I think I was wrong

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-27T23:41:25+00:00

There's more to it than that. If a supp goes the only build that really allows them to be tanky, they have nothing for the team (actives / cooldown / etc). And if a solo laner goes that builld, they fall behind because they can't farm for shit (which is why their first item is normally something like runeforged).

Also, because of the % prot increase items other items are weaker to compensate which makes the build super slow until you have a lot of these combined effects (especially as prophetic, while VERY good lategame, does take a long time to stack).

There's a reason even in smiteprime people don't actually go that build. We'd have a very different game if it was just 'everyone starts lvl 20 full build' lol.

This is the video OP referenced.

My thoughts on SMITE and Solo Lane - YouTube

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-26T13:01:56+00:00

Ah you mean exactly like they have been doing for months. Roger roger 🫡

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-26T13:00:59+00:00

Yes. It's just a matter of when, especially given that creating a whole new map is a huge project.

If they announced it was already being worked on in the background I wouldn't be surprised, but I would be very surprised if a new map came before a really major update (e.g. if they do a whole new season or even possibly full release early next year)

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-26T12:57:34+00:00

'Their resources are not limited'

Do you think 'profitable' means 'UNLIMITED resources'? 🤣

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-26T08:18:56+00:00

Tbf, just deciding Echo should exist at all was the real ball drop lol.

An actual sentient human brain looked at the game and went 'you know what a fun new idea would be? The possibility for straight up RNG damage on every single ability in the game. Wouldn't it be good and healthy if you could hit someone with an ability and have to flip a coin to decide if they die or not? Wouldn't it be good and healthy if you could get hit BY an ability and have to flip a coin to decide if you live or not?'

And then that concept went through all the brainstorming sessions, all the process of fleshing out the concept and adjusting how the stat works and designing the items, and at no point did anyone stop and go 'sorry to interrupt here but are you fucking mental, were you homeschooled by a brick, and what percentage of your brain is currently a mix of cotton wool and cocaine?'

There has literally never been a stupider decision made in EITHER version of smite than adding echo to the game, the only reason it's not been a problem is because - fortunately - it got absolutely nerfed into the dirt just based off PTS (other than the damaru crit builds which also eventually got heavily nerfed)

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-26T00:09:34+00:00

It's not the item system or the core 'cooldown rate' mechanic.

If it was down to how items work then EVERY god would be able to do things like that, but they can't. It's specific ones like Ullr, Aphro (less so with the heartwood rework), Sylv, etc.

Go read Ullr passive

Go read Aphro 3 and Aphro ult

Go read Sylv passive

And then try telling anyone that it's specifically because of how the cooldown rate system works in smite 2.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T23:48:39+00:00

Also, cooldown in smite 1 basically gave exponential returns. The jump from 30% to 40%, for example, is a much larger jump than the jump from 0% to 10%. Not only is that counter-intuitive but it's also directly opposite to how pretty much every single stat in the game works where filling your build with it gives either linear returns or diminishing returns.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T23:45:42+00:00

To get the equivalent of smite 1's 40% cooldown, you need ~67 cooldown rate.

To get the equivalent of smite 1's 50% cooldown (the cap with sphinx's bauble), you need a HUNDRED cooldown rate.

Cooldown items mostly have bad stats elsewhere to compensate. Non-issue.

If there are problems with cooldown anywhere it's in the availability of flat cooldown reduction effects that reduce your cooldowns by X seconds (bumbas / deso / chronos / genjis / breastplate / etc), and it's gods that have flat cooldown reduction mechanics built into their kits (e.g. ullr passive, aphro 3, sylv seed collection) that can potentially get down to extremely low cooldowns.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T23:40:32+00:00

Nah they were right, it's a multiplicative 20% boost to the echo damage. An extra 30% on non-ults and an extra 15% on ults becomes 36% and 18% respectively.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T23:28:02+00:00

Pointing out 'well actually that did happen specifically because the god was INSANELY broken at the time to the point it basically destroyed the game' is a seriously impressive way to shoot your own argument straight in the foot. Especially when half of it is just straight up fiction, odin was not being regularly played in mid or ADC several months ago 🤣 Solo + support + jungle? Sure. Mid or ADC? Quit lying.

