Solomon Deadlock Guide: Abilities, Build, Ability Order and Matchups

Who is Solomon?

Solomon is a New York chess player who has sat across the board from tourists, criminals and titans of industry, and stays calm whoever the opponent is. For him chess is an equalizer, a way to meet anyone on even terms. The game tags him Strategist, Focused and Checkmate and files him with the mystics, the spirit damage and crowd control heroes. Valve rates him at the lowest complexity level, the same as Baba.

Alekhine's Gun and base stats

His weapon, Alekhine's Gun, fires chess pieces. Each shot explodes in a radius of about 1 m, headshots included, and because his right-click moves pieces, the gun has no zoom by default.

One detail matters for builds: his bullet damage scales with spirit power, at 0.14 damage per point. With 100 spirit power each shot hits for 14 more, so spirit items raise his gun damage as well as his abilities.

Abilities and upgrade tiers

How his chess pieces work

• Bishops, the knight and the queen arrive in two steps. The first cast places the piece, and its Move, on the alternate cast button, slides it across the street. Rooks skip the first step and set off as soon as you cast.
• Bishops and the queen are recalled if you move more than 80 m away from them, so they work best in the area you are fighting over.
• While you aim where a piece should go, Solomon hovers in the air for a few seconds, and an innate passive changes his gravity, which makes his jumps slightly floaty.
• Develop Queen's first strike lands 0.75 s after the cast and her lines start 1 s later, and both can trigger the execute.
• At Tier 3 the king's Move is described as removing all debuffs, but wiki testing shows it clears neither stuns nor ultimate effects.

Which ability to max first

Maxed first	Share of games	Win rate
Rook Battery	54%	43.5%
Setup Bishop	27%	44.8%
Develop Queen	9.5%	44.3%
Kingside Knight	8.5%	44.5%

The lane belongs to the bishop. Nearly every Solomon, 95%, unlocks Setup Bishop first, and 90% spend their first upgrade on it as well, for the longer Move and the stronger slow. After that the orders split. More than half of all players max Rook Battery first, and the most common sequence, seen in about one game in six, maxes Rook Battery, then Kingside Knight, then Develop Queen. Players who max Setup Bishop first win 44.8%, 1.3 percentage points more than the Rook Battery group. After three days that gap is too small to call either order the better one.

What players build on Solomon

Solomon's build is a spirit build that opens with the gun. High-Velocity Rounds and Opening Rounds come first: faster bullets that reach distant targets sooner, and extra damage against enemies above half health plus a little spirit power. From about the tenth minute almost everything feeds the pieces. Mystic Expansion adds range and area to one ability and Greater Expansion to all of them, so bishops and the queen cover more of the street. Compress Cooldown and Superior Cooldown bring the pieces back sooner, which counts most on Develop Queen and its long cooldown. Extra Stamina and Stamina Mastery cover his low stamina, and Tankbuster charges up a bonus hit for his next big ability, based on the target's current health and ignoring spirit resist.

Improved Spirit, bought in 85% of games at about minute 12, and Boundless Spirit later on are his main spirit power items. 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.

Most used community build

SN|P3R : Zugzwang (Solomon Spirit) is the published build Solomon players pick most often, and its win rate is about the same as Solomon's overall, so its value is the plan rather than a hidden edge. That plan follows the most bought items above almost one for one. Two early picks stand out. Sharpshooter adds big weapon damage beyond 15 m, and Guardian Ward is an active 250 barrier and speed boost for yourself or an ally. After unlocking all four abilities, the build puts two points into Setup Bishop and one into Develop Queen, then maxes Rook Battery, Kingside Knight, Develop Queen and finally Setup Bishop.

Two other builds are worth a look. YaBoyCJ Solomon Hybrid Solved V1.0 is a close second with 1,214 games and wins 43.9%. It plays from distance, with Long Range and Sharpshooter for the gun and both Expansion items for the pieces, and its author recommends Echo Shard late for Mid-Boss fights. The Bongcloud Opening, named after the chess opening 1. e4 e5 2. Ke2, has the best record of any build with more than 500 games, 45.8% of 816. It lowers spirit resist with Mystic Vulnerability and Spirit Rend, adds Escalating Exposure, maxes Setup Bishop first and leaves Rook Battery for last. Samples this small can still swing a lot within a few days.

