McGinnis Spectral Wall In Deadlock: Current Slow, Damage Amp, Turret Upgrade, And Counterplay

Short answer: Spectral Wall is McGinnis’s terrain-control ability. She casts a wall that slows enemies it passes through, can be erupted early, damages nearby enemies when it forms, and upgrades into damage amp, shorter cooldown, longer duration, and temporary Mini Turrets.

Image	Ability
	Spectral Wall McGinnis sends out a wall that slows, damages, divides terrain, and upgrades into damage amp, shorter cooldown, longer duration, and bonus turrets.

Current Mechanics

Deadlock.one’s current Spectral Wall data lists a 50s cooldown, 6s duration, 50m cast range, 60 damage with 0.7 spirit scaling, -20 percent move speed, 5m minimum range, 5m impact range, and 2.5s slow duration. The wall can be destroyed with melee attacks.

The ability is both a door and a lock. Use it to deny a route, split a target from help, protect a teammate, or make an urn/objective path suddenly expensive. It is not just a damage spell, and treating it like one wastes the best part.

Upgrade Path

• 1 AP: McGinnis deals +20 percent damage to hit enemies for 7s.
• 2 AP: -20s cooldown and +2s wall duration.
• 5 AP: deploys 2 Mini Turrets near the wall for 8s and increases slow by 30 percent.

The T3 upgrade is why the post-rework wall belongs in turret conversations. It no longer exists as a simple stun spike. It creates more turret pressure and makes the slow nastier, which means bad paths get punished twice.

Key Patch Changes

Valve’s Gameplay Update – 03-06-2026 reworked Spectral Wall: interrupted midcasts now fire instead of continuing outward, wall segments became destroyable with 2 heavy melee hits, minimum range dropped from 6m to 5m, the wall started applying slow as it passes through enemies while being summoned, T1 no longer drains stamina, T1 damage amp increased from 15 percent to 20 percent, T2 also gained +2s wall duration, and T3 changed from a 0.75s stun on impact to creating 2 turrets for 8s plus stronger slow.

Valve’s Gameplay Update – 05-22-2026 fixed Spectral Wall among the abilities that could temporarily take players out of zoom when cast.

How To Use It

Wall the exit, not the screenshot. The best Spectral Walls either trap a target where your team can finish them, split the enemy frontline from the backline, block a rotate, or force enemies to spend movement before they wanted to.

JoeYoursTruly’s March 26 McGinnis gameplay uses wall pressure to trap lane opponents and buy time for pushes. Vegas’s June 6 tier-list discussion points to max wall as an annoying and valuable extended-fight tool because it can cut off rotations, jump-pad movement, and urn routes. That is the real lane: not damage number theater, but geography control.

Counterplay

Hit the wall segments with heavy melee when that is safer than walking around. Save movement for the wall, not before it, and avoid chasing McGinnis into narrow routes where a single cast turns pursuit into a meeting with her turret department.

Lore And Context

McGinnis’s lore is all practical invention: build the thing, test the thing, make the thing unavoidable. Spectral Wall is that worldview made vertical. If the battlefield is a machine, she is the one adding a new part while everyone else is still reading the manual.

For more evergreen Deadlock guides, see DramaLock’s best heroes tracker, matchups guide, synergies guide, and Street Brawl tier list.

Sources

Current mechanics and icon context: Deadlock.one’s McGinnis page, the Spectral Wall modal, and Mobalytics’ McGinnis guide. Patch history: Valve’s March 6, 2026 gameplay update and May 22, 2026 gameplay update. Video context: JoeYoursTruly, Vegas, and AndrewChicken.