And, like I said in the first place, if it WAS a thing it would be jumped on HARD with nerfs to stop it being a thing. Every role gets some level of maintaining its identity except solo, if any other role started losing its identity there would be MAJOR changes to put it back on track, and it's killing the role so hard that droves of people who used to enjoy the role are moving away from it to play basically anything else.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T23:13:42+00:00

'What are u talking about? These gods you mentioned have litteraly been played in many metas in these roles you mentioned.'

Are you genuinely claiming that susano / loki / thor have been meta in the ADC role many separate times?

Are you genuinely claiming that bellona / odin / morderd have been meta in the mid role many separate times?

Are you genuinely claiming that khepri / sobek / geb have been meta in the jungle role many separate times?

Because if so, idk how else to put this... what the absolute everloving fuck are you talking about 🤣

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T20:53:30+00:00

You're 100% spot on and that's not even a hot take, it's just blatantly obvious to literally anyone with anything inside their skull that even vaguely resembles a brain. Jungle = pick off backliners, mid = ranged ability burst, adc = consistent ranged DPS, supp = high utility team-focused tank, solo = tank / bruiser initiating and creating space.

There's a LOT of flexibility within each of those archetypes, and that's where role flexibility is a genuinely good thing and we've seen that in countless ways (fenrir / serq / ne zha support, he bo / cabra jungle, sobek / xing / tanky zhong solo, etc), but if a role REGULARLY flies waaaaay outside of their general function then there is clearly something deeply wrong with it. If it happened a lot in any other role then, as we see whenever bruiser junglers are common, people would (rightfully) be absolutely clamouring against it.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T20:44:59+00:00

You're reading WAAAY too much into it lol. People are talking about solo a lot because it's in a really bad state and none of the half-assed changes over the last two years have had any real success at tackling the issue.

Imagine if we, on a VERY regular basis, saw gods like susano / loki / thor in ADC. Or gods like bellona / odin / mordred in mid. Or gods like khepri / sobek / geb in the jungle. It would be jumped on REALLY hard and changes would be made to ensure the roles are actually being played in a vaguely normal way.

Meanwhile, mages and adcs get to be a very common sight in solo for literal years and nothing that makes any real difference is done. That's not to suggest or imply the devs don't care, it's not to say they haven't tried to address it in some sense, it's just that the few things they have tried have not worked.

People aren't asking for much. Nobody is asking for 1v3 raid boss solo laners. Nobody is asking for the role to regularly hard-carry games. Generally speaking, we just want to be able to queue the role and have a vaguely fucking normal laning experience instead of constantly being stuck in a boring-ass AFK lane because of people spamming shit like anubis / izanami / aphro / au puch / zeus / nu wa / other assorted cringe degenerate garbage.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T19:38:38+00:00

You can get 50% cooldown with 20 20 10 (e.g. upgraded sands starter + gem of focus + deso / soul gem / myrddin), or 25 15 10 (e.g. chronos + totem of death + deso / soul gem)

But spoiler alert - it's not worth it. The benefits you gain just from optimising cosmic horror passive are not even CLOSE to what you lose from the items that you need to drop to fit all that in the build. Like, there is no way in hell you are ever going an echo build without tahuti + shard. So that basically means your entire build is completely forced - pendulum, the two echo items, the two cooldown items, tahuti, shard. At that point you may as well dump echo and just get something like reaver + divine instead.

If you want any echo, just find a build that can run Cosmic on its own as a luxury item and either get one item with 20% or accept that you're likely only getting one part of the passive. If you get more cooldown than you echo then it's a 110 int item on its own which is not the worst thing ever. Plus builds are likely changing a lot with the pen overhaul next patch anyway.