How to play Solomon

1. Use bishops as traps. Park one on a lane or a door you expect enemies to cross, then Move it through them when they arrive. The hit, the slow and the squares all land on the same group.
2. Save Rook Battery for a target you can follow up on, ideally in a narrow street where the walls work for you. The immobilize is long enough for your team's burst.
3. Treat Kingside Knight as a rescue. Cast it on the ally who is diving or getting dived and Move them out of the fight. On yourself, the king buys time against a gank.
4. Drop Develop Queen where enemies have to cross her lines, then spend her Moves chasing whoever survived.
5. Stack your bishops. YaBoyCJ's build notes suggest placing both on the same spot once Tier 2 gives you a second one: the enemy sees one piece and walks into two hits.

How to fight against Solomon

• Step off his squares as soon as they light up, bishop and queen alike.
• Do not fight with your back to a wall when his rooks are up.
• Hold your burst while a knight or king is in the air and shoot the landing spot instead.
• Respect the queen at low health and back off early, before she lands.
• Pressure him while his pieces are on cooldown, especially Kingside Knight, his only way to hop out of a fight.

Matchups

Four of his five hardest opponents, Paige, Graves, Rat King and Haze, are also the four heroes with the highest win rates over the same days, at 55-57%, so much of this list is simply who is strong right now. Baba, another City Never Sleeps newcomer, is the exception. Ranked games alone tell the same story: Baba, Rat King, Paige and Graves are his four hardest opponents there as well, while Mirage, Viscous, Sinclair and Shiv stay among his easiest. Mirage and Shiv also sit with Solomon among the four lowest win rates of the period.

Can you play Solomon in Ranked?

Yes, for a limited time. New heroes can be picked in Ranked without the usual 15 Standard wins for a while after release, and they do not count toward the three ranked heroes you need. Once that window closes, Solomon needs 15 Standard wins like any other hero. Standard games and the sandbox are where to learn how far each Move travels. Our City Never Sleeps heroes guide tracks who comes next.

Is Solomon good right now?

Average rank in the match	Win rate
Initiate to Mystic	42.1%
Ritualist to Oracle	40.4%
Phantom to Eternus	40.4%

Not yet. Across about 140,000 games in his first three days, Solomon wins 43.9%, 40th of 41 heroes, and 41.2% in Ranked, the lowest of all. He does a little better in the lower brackets, 42.1% up to Mystic, and 40.4% from Ritualist up. Most of that looks like a learning curve. The launch exemption put him in 88% of ranked matches on October 10, mostly in the hands of players new to his pieces, and his ranked win rate has risen every day since: 37.5% in his first hours on October 9, 39.5% on October 10, 42.8% on October 11 and 45.0% so far on October 12. Baba took the same path, from 39.4% on her release day to 46.0% two days later. No balance changes have come out since his release, so none of this rise comes from a patch. We will update these numbers as more games come in and after his first balance changes.

Chess references and trivia

The board Solomon holds is his ammo counter. Each piece is one round, and he fires them in order of chess value and color: black pawns first, then white pawns, up to the black king and finally the white king. On every reload he plays a famous game on the board, chosen by his magazine size, and the game ends with exactly as many pieces left as he has rounds. Items and buffs that add ammo change the game, up to 32 rounds and beyond. A successful Active Reload skips the game and sets all 32 pieces back on their starting squares.

Before release, fans tied the board to a different game. An animation of the 1956 Game of the Century, Donald Byrne against a 13-year-old Bobby Fischer in New York, was found in his files, but it is not among the reload games players have mapped since launch.

His names are chess too. Alekhine's Gun is a real formation, two rooks stacked on one file with the queen behind them. It is named after Alexander Alekhine, the fourth world chess champion, who used it in 1930, and the term comes from Jeremy Silman's 1993 book How to Reassess Your Chess. In chess, developing a piece means bringing it into play, and a battery is two pieces lined up to attack along the same line, which is where Develop Queen and Rook Battery get their names. His name logo is drawn on a chessboard: the three O's sit on light squares, a nod to O-O-O, the notation for queenside castling, and the L is topped with a rook's battlements.

He is voiced by Carl Lumbly, as Valve's Yoshi confirmed on the Deadlock Discord, and his codename in the game files is Chessmaster. The tips of his hair are shaped like chess pieces, and while you play him in the Hideout, your friends list shows Planning Moves in The Hideout. The origin of his name is not confirmed: fans point to the biblical King Solomon and to Kenny Solomon, a South African grandmaster. His launch weekend also pushed Deadlock past Team Fortress 2's all-time Steam peak of 253,997 concurrent players, as PC Gamer reported.