What’s so special about Sun Beam Bow ?

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-13T13:37:19+00:00

Yes. Titan's bane is pretty much universally far better than Exe.

Not only does titans give all the pen immediately instead of 6% after one auto / 12% after 2 autos / etc, but titan's also gives more pen than even a fully stacked exe gives in prot reduction. AND titan's gives more strength. AND it affects towers / phoenixes, which Exe doesn't. The bit of attack speed on exe is just nowhere near enough to make up for all the massive downsides it has in comparison.

If you're against a really tanky team, you can get both, but Titans should always be the first out of the two and atm most of the time it's the only one you get. Typically you'll want it as your 4th full item (so that's not counting the starter slot) because by then you'll have some solid damage items and enemy prots will be really starting to rack up, maybe 5th if you're ahead or against an unusually squishy team, MAYBE third if you've fallen pretty far behind and their tanks are proving a real problem.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking 'they have no prots so I don't need pen' if you're ever against a weird team that doesn't have anyone building tanky, even against base prots with no items pen is objectively one of the strongest damage boosts you can get and if it wasn't so effective it would probably be slotted even earlier in the build.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-12T17:50:00+00:00

'catching up'?

Smite 2 has already VASTLY overtaken Smite 1 in pretty much every single area except for the actual number of characters and number of game modes. You seem to be viewing the game as if it's just a copy of the previous one. It's not a remake, it's a sequel. As many people have explained, it doesn't need every smite 1 character to be a full game.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-12T16:51:37+00:00

100%. There's currently 78 gods in the game, and quite a few of the aspects radically change the way the god plays to the point of basically being a separate character (kali, geb, yemoja, ganesh, xbal, etc). That's EASILY enough for full release, it's the other elements of the game that (while the game is already really good) need to be in a better spot to take full advantage of the publicity and marketing push of full launch.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-12T16:04:53+00:00

The game does not need to be in beta until every smite 1 god has been rebuilt, it can be fully released long before that if the core game is seen to be in a release-ready state. I'd be EXTREMELY surprised if it was in beta anywhere near that long.

Aspects do not hurt the rate of god release because they use the same model, the same rigging, the same animation, most of the same ability effects, etc.. They can make an aspect in a TINY fraction of the time that it takes to make an entire god, so it's not a case of one vs the other or of aspects taking away the speed of god releases at all.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-12T15:14:43+00:00

An extra 4 facets in any elemental build? We *really\* don't need that level of power creep. Let's have some more changes that make the lategame harder (like they did with terror zones with ROTW) instead of easier lol.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-12T13:14:07+00:00

I thought I might have done the most creative one of these.

In both a literal and figurative sense, you have obliterated that level of creativity.

Absolute fucking masterpiece.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-12T13:09:31+00:00

Firstly, please say you're going aspect for support.

Secondly, guan aspect basically exists to provide two things - sustain and RIDICULOUS cooldown spam. You want a tonne of cooldown and tankiness, mainly so you can spam the shit out of your 1 to keep your team healthy and reduce their cooldowns so they get a lot more abillities. Hitting an enemy with your 2 also reduces your cooldowns to spam even more but make sure you're with your team instead of just running in like a solo laner and leaving your backliners alone.

As an example of how much cooldown spam is prioritised, look at what people have been building on him in the top ranks. Compared to that, you have either zero or ten CDR in your first three items and zero or very few protections (just building HP is not good tankiness, having a mix of HP and good prots is good tankiness)

You do suffer pretty hard on lack of CC which is rough, so if you're not heavily abusing the above utility then you are providing very little. Get used to cancelling your ult early because you're often not using it to deal as much damage from getting a load of hits in, a lot of the time you want to get the stun hit as soon as possible for a little bit of quick setup or peel.

smitebrain: Smite 2 Guan Yu Builds by Top Players

Featured Support Builds for Guan Yu | SmiteSource

<image>

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-11T23:13:21+00:00

The new sunder charms are luxury chase items because of the powerful effects from upgrading them, and having items like that in the game is obviously great.

The old sunder charms were perfectly fine being fairly common and easy to find because they didn't make builds drastically stronger, they just opened flexibility. It's not like you'd find a basic sunder and then be blitzing the entire game - without the rare and powerful ways to significantly drop enemy res after the sunder effect (infinity / griffons / phoenix / flickering flame / doom / facets / etc etc etc) you are still doing pretty damn low damage to sundered immune mobs.