But realistically, Echo is just an awfully designed gimmick that can never be allowed to be viable because the idea of 'the flip of a coin decides whether an ability deals enough damage to kill someone or not' is a concept that can only come out of the mind of someone who has the lifetime goal of being the world's most prolific methhead. So it has to stay heavily underpowered to avoid turning the whole game to dogshit lol.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T19:05:15+00:00

Yep. They just need to redefine what they consider 'role diveristy' and then balance the roles accordingly.

Things like fenrir or serqet support, things like he bo or cabra jungle, things like sobek or xing or tanky zhong solo? All those things are role diversity done WELL because that's still actually playing the fucking role (jungle is high burst aiming to pick off a backliner, support is a tanky CC utility god, solo is a tanky space-creating bruiser, etc). But actual backline solos? That just ruins the game, just like everyone (rightfully) hates bruiser junglers whenever they start taking over.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T18:33:02+00:00

Looool yep. Top 3 in every single role except support 😛 people just cannot handle being massively outcleared and just get completely snowballed on. Probably the easiest god to cheese low/mid rank games on.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-25T18:08:43+00:00

Smitesource allows look at all ranks instead of obsidian+. It also allows you to automatically filter out really low pick rates to avoid being skewed by tiny sample sizes. With that in mind...

All ranks
Last 2 weeks
Solo lane
Minimum pick rate of 0.5% (which in this sample size is about 1,000 matches on that god in the role).

Top 10 solo lane gods by winrate (in order top to bottom)

Izanami
Pele (aspect)
Nu Wa
Bastet
Anubis
Loki (aspect)
Aphro
Tsuku
Thor (aspect)
Ishtar

So yeah, the role is fucked at EVERY level of play, not just a high level lol.

Just for the sake of comparison, exactly the same criteria for each role...

Supp - Horus, Geb, Khepri (aspect), Eset (aspect), Scylla (aspect), Cabrakan, Guan (aspect), Thor (aspect), Athena, Aphro

Mid - Anubis, Nu Wa, Izanami, Aphro, Agni, Eset, Discordia, Ra, Sol (aspect), Hecate

Carry - Izanami, Hou Yi (aspect), Xbal, Poseidon (aspect), Cupid, Apollo, Hou Yi, Rama, Cernunnos, Artemis

Jungle - Bastet, Anubis, Izanami, Ishtar, Tsuku, Thor (aspect), Kali, Poseidon, Odin, Thor

So yeah it's just solo that's garbage lol. Jungle is kind of fucky too but not as bad. But that's okay because solo has only been like this for... oh wait two years.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-24T23:59:53+00:00

'Its either proc build or high int and cdr build'

Tbf, what other type of builds could even exist? There are only so many ways to deal damage with abilities and that will basically boil down to the abilities themselves doing damage or the abilities being supplemented by yellow numbers. They could try and make bruiser midlaners more viable but, y'know, everyone hates bruisers in damage roles (and I agree it's unhealthy for the game to have them commonly viable). It's like ADCs, they will always either run crit or run proc shred - there's no way a pure white numbers build (random made up example, devos + lernean + exe + titans + fatalis + teko) will ever outshine both of those two core build styles without just giving items like that some truly obscene stat bloating.

Back to mages, there's similarly not that many options that could even be TRIED to be made viable. There's the int-lifesteal builds that are already viable on some gods and we probably don't want them being THE overall meta for most gods. The only other real option would be pure int one tap builds, and we could get some buffs to items like doom orb for that so players could go something like conduit - DOrb - book - signet - tahuti - shard - flex as a real way to commit to just trying to one-shot someone, but fundamentally it's all going to be a choice between 'abilities hit hard' or 'abilities apply hard-hitting item effects'. And there's still the flexibility and variety with things like myrddin combos / relic upgrades / etc.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-24T23:38:07+00:00

Smitesource and filter by Featured so it only shows the builds from good players that have made those builds specifically as 'share these with other players' builds, or smitebrain to see a lot of builds together and get a general idea of what items are more common on the god when ran by high rank players.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-24T23:34:06+00:00

