump as the rocket goes off and dash away from the blast.
• No Fuel Jump. Bind jump to the scroll wheel as well as the space bar. A scroll jump never starts the jetpack or adds heat, so it also keeps a dash rocket jump at full distance.
• Wall push. A charged rocket fired into a wall right next to Danny throws him away from it, a quick way to turn sharply in the air.
• Free launch off an enemy. When the blast also hits an enemy hero, Danny takes no self damage but still gets the full push.

Items

• Metal Skin and Plated Armor do not reduce Jettison Fuel damage.
• Cold Front, Arctic Blast and Kelvin's Frost Grenade cool the jetpack, each removing 10% of the heat it has stored.
• Lightning Scroll is a trap on him. Close the Deal damages Danny as well, so the scroll's stun and bonus damage land on him too.
• Close the Deal sets off Indomitable and Reactive Barrier on both sides: the target's go off the moment you grab them, Danny's own after the landing.

Close the Deal, Jettison Fuel and the dive

• Steer the flight. Danny keeps a little control while flying up and falling, enough to drop the target among your team or next to a Guardian.
• Walls and Kelvin's Frozen Shelter stop the dash to the target, so check the line before you press it.
• Parrying during Jettison Fuel pauses the spray until the parry ends, so a melee threat does not cost you the ability.
• Viscous's The Cube saves Danny from his dive's self damage, and inside it the jetpack cools twice as fast on the ground.

How to fight Deadman Danny

• Slow him while he flies. Slows still work on him in the air, though the October 14 update made them about 30% weaker there.
• Spread out when the jetpack overheats, so the dive finds as few heroes as possible, and punish him if it lands on nobody.
• Walk around a line of Strix Salvo missiles instead of through it.
• Leave the fight early at low health while his ultimate is ready.
• Trade back after his combo. His dives and his ultimate both cost him health.

Can you play Deadman Danny in Ranked?

Yes, for a limited time. New heroes skip the usual 15 Standard wins for a limited time after they arrive, but they do not count toward the three ranked heroes you need. Once the window closes, Danny needs 15 Standard wins like anyone else. A hero who flies and dives is easy to overextend with, so a few Standard games and some time in the sandbox are worth it before you take him into Ranked.

Deadman Danny trivia

Danny has been in the files far longer than the update. According to the Deadlock Wiki, he first appeared under the codename Airheart, likely a nod to the aviator Amelia Earhart, with Paradox's model and a rocket launcher as his only ability. He was later removed and came back with City Never Sleeps as Deadpack, the name his files still use. A texture also carried a proposed name, Hayward Hughes, which points to the aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. Strix, the name of his missiles, is the scientific name of a genus of owls.

His salesman's patter runs through everything he says. His in-game biography is a transcript of his opening speech at the Military Technology Expo, where he admits Fairfax Industries knows nothing about safety, calls that a good thing and claims he has been decapitated so often that he had to invent a word, quice, to count it. In the match, one voice line admits that in its first week of testing the Chimera blew up before it ever left the ground, and he counts the current version as an improvement.