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Deadlock still technically isn't out yet—which means that Valve's gonna experiment. As was the case with last Friday's patch, that made a sweeping list of changes to the urn, one of the objectives on the game's map that helps encourage players to actually batch up for teamfights.
Previously, the urn spawned on one side of the map and had a drop-off point at the other—the carrier's movement was slowed considerably, and when they dropped it off, the opposing team could shoot the soul orbs that flooded out of it to recoup some of their losses.
Per that patch, though, a huge list of things changed—the new urn required players to melee it to pick it up. The new urn went into a depositing phase (shorter if you're behind, longer if you aren't) where the opposing team could melee it to change it to reward their team instead. And crucially, the new urn was always deposited at the midlane.
This had, uh, some consequences. I myself played a few games over the weekend just to see how it felt, and the interesting back-and-forth macro I was used to had clearly and plainly transformed into a "once every few minutes, everyone meets up in midlane and fights to the death".
Plainly put, the new urn was not only too important to ignore, it also overrode all other objectives and made certain heroes that are good at team-fights—Lash, Billy, Dynamo—or who excel at area denial—McGinnis and Graves—far more powerful than they otherwise would be.
It being on mid also meant that it was stacked on top of the midboss, meaning whoever won the urn fight would often be in a position to go and grab midboss too. Snowball central. It was a little obnoxious.
Here's a thread in the game's subreddit to back me up: "We were already in a very team-fighty meta where being in jungle was borderline worthless, and all they've done is exacerbated the issue and make late game carries more obsolete," writes one player."
"This is just everything that was already wrong with the urn turned up to 11, to the point where it just completely warps the game around itself," writes another, to which a third mid-hater replies: "It's so fast you HAVE to be there. It's very easy to get the urn to blue and cap it … so much macro depth and decision making feels like it's been tanked."
All this to say, this meant that the new urn's location lasted a weekend. As announced in a patch yesterday, while a lot of the changes are still being experimented with, the urn now spawns under the bridge in either one of the side-lanes. This should make it a little less All Mid, All the Time.
One interesting wrinkle is that the urn now spawns where it used to be dropped off for the "favoured" team (the team that's behind on souls)—in exchange for the bullet and spirit resist aura surrounding the favoured team as they deposit the urn being reduced from 50% to 35%.
