Souls are the primary currency in Deadlock used to purchase items. Every item costs a fixed number of souls. The soul cost of an item determines the baseline value — a 1,600-soul item should provide roughly twice the stat budget of an 800-soul item.

When talking purely about Theoretical Values, this calculator was designed to split the soul cost proportionally between all of an item's stats, passives, and actives. This is known as the souls per unit.

For example, if a 1,600 soul item gives both +13% Spirit Lifesteal and +90 Bonus Health, this calculator would look up the cost of 1% Spirit Lifesteal and 1 Bonus Health and calculate the Theoretical Value.

Importantly, the values calculated here are done through the averaging of all items with a given stat, compared with their total cost. This assumes that Valve's philosophy is "all items should only give their value in stats", when in reality items are stats with skill expression in mind.

Souls Per Unit tells you how efficiently an item gives a specific stat. A lower value is better because it means that fewer souls are spent to get 1 unit of that stat. This system is only used in the Theoretical Value calculation

The colour coding in the Soul Values tab uses these thresholds:

• Green (Good) — under 50 souls per unit
• Yellow (OK) — 50–300 souls per unit
• Grey (Poor) — over 300 souls per unit

Deadlock items scale non-linearly. Most of the tiers require +800 souls to move on to the next upgrade, but jump to 1,600 souls at Tier III (3,200) to Tier IV (4,800). Personally, I would argue that items in Tier III to Tier IV are character and build defining items. While you may take a given Tier I or Tier II item on many different characters, certain characters are defined by 1 or 2 items in the above tiers.

That is why the 4,800 soul column in the Investment Spikes charts is highlighted. Your spike not only represents a pivotal change in itemization, but also in character build investment, whether that's Vitality/Spirit, Weapon/Spirit, or Weapon/Vitality.

Stats granted by a passive or active ability are marked with a Given by Passive or Given by Active badge. These are usually conditional — they only apply some of the time.

You can toggle these on/off using the checkbox next to each badge. When checked, they are included in the soul allocation calculation, affecting the souls-per-unit values for all other stats on the card. Uncheck them to see the baseline value of the permanent stats alone.

The reference soul rates used in this calculator were estimated from single-stat items in Deadlock. Some values may not perfectly reflect Valve's internal balance model. Multi-stat items may have hidden synergies, passive bonuses, or utility value not captured by raw stat allocation. This tool is meant as a guide for comparison, not an exact scientific measurement.

My math might be off because I lowkey slapped my face against a calculator and a chatbot until things made sense :3

A huge amount of the data analysis outside of the interface of this website was done by the amazing people in the Clear Comms discord community. I would like to specifically shoutout Crimson (@crimsoncore94) for his constant labbing, build discussion, sexy voice, plethora of spreadsheets and overall extremely thorough documentation of all things Deadlock data.

Secondly, I'd like to shoutout Junior (@krjunior) for not only being an amazing friend who constantly pushes me to be better at this game, but also for smuggling me into Crimson's server so I could suck on their data and do way more backend calculations, lots of linear algebra brushup, and re-learn how to work with html even if it makes me want to blow it all off smooth with a twelve gauge.

Lots of others have helped gather this data, including members of Clear Comms and the Deadlock Wiki for their constant selfless effort in documenting this game, so shoutouts and cheers.