Souls come from creeps, objectives and kills, but half of every trooper's bounty sits in a floating orb either team can shoot — confirm it and it's yours, deny it and it's stolen.
You don't need to last-hit in Deadlock the way you would in a MOBA — melee-killing a creep pays out its full bounty on the spot — but you do need to win a small gunfight over the soul it drops, and that fight is the actual skill test.
Souls are Deadlock's version of gold, and you earn them by killing lane troopers, neutral creeps in the jungle, and heroes, and by taking objectives. A trooper's base bounty grows slowly as the match goes on, so the same creep is worth more at the twenty-minute mark than at the two-minute mark.
Kill a trooper with a melee attack and you get its entire bounty immediately, no contest involved. Kill it any other way — with a hero's gun or an ability — and the bounty splits in two: half drops as a Soul on the ground that any nearby ally can simply walk up and collect, and half launches as a floating orb that isn't anyone's yet.
That floating orb is the important part. Either team can shoot it: an ally who hits it confirms it and banks the souls for their side, an enemy who hits it denies it and steals those same souls for theirs. Leave it alone entirely and it eventually auto-awards to whichever team has someone standing nearby.
This is why laning in Deadlock isn't really about who last-hits — the ground half is going to someone regardless, and the melee-execute option removes the orb step altogether. What separates a lane you're winning from one you're losing is whether you're the one shooting the orb before the enemy does. A hero who's zoned out of orb range, or who's too busy dueling to spare a bullet for the orb, is quietly bleeding souls to the other side even while trading damage evenly. Denying isn't a bonus play, it's a lane-defining one: every orb you deny is a bounty that flips from their bank to yours.
Trooper souls aren't a solo reward if more than one ally is nearby when the kill happens — the game splits the bounty between everyone close enough to the kill or the orb, and it hands out slightly more than 100% in total as an incentive to lane together rather than alone. That's a deliberate nudge toward duo and trio lanes: grouping up costs you nothing in personal income and can even net the group more souls overall, on top of the safety of not fighting alone.
What isn't shared is anything you pick up individually off the ground, or an orb you personally confirm — those souls are yours, full stop, whether or not a teammate was standing next to you.
Souls you've already banked from confirmed kills and objectives stay banked — dying doesn't erase progress you've already secured. What's at risk is unsecured souls: bonus soul sources like neutral creeps, crates and similar objectives carry their payout as "unsecured" for a while, and if you're killed while holding a meaningful pile of it, it drops on the ground as a container the enemy can claim by finishing it off with a heavy melee hit. In practice this means a hero who's just cleared the jungle solo and hasn't converted that lead into items yet is carrying a bounty on their back — dying at the wrong moment hands a chunk of it straight to whoever gets the kill.
Lane souls that already went through the confirm/deny step don't have this problem: once an orb is confirmed, it's spent income, not a bag you're carrying around.
Souls exist to be spent, and the item shop is organized into four cost tiers, each noticeably pricier than the last. Early tiers buy small, cheap stat and utility upgrades you can afford within the first few minutes; the top tier holds the expensive, build-defining actives and passives that only show up once a hero has had real time to farm. Items are grouped by category — Weapon, Vitality and Spirit — and how much you've put into each category over the whole match also grants its own scaling bonuses, which is why a hero's build usually leans hard into one or two categories rather than spreading evenly across all three.
Not all damage in Deadlock comes from a gun. Most abilities, and a chunk of Spirit-category items, deal Spirit damage instead of weapon damage — a separate damage type that scales off a hero's Spirit Power rather than their gun stats, and that's reduced by the target's Spirit Resist rather than their armor against bullets. That split is why the same hero can be built two very different ways: pour souls into Weapon items and your gun does the killing, pour them into Spirit items and your abilities do, and the numbers on each side barely interact with the other's defenses.
Once you're tracking who's winning the orb fights, checking a hero's abilities page is the natural next step — it's the difference between "I have souls" and "I know what to buy with them."