Smite picked and banned gods season 6

Decided to queue more ranked with friends over go solo. Climbing back towards platinum, after couple rough games. I been enjoying the grind even with the bad games. Top bans at the moment, King Arthur solo, Merlin Mid, Bakasura jungle, Pele jungle. First two are certain to be banned away. Sometimes Bakasura or Pele goes past the first ban stage. Certain gods I feel are currently underrated examples include Fenrir in the jungle.

King Arthur requires the jungle to camp solo. Forced to buy anti heal forced to invade the blue. Forced to apply pressure making the lane period difficult. One death is not good enough, couple are required to set him behind. Rise of AA junglers maybe this why people don’t like him. Quite frustrating to play against given his sustain and damage output. Team fights can be annoying dealing with him on the back.

Merlin is one strange ban given how the top pick junglers are the moment counter him. Guessing people don’t want to deal with his constant control and damage. Once any jungler sticks to Merlin he can find it difficult to escape.  Quite unsafe compared to certain mages at the moment. Some respects bit like Zeus and Ah puch together.

Bakasura and pele have great matchups against most mid mages at the moment. Result most people end up banning these two gods.  Pele can be countered by anti heal, bakasura hates any crowd control. Can be difficult to stop the snowball given eat minions. Weird world which Ao kuang not picked often at all.

Top picked jungle

• Ratatoskr
• Arachine
• Pele

Name of the game early pressure, arachine weak team fight forces her to pick people off. Build hybrid on Ratatoskr, pele can go hybird making them excellent team fight gods.

Top picked middle lane

• Agni
• Poseidon
• Raijin

Some early pressure with decent middle and excellent control late game in team fights.

Top picks solo lane

• Achilles
• Bellona
• Vamana

Early pressure and enough control for team fights. Main goal is jumping towards the back line.

Top picked supports

• Bacchus
• Kumbhakarna
• Slyvauns

Once again early pressure enough control later on.

Top picked carries

• Xbalanque – Often banned from my experience
• Cernunnos
• Hachiman

Not highest pressure in lane but most are safe enough.

Loads of pocket good picks which exist but the above are common ones.

Smite mages in season 6

At the start of season 6 mage, itemization was changed. Certain core items from the past had big changes. Builds started to see more variety, choices made early had big impacts later. Book of thoth rush now became the mana build. Massive magical power builds disappeared with mages forced to make choices. Separate archetypes now exist very clearly burst builds, cooldown, hybrid and attack speed.  Specializing in whatever strength each mage has to offer. Class now has a home within solo or middle lane. At the moment only two bad choices warlock staff, stone of fal. Warlock staff suffers from lacking value taking long time to stack. Stone of fal just outclassed by other options.

Very brief time playing ranked people like to play.

• Agni
• Anubis
• Hera
• Ra
• Kukukan
• Poseidon
• Scylla
• Vulcan
• Zhong Zui

Traditional burst mages which have some self peel. Odd one out is Zhong zui who likes more hybrid style build. I prefer playing Agni, Kukukan, poseidon and Scylla. Merlin is banned most games with Ao kuang. Jungle offers Ao kuang a home, sometimes solo like morrigan.  Style of play centered around burst and pressure. Not played against hunters yet who are difficult to lane against. Only downside is lacking burst from a traditional mage. Zeus lack of mobility means many don’t touch him. Couple hidden gems like Raijinn, who is not bad at the moment. Most top picks don’t have any form of crowd control immunity. Healing focused mages sort of suck, battle mages do okay. Aphrodite gets bullied in solo, need a team around her.  Jungle likes to pressure solo hard at the moment sometimes. Warriors provide so much pressure. Solo mainly about pressure with certain mages not coping to good against it. The morrigan has a surprising good solo match up. Utility offered by the ultimate outclasses most warriors in terms of team fight. Traditional battle mage Zhong zui offers pressure having sustain to cope. Don’t forget carry mages in duo having quite a bad time. Most being unable to provide pressure or be safe enough. Can still get away with it sometimes. Pressure is the name of the game across most lanes at the moment.

