Overview
This is a guide that contains the many key elements of SMITE and the game mode conquest, in order for newer players to get into playing this game and even the complex game mode of conquest. Since I have been playing SMITE since 2016, I am not a new player, but I have tried to highlight the major information that a new player will need in order to improve at playing this game. Although the purpose of the guide is to introduce newer players to conquest, it also can be used to teach the basic parts of SMITE. I hope that any newer players who read this guide can either learn something new, or find some more enjoyment in SMITE. For other veteran SMITE players, feel free to contact me for other information that I should add to this guide. Hopefully, you can enjoy reading this guide, and good luck on the battleground of the gods!
Introduction
Hi, I am Tepig, and I have been playing SMITE since 2016, and I have many friends who have wanted to get into SMITE, but have not been able to properly do so. This is why I have written this guide as I want to help any new players learn the basics of SMITE, so that they can enjoy SMITE for what it is. For those who know a lot about SMITE, I would love for any of you to contact me for new information that I should add to this.
What is SMITE?
Throughout time, there have been many different polytheistic pantheons that believed in different gods and deities. These religions have even had folklore, which included a variety of monsters and other mythical and powerful beings. Although not many polytheistic religions remain, the free-to-play game SMITE preserves these pantheons in a multiplayer game. Due its adaptability, this complex game entertains millions of players between PC, Xbox, PS4, and Nintendo Switch.
SMITE is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) made by Titan Forged Games and published by Hi-rez Studios. Multiplayer online battle arenas tend to have very unique and specific features, which differs them from other genres. They have the similar combat feeling of MMOs, and you also get to fight as a certain character. MOBAs include a real-time strategy element that faces teams against each other as they battle each other in battle. SMITE was one of the first MOBAs to utilize a third person point of view over the traditional sky view that MOBAs such as League of Legends exhibit.
Character Classes(Character Types) and Pantheons
Since the game was released in 2012, SMITE has incorporated an extensive amount of gods from numerous pantheons. Currently, SMITE has one hundred and eight gods and goddesses from fourteen unique pantheons of religion. These pantheons include Arthurian, Celtic, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, Japanese, Mayan, Norse, Polynesian, Roman, Slavic, Voodoo, and Yoruba.
Every god has a weapon with which they can basic attack, and four abilities that include an ultimate ability. Each of these gods and goddesses belongs to one of five classes: hunters, mages, assassins, warriors, and guardians. Hunters are basic attack based gods that often have abilities to power up their basic attacks, and most hunters have bow like weapons to attack from afar. Mages are wizard-like characters that are mostly ability based to either support their team, or do lots of damage from afar.
The other three classes are often melee based, which means that they utilize a weapon for close ranged combat, such as swords, daggers, and even martial arts. Assassins are evasive characters that often use stealth or other means to get behind the enemy team to kill them quickly. Warriors are tankier gods and goddesses that may both be offensive and defensive for their teams, to have multiple purposes.
Guardians are usually the main frontline of their team as they are by default the tankiest class, and often are tasked with supporting and defending their teammates. Although they each have their specific role, they can all be a damage dealer, tank, a support, and even use crowd control if they build items of a certain type.
Offensive Statistics
SMITE has several types of items with many unique functions and statistics. There are two types of damage in SMITE, which include physical and magical. Every hunter, warrior, and assassin deals physical damage, while mages and guardians deal magical damage.
Offensive stats include basic attack damage, attack speed, power (physical or magical), lifesteal (physical or magical), penetration(physical or magical), and critical chance.
Basic attack damage determines how much a basic attack will do before mitigation and is equal to either all of a physical god’s physical power or one fifth of a magical god’s magical power, while basic attack speed is how fast your basic attacks are.
The amount of damage your abilities will deal depends on the base damage of that ability and its scaling, which uses the god’s power stat to amplify the damage of that ability.
On the other hand, basic attacks deal more damage based on the amount of damage that you build into your kit.
Similar to healing, lifesteal allows you to gain an amount of health, based on how much lifesteal you have and how much damage you dealt.
Since every character has defenses by default, penetration allows offensive attacks to bypass some of these defense stats, depending on if it is percentage based or a flat amount of penetration.
Critical chance determines your possibility for your basic attacks, and in some cases abilities to deal twice the amount of damage. No matter your character, there is an optimal way to deal damage.
Defensive Statistics
SMITE offers various forms of defense in order to counteract the damage taken from enemy. Defenses in the form of protection can mitigate or reduce the damage that you take from enemy attacks.
This protection comes in both physical and magical forms to resist that certain type of damage. The amount of protections that a god has also scales as they level up. Both types of protections will cap at 325, and penetration can reduce that amount before damage is calculated.