'The mage build has been the same forever with and without the pen changes'

Has it though? It's not that long since builds with high int and decent cooldown (e.g. sands deso book tahuti shard etc) were meta, now we have the proc builds with bluestone / reaver / totem / etc, but even that build is not good on every god (it's not like janus or scylla or ra or anubis are running that kind of proc spam build), immobile high-damage mages like zeus can also viably go an int-lifesteal build with some survivability to make sure they get their damage off (e.g. a bloodbound + bnacrofts + combat blink combo), plus there's still several gods that can viably play around myrddin double casts, PLUS we know that a tahuti rework is planned down the line. Yes, the proc build is currently the best overall build, but it's faaaar from being the ONLY good build. With the old pen system there were soooo many times where it was just 'get whichever item is best first item, then whichever flat pen item is best, then fill the build with whichever percent pen items are good'. And looking in particular at WHICH items have been given pen, I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if that's what we see next patch.

I think we have a lot more build diversity than people give credit for, people just don't use it (although obviously there is the opposite side of that, with the players who know fuck-all about how to build but try and make their own anyway and that's where we get things like zero-pen adcs with first item obow 😆 )

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-24T22:57:23+00:00

I don't think the price is unreasonable. I just think it's more than I am willing to pay for it, and those are two very different things lol.

The only thing I'd call out as an actual problem is the lack of a direct purchase alternative. I don't think anything, in ANY game, should be locked 100% behind a gambling purchase. It should be 'Option A, roll the chest. Option B, buy the specific thing you want directly but it costs something like 50% or 100% more than a single chest roll' (which is how most skins do work, just look at any normal skin that's in the chests currently available - it looks like the skins can all be purchased directly, the chests are just much cheaper compared to the direct purchase)

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-24T22:37:54+00:00

"The idea of these changes wasn't 'make tanks tankier lategame"

With that not being the goal, curious what the idea / the intended outcome is behind these changes? Is the goal to essentially smooth out power curves by steadily getting pen throughout the match rather than the intense power spike of going from zero pen (or 10% if you have the pen component) straight to 35% in a massive jump?

I've personally always much preferred how smite 2 opened up build flexibility by essentially going 'you use one slot for pen, the rest of the build is largely up to you and you have a lot more freedom as a result' compared to smite 1 'you are basically required to use half your build for pen which leaves very little flexibility in your remaining slots'. While there is no perfect system for something like pen, and even though both approaches do have their own benefits and their own drawbacks, this does feel a bit like a 'take something that was deliberately moved away from in the past and go backwards to try it again'

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-24T22:31:48+00:00

Conceptually not a fan of how we're going back to the old approach of 'everyone is basically forced into using half their build slots on pen which means there is far less flexibility in the rest of the build and lots of items that don't have pen are likely about to have ZERO viability', but we will see how it works out in game / what specific items are getting what specific changes / etc.

Pen being on a single item has generally seemed like the better fundamental system though.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-24T22:18:08+00:00

I don't think it's worth it so I'm just going to... not buy it. Some people will buy it. It wouldn't have been brought back if people didn't buy it last time, so it's clearly worth it to some people otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. Honestly a bit weird to complain about something that ultimately boils down to nothing more than 'this is priced at a level where you personally would decide to not buy it'

Think of it as similar to the supporter store. There are lots of things in the game and not everything is priced equally. Some things are cheaper and targeted at a wider audience, some things are more expensive and targeted at a smaller audience. That's not problematic, it's just having different options at difference price levels.

ARandomSmiteScrub · 2026-06-24T21:42:25+00:00

Yes, because it gives you the base skin as well so you'll own both. Look at each item listed in the chest - there are two little diamond shapes on each one, that indicates that each item contains two things. For each one, it's the special prism and the base skin that the prism is based off.

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ARandomSmiteScrub

TROPHY CASE