Jormungandr – Smite

Jormungandr newest guardian in smite, world serpent from Norse mythology. Scale of this god not be underestimated, model is massive. Terms of play style aggressive bruiser guardian who causing back line chaos. Passive is interesting combined with strong area of effect crowd control. Crowd control on offer slow, knock ups and some sort of fear. Briefly played solo lane with some arena, feels like natural fit for solo over support. No sustain within the kit which is one weakness. Don’t think his early game is strong enough for duo lane, more a front line bully. Hard to judge how strong the god going to be. Kit wise knock-ups are super valuable with decent team fight powers. I love the general style, audio is fantastic. Designers have made this snake feel interesting.  Much more than just a monster serpent. Minor things which make require a degree of learning.

First impressions are good nothing like the lane terror that is king Arthur. Completely different beast compared to Merlin late game control mage. Worth the wait I would love to thank whoever worked on him.

I enjoyed season 5 of smite, hard to believe how much fun this season has been. Still remember the day I first downloaded it and quickly died. Over time I gotten much better at the game. Looking forward to season 6.

Season 5 has seen hunter players favour critical strike items over penetration focused builds. Quicker lane clear combined with more gold per minion. Further changes to how penetration works against objectives allow for higher damage per second builds. Burst is back for the main damage classes in smite. Hunters which make use of critical strike chance are heavily favoured at the moment. Critical strike based builds are viable until players work out the counters.

Hunters who love critical strike chance are the following.

• Anhur – Passive
• Artemis – Passive
• Hachiman – Steriod
• Izanami – Steriod
• Jing Wei – Steriod
• Rama – Steriod
• Ullr – Steriod

Generic builds have just enough attack speed to provide great damage per second. High penetration builds are better against defensively focused builds. Until players start building against it best to go full burst. I use these builds as a reference, builds are situational.

Generic build – Triple critical

Ninja Tabi	Devourer gauntlet	Deathbringer	Asi	Poison star	Wind demon
Attack speed	Sustain	Little bit of everything	Penetration, sustain	Passive	More critical chance

Triple critical strike build provides massives amounts of burst. Hunters lack viable items which give flat penetration and targets normally don’t have enough protections to make it viable. Aura items during team fights can be a problem most of the time it won’t be.

Generic build – Double critical

Ninja Tabi	Devourer gauntlet	The executioner	Deathbringer	Asi	Poison star
Attack speed	Sustain	Penetration	Critical strike chance	Penetration, sustain	Passive

Higher penetration compared to the first build at the cost of damage.

Generic build – Triple critical

Ninja Tabi	Transcendence	Asi	Deathbringer	Poison star	Wind Demon
Attack speed	Power	Penetration, sustain	Critical strike chance	Passive	Attack speed

Lacking the same level of sustain compared to Devourer gauntlet.

Smite new season is coming, expect big changes to conquest. Meta at higher and lower end is likely to shift. Early pressure with high kill potential is likely to thrive. Once players start to learn what works things should tone down. Every new season becomes about kills and quick burst. Duo lane is likely to be high pressure and kill lane focused gods. Early kill potential is likely to be king with burst being queen. Middle lane could see various new mages becoming more viable. High burst or early kill potential jungle picks countering the new mages. Solo could see various warriors appearing again and guardians. Certain jungle picks could still spell trouble for certain solo lane gods.

The last couple of months have seen even lower level casual players copy high-level players. Blindly following the ‘meta’ because somebody else did it. High-level players complaining nobody understands the ‘meta’ unwilling to try new things. Failing to explain why certain starts were done.

Season 5 should see players experiencing massive unique starts and strategies.

Classic 2 Duo – 1 Middle – 2 Solo

Carry starts with the support of a duo lane.  Expect to see high early pressure gods or kill potential gods do this start. Split farm with the ADC until a kill happens to help to secure the jungle farm.  Jungle farm is mainly for the support, carry focuses on the lane minions. Avoid sharing waves or farm unless it results in a kill. The solo side of the map has a similar story. Jungler starts at speed goes straight to blue in solo. Kills get the jungle bigger and solo gets lane to farm. Middle lane gets visits from the jungle or support once a kill opens up.

A strategy has shifted focus more on lane farm over jungle farm. Heavy invades are now not worth it once you gain pressure small invades are worth it. Enough farm on the map hard to force teams out of games.  In theory, the designers have solved the snowballing problem we wait and see.  Expect to see the majority of players doing this start.

Side lanes focus 1 Duo – 3 Middle – 1 Solo

The main goal of this strategy put the highest burst gods ahead. Pressure on the side lanes with rotations towards the middle.  Support focuses on duo jungle, jungle focuses on solo lane jungle. Both side lanes buffs are invaded by two players to keep pressure.  Expect to see high early pressure gods with super carries using this start.