Since penetration reduces protections, some tanks may invest in building health as well. When health is built, it increases the maximum amount of health that a god or goddess has. The more health that they have, the more attacks that that god can take before dying. Each god has a different base value for health and it will go up as the god levels up. Health will cap at 5,500, and can not increase further then that. There are certain items that increase in damage depending on how much health a target has, which includes soul reaver and heartseeker.
In addition to health, gods can build HP5, which ultimately is health regeneration. Depending on the amount of HP5 that a god has, the god will gain a certain amount of health by that amount every five seconds. Similar to health, the amount a god has depends on what god it is and what level they are as it increases in the same way. Popular items such as stone of gaia offer a passive that allows your god to passively gain a percentage or fixed amount of health over a certain period.
Crowd control is a very popular form of offense, which includes hard crowd control (the god loses control of their character) and soft crowd control(restricts the god, but they can still be controlled in some way). In order to counter crowd control, SMITE offers crowd control reduction, which works by reducing the total time that the crowd control would last by the percentage of crowd control reduction that the target has. This amount can increase up to forty percent, and the greater the amount of crowd control reduction would result in shorter crowd control on that target. Unlike the other defensive statistics, crowd control reduction does not increase as the god levels up, and only the god Anubis starts with the statistic.
For those struggling with crowd control, there is an item called magi’s cloak that will absorb one form of hard control crowd control and then become immune to future forms of crowd control for one second. This item is very useful for crowd control heavy team compositions, but it has a cooldown of seventy seconds.
Luckily for tanks, SMITE offers many forms of defense in order for frontline gods to be able to tank damage and protect their team longer.
Utility Statistics
In addition to offensive and defensive statistics, SMITE includes many utility related statistics that have a wide range of uses. In the game SMITE, every god has a set base number for how fast they move, which is referred to as movement speed, and then all gods have options to increase the speed that they move at by increasing this stat. As the number increases, the god will be able to move across the map quicker than before.
Most of the abilities in SMITE have cooldowns, which can be reduced to shorter times with the use of cooldown reduction. Cooldown reduction will decrease the base time by a percentage amount, and even some items have auras to reduce the cooldown by a few seconds such as chronos pendant and spear of desolation.
Mana is a stat that is used by most gods when they use their abilities. A god will need a certain amount of mana to cast some of their abilities. If a god does not use mana in their kit, mana will add to another one of their statistics. When the average god builds mana, they will be able to use more abilities as most abilities cost a certain amount of mana to use. Certain items such as transcendence and book of Thoth increase the amount of power that a god has based on the amount of maximum mana that a god has.
Mana is important early on for gods to be able to use their abilities, so they want to be able to maintain their mana. In order to help with this, SMITE has a statistic called MP5, which is mana regeneration expressed in the amount that a god will passively gain back over five seconds. The amount of MP5 that a god builds, will increase the amount of mana that will be recovered over five seconds.
Since there are so many types of stats that a god can build, many different gods can be built to have a completely different purpose than is originally intended.
What is Conquest?
Although a majority of SMITE’s population plays arena, the most competitive game mode in SMITE is conquest, and that is the game mode that highlights the game as a MOBA.
The gamemode conquest has two teams of five players face off in a map consisting of three lanes, and a jungle that is split up by the lanes. In SMITE your team either is on the Chaos or Order side, and they have inverted views with each other when facing the other side.
The Order side has blue towers and phoenixes by default and the left lane would be the duo lane, and the right lane would be the solo lane. On the other hand, Chaos has orange towers and phoenixes by default and the lanes are inverted so that the solo lane is on the left and the duo lane is on the right for that team.
The Typical Roles of Each Class in Conquest
In conquest, there are five roles and five players so it is optimal for every player to take on one of those roles.
The duo lane is where the adcs (attack damage carry) and supports will fight in the early parts of the game. These carries are usually auto attack based gods that can deal a lot of damage with just their basic attacks. As the name suggests, supports are the gods that will have the role of supporting their team in many ways. Most supports are tanks, but others can also be healers that can heal their teammates. Although supports start the game with their adc, they will later rotate around the map to support their other team members.
The lane that will always be in the middle of the map is called mid lane, and it will be occupied by the mid laners. Mid laners are usually mages, but are mostly ability based gods that will work with the jungler to control the center of the map through applying pressure in many forms, such as killing the enemy gods. Since mid laners are in the middle of the map they will often rotate to other lanes and objectives to help in team fights, as they are one of the most important roles for team fights as they usually have abilities that yield high amounts of power for wiping out the enemy team.
The last lane is the solo lane and is where the solo laners will fight each other. It is often seen as a farming lane, and solo laners are usually tanks such as warriors or have some sort of sustain to stay in their lane as long as possible. The solo laners often get the relic teleport, which allows them to teleport back to their tower. This allows for them to optimally farm in their lane, while also helping with returning to lane quickly against aggressive opponents.
