Valve's Deadlock Steam page is up

Have you ever heard of Smite?

Enemies are bullet sponges too.

That's kind of intentional and part of the design of MOBAs.

In the early game, this makes it difficult to get kills unless the enemy makes a mistake. You want players to have to choose between spending their time harassing their opposing player or farming minions.

Later on, the bullet sponge effect makes for longer, more interesting fights. That can end up, being not the case, though, if the economy is too one-sided. That's another reason for the bullet sponge design - to make the economy more important. That's how many souls you collect. Buying more means you're stronger with items and the fights are more in your favor.

So, essentially, the bullet sponge amplifies the more interesting/complex elements of the game. They wouldn't really be possible if you could just one-hit your opponent from base level.

Eh, there was definitely a couple years where the market was flooded, but at this point there really aren't any notable games in the genre other than League, Dota, and Smite. Deadlock being a third person game puts it in direct competition with Smite, though it's also got more shooter DNA, which is aiming to bring in the overwatch crowd refugees. And at least IMO it already feels better than Smite, or any of the other abortive attempts at a third person moba over the years.

I really like how deadlock does it; you just have to hit the creep with player damage in the last few seconds of its life, and then your whole lane gets the reward, which can't be denied. But it also generates a little orb that can be secured by either team; if no one pops it, it automatically goes to the killing team. It has the HOTS thing where farm gets shared pretty much evenly among everyone in the lane, but there's still enough gameplay to the creep killing that it's engaging, instead of just standing in lane passively and getting XP for it.