Smite 2 Relics

In Smite 2, the relic system has undergone a massive shift: we’ve gone from two relics down to just one. On paper, that sounds like a minor tweak, but it isn’t. It makes your starting choice incredibly impactful, as the decision is locked in at the start of the game.

Honestly, I’d love it if we could swap our relic later for a gold cost. However, I understand the developers’ logic: this design forces knowledge and raises the skill floor. Limiting us to one relic makes Crowd Control (CC) abilities much scarier. I suspect this is exactly why certain gods haven’t been ported over yet, as the devs likely realized their kits would be balance nightmares in a 1-relic ecosystem. We’ve already seen changes made to certain ported gods to address this very issue.

With that in mind, let’s discuss the current options:

Defensive Options

Beads: Cleanses CC and provides immunity.
Aegis: Provides damage immunity but silences/disarms you.

In Smite 1, carries usually took both. Now that you have to choose, I find myself favoring Aegis mostly, though Beads is essential against high CC teams or certain truly scary disabling abilities. For Mid and Jungle roles, the choice is similar to carries, demanding an immediate, locked-in decision in the first minute.

Aggressive Options

Blink: A short-range teleport. Useful, but without a defensive second relic to fall back on, this is now a purely “High Risk, High Reward” option. It often requires adjusting your build, perhaps relying on an item like Magi’s Cloak for CC immunity, making it a niche pick.

Utility Options

Shell: Shields allies and allows movement through player-made walls (phantom effect)—a merging of two older relics from Smite 1. This is generally the “safe” Support pick. However, given how important pressure is in Duo, Sunder often gets picked up more frequently. I constantly see average players pick Shell due to default thinking, only to lose lane and die early.

The Sunder Problem

Sunder: Damages players, jungle monsters, and bosses. You’ll mostly see this in Solo or Support as a counter to invading. Sunder also helps speed up your clear, translating directly into lane pressure and early kill potential in the Duo lane.

This relic has a notorious history of balance issues; Smite 1 veterans will remember how many times it was reworked or removed. Yet the designers keep bringing it back and keep failing to learn the same lessons. I’m not sure how I would address it.

The Noob Trap

Agility: A leap on a 20-second cooldown. This was recently allowed in ranked, not that I play ranked at all. In my opinion, this is a “noob trap” and a poor choice compared to the utility of the others. The designers themselves have stated that newer players seem to love it.

This highlights a potential design problem: in the game’s fundamental triangle of Health/Defense, Damage, and Mobility, this relic gives new players unnecessary mobility, breaking the balance of the game. What happens is players lean on this heavily and, against good opponents, get punished for picking it when they should be focusing on the other two essential components.

One possible solution would be to allow gods with zero mobility to buy it, but that would require designers to build exceptions for each god, adding extra work to the balance process. The current system already struggles with balance, mainly around damage and CC being too strong together. If a god has high damage, they should get less CC, and vice-versa. Addressing this would require reworking how CC works for tanks and the role of tanks entirely.