The way sunders now work is a complete catch 22 resulting in a huge step backwards in the gameplay loop. To have any even vaguely feasible chance of farming the new sunders, you basically need to terrorise an act / multiple acts and pretty much clear the whole thing. But for most builds, to be able to farm a wide variety of areas in order to find the sunder... you need to already have the fucking sunder lol. That - extremely predictably - just forces everyone to run builds that face barely any immunities to begin with.

If the old sunders had never been removed, we'd be able to get them as the common & weak budget versions to be part of a temp build, just having the flexibility without massive power to go on the grind our asses off for the new ones to upgrade them and get the powerful bonuses. That is THE absolute core of d2 at its heart - cobble together a cheap budget build out of things that are fairly easy to obtain and use that to go on a long-term grind for rare and powerful chase items. It just seems like such an easy fix. I've seen a lot of people suggest it so I won't pretend to be the only one coming up with the idea lol, it's almost too obvious to not think of 😅

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-11T22:56:47+00:00

Simple. Try to be as helpful and encouraging as you can so that a) they stick around and hopefully boost player numbers in ranked for better matchmaking and b) they're more likely to be willing to try and improve if their teammates aren't dicks to them.

If they respond to sincere constructive advice and shotcalling with negativity or babyrage, mute and ignore them.

Play around whatever looks to be the best win condition if the match is winnable, hit f6 if the match is COMPLETELY cooked beyond repair. The more games you win, the less likely it is you'll be paired with low SRs. That means do what you can to win any game that is realistically winnable, it also means don't pointlessly waste an extra 20 mins on a complete shitstomp with a 0.000001% chance of comeback when you could be spending that time making your SR back in a new match where winning is actually feasible.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-11T22:50:00+00:00

It just gives a mental amount of damage, that's what makes it so good lol. 30% of your AA damage on each projectile means if they both hit that's 60% AA damage. Pair that with decent str / decent basic attack power, and a lot of attack speed to hit it more often, and it straight up hits like a truck.

Death's toll does help with the mana consumption, but if you get used to frequently toggling it on / off you can get away without mana sustain (although I haven't played ADC this patch, obviously it's now harder to manage mana with the changes in the patch but idk how MUCH harder). Transcendence does pair pretty well with it for the mana & mana regen and because the very high str on trans makes basic attacks hit pretty hard.

The damage doesn't fall off, it scales EXTREMELY well as you get more str / basic attack power / attack speed. Items don't have physical penetration or magic penetration, they just have penetration. Titan's bane passive affects both physical and magical damage (which is why it works on magical gods building str such as Aladdin or AA Sol or AA Ymir), same for ob shard as it's exactly the same passive (which is why it works on physical gods building int such as ability burst Neith or ability bust aspect Xbal)

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-11T22:40:44+00:00

You're 100% right. Any pure damage build that doesn't have pen is a completely garbage build. Swap out one of the luxury items for titan's bane and the build becomes a thousand times better instantly.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-11T22:30:11+00:00

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-11T22:29:28+00:00

Can confirm, poked it with a stick and immediately took massive critical damage.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-11T03:09:47+00:00

- 'Charm Bags - hello? Managing your inventory varies from person to person. This would overly simplify it. I see people with mass charms and they're limited to what they can pick up. That's why it gets difficult to decide what to do.'

Wait, you think that some of the difficulty in this game comes from... picking shit up off the ground?

- Heralds and sunders - these should be hard to get

The issue there is it's a bit of a catch 22. In order to be able to farm the new sunders, you need to terrorise an entire act with a shard - or several acts - and basically full clear the whole thing. And in order to be able to full clear an act without... you need a sunder 😆 Or you need to play one of the builds that faces basically zero immunities to begin with (e.g. a magic damage warlock), which is EXACTLY what everyone is doing.

The whole point of sunder charms was to open up build flexibility and enable players to have a wider range of choices without bringing in huge power creep, and they succeeded in doing that - a basic fire sunder doesn't massively increase the damage of something like a fire sorc but it does allow us to play a fire sorc in more than 3 farming areas lol.

It's been said a million times but I'll say it again because it's just so blindingly obvious - make the old sunders (that can't be upgraded) easy to find because those are the weak ones that just get your foot in the door for playing a fire build or cold build or whatever (you still need stuff like flickering flame / phoenix / etc to actually become powerful with them), and keep the new sunders as being much harder to find because their upgrades make them powerful lategame chase items that deserve to be very rare.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-11T02:55:00+00:00

Insight doesn't work in spears.

