HMC stands for Heavy Melee Cancel and is a valuable tool in Valve’s Deadlock, allowing you to quickly get in and out of situations. We’ll explain what enables you to do it and the possibilities it opens in your gameplay.
Heavy Melee Cancel, or HMC, is a unique and powerful mechanic in Deadlock that lets you cancel your Heavy Melee. HMC has a variety of uses and interactions, many of which you might not expect, like baiting your opponent's parry or doing some crazy rollouts throughout the map. It’s perfect for characters who want to get in and melee like Abrams and Shiv, but also for any character that wants mobility.
Whenever you use a heavy melee, you gain a burst of speed that is taken away at the end of the punch animation. Certain items can cancel the animation, allowing you to keep the momentum or do something else.
Before performing an HMC, you must buy a cancelable active item. The cheapest cancelable active item is Fleetfoot, for 1250 Souls, and the item “Melee Charge,” if you plan on using it for mobility, meaning that, in total, speeding around the map will cost you at least 2,500 Souls. You can also use HMC with 6,200 Soul items: Vampiric Burst, Colossus, and Unstoppable. Once you have acquired at least one of these, you’re good to go and can HMC to your heart’s content (as long as you respect the item cooldowns).
To perform an HMC for mobility, hold your melee button to start a heavy melee before releasing and activating the cancelable active item. Getting the timing right may take a bit of practice, but once you get it down, it's easy to do consistently. To take this further, try doing it midair and in the middle of the extra distance given from Melee Charge, time it right while you have and hold crouch before landing on the ground; you’ll slide and keep the momentum the heavy melee ending usually takes away, zooming you forward.
As a bonus, you can throw in some hops for extra distance. This is also an excellent opportunity to remember that you have infinite ammo while sliding. Since many builds usually have Fleetfoot, you could use it for HMC while it is there.
You can use HMC as you play Deadlock in two main ways: mobility and mixups. In the case of mobility, you might not have noticed this, but the way Deadlock’s map is created leaves objects you can slide on if you’re running away in enemy territory, like stairs and slopes. You can take plenty of advantage of these while performing HMC and the speed boost it gives. A typical scenario is one where you are shooting a walker, and somebody pulls up. Instead of trying to dip the usual way, dashing out and using all of your stamina, what if you jump up HMC out of there, and the enemy can’t even begin to touch you as you slide down the slopes and stairs.
Building upon what you have just learned, you can chain HMCs together, opening up even more map mobility as you can turn yourself into a pinball or terrify the parry out of your opponent. The other application of HMC is in combat, which is used for feinting heavy melee attacks to bait parries out of your opponent. Specific characters like Shiv and Abrams enjoy this as it allows them to stay close and get more melee hits out of their opponents if they build for melee.
Many builds already have Fleetfoot since the item is suitable for mobility and getting around the map on its own. Plan on using HMC if you are playing a melee character or the build already has melee cancelable items. HMC gives Fleetfoot an additional use in combat and lets you squeeze more mobility out of the mobility item. For mobility, the best uses are running away from enemy walkers while you slide down the stairs for more momentum, off of anything high-ground related(roofs, zip lines, bounce pads, even a double jump/wall bounce).
For combat, think of it as a much more convincing parry bait than the alternative of looking away from your opponent during a punch.
The best way to counter HMC when it comes to them using it for mobility is, unsurprisingly, items and abilities that stun and slow. Slowing Hex and Knockdown are two items that are commonly bought already and are good at stopping people from interfering by using the HMC. Since the items used for HMC go on cooldown, you can catch them if you’ve stunned them after they’ve already used their HMC item.
Before November 13th, several characters had HMC in the base of their kit, allowing them to use an ability instead of an active item. While they can no longer perform an HMC with their abilities, remembering these characters and which of their abilities were cancelable may be relevant in a future update. Deadlock is still in an early stage, and the devs have gone back and forth on aspects (especially HMC) plenty of times. Before the 11/13/2024 update, the following characters had HMC in their base kit: Abrams (Siphon Life), Infernus (Concussive Combustion), McGinnis (Spectral Wall), Mirage (Fire Scarabs), Mo & Krill (Scorn), and Paradox (Kinetic Carbine). HMC is a potent tool, and while it is unlikely to return to the base kit of certain cast members, the chance is not zero.
HMC is a potent tool that is very good for repositioning around the map once you fully see how many opportunities there are to use it. I hope you enjoy bouncing around with the extra mobility bestowed upon you. May you now reach that walker with a massive troop wave before it gets destroyed with the extreme mobility granted to you by HMC. Good luck and have fun.
