Solomon: abilities, stats, lore and mods
The chess hero who plays the board instead of the fight — all four abilities, his stats, and the mods already built on him.
· 8 min
Solomon arrived in Deadlock with the City Never Sleeps update, one of the six heroes players unlock by voting in the pregame lobby.
He does not fight the fight in front of him. He places pieces around it — a bishop that arms the squares it passes, a knight that hands an ally a barrier, a pair of rooks that pin whoever they touch — and then moves them, one at a time, while hanging in the air.
Who Solomon is
Solomon plays chess with anyone. Tourists, criminals, captains of industry — he sets up the board, listens, and offers counsel, and none of them rattle him. The game is the point: his story frames chess as an equaliser, a way of meeting people on ground that does not care who they are away from the table.
That patience is the whole design. Every other hero in Deadlock points a gun at a problem. Solomon puts a piece near it and waits for the next turn.
Solomon's abilities
Four abilities and an innate. Every one of them is a chess piece he places, moves with alt-fire, and recalls when he is done — and all of his damage is Spirit, with no weapon scaling anywhere in the kit.
Chessmaster
Solomon falls slowly, and hangs in the air for a few seconds while aiming where to send a piece. Moving a piece is a deliberate pause in the middle of a fight; this is what stops that pause dropping him back to the floor.
Setup Bishop
Place a bishop that stays where you put it. Alt-fire moves it, dealing Spirit damage and a fading slow to anyone it passes through. Shortly after it settles, the diagonal squares around it arm, and anyone who steps on one takes Spirit damage too.
Square range is measured in squares, not metres, and it rounds — so Ability Range does nothing at all until it crosses a whole square. From base it takes 25% to reach three squares and 75% to reach four.
The cooldown only starts when the ability ends — when Solomon recalls his bishops, or when he dies.
Kingside Knight
Promote an ally to knight, handing them a barrier and an extra stamina bar for seven seconds. Alt-fire moves the piece, and whoever is riding it is invulnerable until it lands.
The invulnerability is the real line on this card. A knight in flight cannot be shot, which turns a 13-metre hop into an escape as much as a rotation.
Cast it on yourself and you become the king instead: double barrier, no stamina, and a shorter 7m move.
Rook Battery
Fire a pair of rooks straight forward. They deal Spirit damage and immobilise whoever they hit, and they bounce off walls rather than stopping at them.
Rooks move in straight lines, and so does this. In the open it is a skillshot you can side-step; indoors, with a bounce, it is a trap that arrives from a direction nobody was watching.
Re-activate mid-flight and the pair splits perpendicularly, which is how you cover a corridor and its side door at once.
Develop Queen
The queen crashes down for Spirit damage, and a moment later throws out lines of squares that damage again and stun. Alt-fire sends her leaping to a new spot to repeat the whole thing — twice at base, four times fully upgraded.
The second upgrade is the one that changes fights. Checkmate executes any hero under 200 health, which turns the queen from a long stun into a closing move: you are not finishing them, she is.
Like the bishop, the cooldown starts only when she leaves — recalled, out of moves, or because Solomon died.
How the kit fits together
Nothing Solomon places does much on the turn he places it. The bishop needs its squares to arm, the queen needs her delay, the rooks need a wall worth bouncing off. What he is really doing is spending the early part of a fight making the floor expensive, so that by the time anyone wants to leave, every direction out costs something.
That is also his weakness, and it is the honest one: a 210-second ultimate on a hero whose damage all scales from Spirit means a Solomon who gets picked early contributes almost nothing, and his pieces leave with him.
How to play against Solomon
Watch his feet, not his crosshair. When he floats, he is aiming a piece, not a gun. That pause is the most predictable moment he has.
Walk around the squares. Both the bishop's diagonals and the queen's lines are telegraphed and sit on fixed geometry. The damage is avoidable by moving a few metres, which is cheaper than eating it and healing.
Fight him in the open. Rook Battery wants walls. Without one, it is two slow projectiles in a straight line.
Kill the pieces' owner. The bishop and the queen both end when Solomon dies — including the queen's remaining moves. Of everything on this page, that is the one that decides fights.
Bring a dispel. Both his slow and his Spirit-resist shred can be dispelled, and Debuff Resist shortens them.
Solomon's stats
780 base health, the hero tags Strategist, Sage and Checkmate, and an automatic gun that is deliberately unremarkable — eight rounds, two a second, and a three-second reload. He is not meant to win a duel with it.
Alekhine's Gun
Vitality
Melee
Two stamina and a slow dash, against a 4.5-second stamina cooldown. Read alongside the innate, the shape is clear: he is bad at leaving the ground quickly and good at staying up once he is there.
Solomon trivia
His gun and his third ability are the same chess term. The gun is Alekhine's Gun, after a formation Alexander Alekhine built in 1930: a queen stacked behind two rooks on one file, so that everything in that line is attacked at once. A stack like that is called a battery — which is what Rook Battery is. Nothing in the kit is named loosely.
His files contain three real chess games. Animations exist for Byrne versus Fischer in 1956 — the Game of the Century, played when Fischer was thirteen — for Deep Blue versus Kasparov in 1997, the match that first put a computer above a world champion, and for the Opera Game of 1858, played by Paul Morphy in a box at the Italian Opera House while the performance went on. Only the Fischer one is finished.
The name points two ways. King Solomon, the biblical byword for judgement, is the obvious one. The other is Kenny Solomon, South Africa's first chess grandmaster.
The typography is chess notation. The lettering in his art borrows the notation used to record moves, which is why his name sits over a board rather than beside one.
His hair ends in chess pieces. Look at the silhouette of the white ends rather than the shape of the whole.
Carl Lumbly voices him. The casting reads as deliberate — a voice with forty years of playing people who are the calmest person in the room.
The best Solomon mods
Solomon mods are fan-made .vpk packages on GameBanana that change how he looks or
sounds on your own PC.
Most installed right now
All 8 Solomon mods →
He breaks the usual pattern. Most heroes attract mods that swap one bright effect — Rat King's modders went almost entirely for the flag he plants. Solomon's replace him: Zenyatta, Ayanokoji, Ninja Ninja from Afro Samurai, and inevitably GothamChess, the chess YouTuber. The exceptions are a monochrome version with recoloured particles and one set of meme voice lines.
That is what a hero built around a silhouette gets. The pieces are small and the character is the thing you look at.
To install one, follow our guide to installing Deadlock mods. Mods are client-side, so only you see them, and mods made in a hero's first week are the most likely to break with the next patch.
Frequently asked questions
What are Solomon's abilities in Deadlock?▾▴
What is Solomon's ultimate?▾▴
How much health does Solomon have?▾▴
Who voices Solomon in Deadlock?▾▴
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