The last member of the team will be the jungler, who will clear the jungle camps to benefit themselves and their team. Since junglers do not have their own lane, they will often gank the lanes in order to put their teammates ahead of the enemy. The jungle is the largest part of the map and has many different jungle camps that drop buffs, and the jungler will often clear these for their team.
In team fights, the support and solo laner will often be the frontline for their team as they have the job of soaking up all of the damage for their backline, which are the high damaging adcs and mid laners.
Jungle Buffs
There are four different buffs which include the void buff, damage buff, speed buff, and mana buff. All of the jungle buffs last for two minutes as of the current patch.
The void buff is usually picked up by the adc and will increase the attack speed of its holder and reduce the protections of enemy gods within 55 units by 10 protections.
The damage buff is the buff picked up by the mid laner or other damage dealer, and it will increase the amount of power that a god has by a percentage and a flat 10 magical power or 5 physical power.
The speed buff is necessary for all junglers early on as it increases their speed stat, and will help them to get across the map quickly.
The other buff is the mana buff and as the name may suggest it will increase mana regeneration of the holder (MP5). It also includes 10 percent cooldown reduction, and will often be the tool used by the solo laner to sustain their mana in lane.
Since there are so many buffs, the jungler will be tasked with dropping these buffs for their teammates’ and their own gain. With the help of these buffs, a team may win teamfights and win the game, so they are influential, especially early on.
How to win Conquest
In order to win any gamemode in SMITE except for arena, you have to kill the enemy titan, but it is guarded by a phoenix and even a tower or two.
In conquest each lane has a phoenix and two towers guarding the titan, and the enemy god cannot damage the tower or phoenix closest to the enemy base before killing the tower or towers farthest away from the enemy base.
These towers and phoenixes cannot be damaged by enemy abilities so they are often targeted by the adc and other basic attack based characters. Every lane has minions that spawn in the lane to push these towers, and these minions include melees (basic minions with swords and shields), brutes (stronger melee minions wielding swords and shields) and archers (basic minions wielding bows and arrows).
When a team kills the enemy phoenix of a lane, their minions will be replaced by empowered flaming minions that deal twice as much damage and have 200 more health than their default counterpart. In addition, SMITE offers many types of objectives, which include an Oni fury that will also further power up the minions.
Conquest Objectives
Since they have impactful rewards, the objectives in SMITE can help a team get ahead, or even end the game.
One of the first objectives that will spawn is the default gold fury, which will give the entire team who killed the fury a certain amount of gold and some experience. In the gold fury pit there will also be oracle furies which will act as a vision ward of the entire gold fury pit for the team that kills both of them. That team will have to kill both of them for this effect, otherwise it won’t give anything besides gold and experience.
After this gold fury is slain, either the Oni fury or primal fury will spawn in the same location with different benefits, although both still give gold and experience to the slayers, they each have unique benefits. The oni fury will cause the minions that spawn in the next wave to deal 70 percent bonus damage, and have more health and protections. The other fury is the primal fury and it will give the slaying team a stacking 7 percent damage buff against jungle camps, and 7 percent damage reduction for damage inflicted by jungle camps. This buff does not go away and even increases every time that a team kills this type of fury.
The other side of the map has the pyromancer and the fire giant in the fire giant pit. The pyromancer is another early game objective that rewards gold and experience to the slaying team, but will also give that team a fountain buff for ninety seconds, that will speed up a god’s movement speed when leaving the fountain (the base).
Most importantly, the fire giant is the strongest and most influential objective as it will give the winning team a massive damage buff, and passive health regeneration. At twenty minutes into the game, this mighty being will spawn, but is usually fought by an entire team due to its high power and health.
After thirty minutes have passed in the game, an enhanced version of the fire giant will spawn and wield even more benefits. Since this is such a massive buff, there are often team fights that will take place for teams to be able to take this objective. Those who kill the fire giant will often be able to easily kill enemy towers, phoenixes, and even the titan to win the game.
Conclusion and Works Cited (the links I used)
Now that you have acquired the basic knowledge of SMITE, you should be able to develop into a great SMITE player of any role. Make sure to not get discouraged if you don’t do as well as you hoped, as playing SMITE takes practice, so you can always work on improving.
In order to improve, I would also recommend that you watch videos of gameplay and guides so that you can also see all of this information in action. For those who like to learn about the informational side of SMITE you can check out the youtuber https://www.youtube.com/user/DukeSloth and there are many other informational videos that were released on the internet, not just including youtube.
We can all work together to help the entire SMITE community to improve by providing the resources for someone to improve, so I am glad if I helped out any readers even a little bit.
Here are the links of the sites that I have used to write this guide:
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