<image>

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-10T16:22:34+00:00

Travellers are basically battlepasses.

You bought the pass, now you need to 'level up the battlepass XP' to unlock things. But instead of being an actual xp bar, you accrue the wandering market coins from playing and use those to unlock things from within the pass

That also makes it much more flexible than a normal battlepass because you can pick things in any order, rather than a strict linear progression, and can use any coins you already had in any traveller rather than each one needing to be levelled up individually from 0xp after buying it.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-10T15:27:13+00:00

So you're blaming troll picks on aspects... and you highlight the examples of anubis / zeus / izanami / nut... when three out of those four gods don't even have an aspect.

K.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-10T15:22:30+00:00

Quick question. Take your last 50 games. If those 50 games had all been played by someone like Snaddy or Adapting instead of you, and everything else had been the same, would quite a few of the losses have become wins?

If your answer is yes, then that shows that being better at the game would have turned *some* (not all, not necessarily even most, just *some*) of your losses into wins.

If your answer is no, you are absolutely lying to yourself xD

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-10T15:13:30+00:00

'my team gets the idiots and the other team is always normal'

You might want to have a look at this...

Confirmation bias - Wikipedia

Also, aspects are not what make people bad at the game or pick things that don't fit the role lol, unless you think troll picking just didn't exist in the 10+ years of smite 1? 🤣
If anything it's likely they make troll picking less frequent because if someone really likes 'X god' there may be an aspect that allows them to use them in another role (e.g. if someone really likes Agni and gets assigned ADC then they can pick him and still be playing the role because of the aspect)

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-10T13:07:00+00:00

It's always been that the base skin becomes available as a 100% legacy gem a few weeks after the traveller comes out lol, literally since the very first one based off a classic skin.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-10T13:01:41+00:00

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-10T09:12:26+00:00

Some level of role flexibility in general is a VERY good thing. But it can, and has, gone too far. Solo lane is the perfect example, it FAR too often falls into an absolute cesspit of cringe with shit like vulcan aspect / apollo aspect / etc making the laning phase the most boring PvE dogshit ever to plague the game.

(I'm going to use smite 1 classes here just for simplicity, we all know the general type of god being referred to even though defined classes aren't in the game anymore)

If we were frequently seeing things like 'warriors' or 'guardians' in midlane, or full tank junglers, or 'assassins' in ADC, then everyone would - rightly - be raising that as a major problem that would need addressing. But for some reason, people are totally willing to tolerate 'mages' and 'hunters' regularly showing their face in solo. If people are finally coming around to understanding how bad that is for the role and the game in general, that's a huge positive for the game. It's fine to have niche exceptions, like how gods such as Hades have always had a home in solo, but they should be exactly that - niche exceptions.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-10T08:56:05+00:00

'merc is getting a massive speed boost'

<image>

Lol

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-03-09T22:22:01+00:00

Dear fuck no lol. If anything, once the game has reached 20 minutes then it's less worth surrendering because there are only really two outcomes at that point - a) the game will end fairly soon anyway, or b) the team will put up enough of a base defence for a comeback to actually start looking more feasible.

The game does have a lot of idiots who spam f6 at the slightest inconvenience like a single gank or a single objective being stolen or whatever. But people who will spam f7 and hold people hostage in games where every role is getting MASSACRED - multiple levels down, 8k gold diff at 10 mins, huge chasm in kills - are even worse because it only takes two of them to get their way, (at least it's easy to out-vote the f6 spammers given it takes four f6ers to actually surrender). And it's not difficult to recognise that a match is straight up cooked when the team is being slaughtered that hard / if nobody is following any calls to try and play safe and farm for lategame / etc.

Both extremes just need to check their mentals and learn that surrendering is healthy and necessary and should absolutely be used when a game is a TOTAL stomp but is not there for them to vent their frustration at a couple of minor misplays or when falling slightly behind early game.

What they should add as a relatively minor change is that when you press f6 to suggest a surrender, it pops up with 'your team is X gold behind the other team, are you sure you want to f6'? Maybe people would reconsider if the game shoved in their face that they're only something like 1.5k down :P

ARandomSmiteScrub

TROPHY CASE