Ranked players who can thrive off early kill potential or high burst should ride up the ladder quickly.

 

Smite S4 how to build mages

Understanding how to build requires basic ability knowledge. At the time of writing 91 gods within the game. Understanding the basics base numbers with scaling. High base power with low scaling benefits from penetration.  Low base power with high scaling benefits from power with penetration. Oversimplification which is rather a generic rule. More power equals raw damage, more penetration makes that damage more effective. Simply put you build power with penetration, more penetration means that power goes further.

General rule build power, build penetration to make use that power. 

Protections reduce incoming damage abilities which do 400 damage, in reality, do 300 damage. Add some penetration that damage can be increased to 400 damage. Penetration allows for power to be more efficient damage wise. Penetration is rather important to mages and should be building it.

Two types of penetration, flat and percent based. Which one you build depends,  on the other teams builds and your own goal. Against high-value targets which don’t build protections want flat penetration. Against targets which you want to kill with protections over 110 want percent.

Protections reduce how effective power can be. Consider that power does not give you a 1:1 return. Not every ability scales at 100%, extra power you build could be wasted due to protections.  All damage is subject to protections apart from true damage.

Can learn more from the book of Thoth which covers smite mechanics in detail.

What counts as high scaling and low scaling?

Magical high anything above 70%, low anything below 60%. Guardians on an average scale very poorly with high base damage. Mages scale rather highly with decent base damage.

General rule build power, build penetration to make use that power. 

Seen far too many players ignore penetration on the console. Main damage classes have base 30 magical protections at level 20. Penetration boots with one penetration item remove base protections completely.

Every single god can make use of flat penetration. Just need abilities which can easily apply it. Damage of time abilities works great with the spear of the magus. Below is a table of gods I build spear of the magus. Note I don’t always build spear but these can make very good use of it.

Name

Agni

Ah puch

Anubis

Ao Kuang

Aphrodite

Freya

Kukuklan

Nox

Poseidon

Raijin

Thoth

Zhong Zui

Core concepts behind builds are likely to stay the same. Items are likely to change. General rule build power, build penetration to make use that power.  Penetration is undervalued by far too many players.

Smite Season 4 Mage archetypes

Patch 4.19 this information could be outdated at a later date.

Season 4 saw big changes to magical items changing how build path works.  Balance changes happened, changing how certain mages worked. Professional players even changed builds going for less damage overall. Mages at the moment are the biggest class within Smite. Huge variety of situational build choices. Each mage fits into general archetypes but can be built differently. Not every mage wants to build the same items as each other.  Ability scaling with the design of each ability impacts the build path. Core build idea remained the same for many mages.  Item knowledge however changed with some balance changes.

During season 3 I made a post about archetypes.

https://resistthesun.co.uk/2016/07/smite-build-every-god-archetypes/

Time to revisit that principle and update the mages. Couple big changes later have seen some shift towards new designs.  New classification of each archetype.

• AA – Mainly using basics attacks for damage
• Burst  – Massive amounts of damage very quickly.
• Combo  – Combo abilities together
• Healer – Main focus is on providing healing
• Warrior – Want to be near the action dealing damage

Certain mages can fill other archetypes based what you want to do.  Class is rather flexible, Agni can provide burst or abilities together. Aphrodite can a backline defensive warrior or pure healer mage. Certain mages can provide high amounts of control or damage.

Same ideas as before just different item choices. Basic attack focused mages want attack speed. Burst want power with penetration.  Combo requires cooldown with penetration.  Healers require survivable with bonus healing.  Warrior needs survivable with some penetration.

God name	Archetype
Agni	Burst, Combo
Ah Puch	Combo
Anubis	Burst
Ao Kuang	Burst
Aphordite	Healer, Warrior
Chang’e	Warrior
Chronos	Burst
Freya	AA
Hades	Burst, Warrior
He Bo	Burst
Hel	Healer, Warrior
ISIS	Burst, Combo
Janus	Combo
Kuku	Burst
Nox	Combo
Nu Wa	Burst, Combo
Posdeion	Burst, Combo
Ra	Burst, Healer
Raijin	Burst, Combo
Scylla	Burst
Sol	Burst
The Morrigan	Combo, Warrior
Thoth	Burst, Combo
Vulcan	Burst
Zeus	Burst, Warrior
Zhong Zui	Warrior