Hunter Guardian Meta Is Horribly Unenjoyable

Taking some of this from this post on r/smite, I've been thoroughly unsatisfied with the current meta. Hunters are probably my least favorite class to play against and having 2-3 of them per game has pretty much ruined conquest for me as of late. The most I can do is one match before taking a break doing another game mode or something else. Was curious what your guys thoughts were, what changes do you think they should make?

Some notable offerings in those comments were:

• reducing ranged physical lifesteal to 50% efficiency
• Enfeebling Curse stops crits
• changing ADCs' kits to have either escapes or CC, but not both
• reduce base damages to lesson hunters' early game survivability
• general reduction in crit damages
• full rework of itemization and crit system so that hunters have to choose from a variety of options rather than having every stat they could possibly need late game

I feel that CountPeter has summed up my thoughts on the matter the best


Thoughts?

Lifesteal: No. This is stupid. Lifesteal isn't even much of a factor on ADCs - it's for in-lane sustain, nothing more; in the instaburst meta of Smite, the amount of health you get from lifestealing in a teamfight is barely a factor.

Enfeebling Curse: And now you have an item that single-handedly makes ADCs and autoattacking assassins unviable. That'll just make mage-bruiser-support meta.

Kit Changes: Oh, wait, OTHER MOBAS ACTUALLY HAVE DONE THIS ****! THEY DON'T SHOVE EVERYTHING INTO A CHAMPION'S KIT!

Base Damages: THIS TOO!

Item Rework: AND THIS!

Crit Damage Reduction: Nah. Crits work fine; it's the power/pen itemization that's the problem.

The sad part is, if you rework Smite's hunters to be like other ADCs, they won't survive it and will die as a class. By definition, ADCs have the strongest late game of practically any class, and logically, when you give them infinite mana, absurd stat stacking, a lack of good armor items, a stupid pen item, and escapes and CC up the wazoo, you get the ADC meta.

Realistically, HiRez won't change much. Just like how mid lane used to have a pool of four gods, HiRez only swaps one problem to another.

And unfortunately, if you change all hunters to give them less CC and escapes and damage, then no one would use them. Because they'd be the only class in the entire game to not have CC + escapes + damage + utility, so they'd just get replaced by mages, or assassins, or bruisers, or whatever.

Warriors had the same problem. Now ADCs have the same problem. And if you nerf ADCs, some other class or god is going to have the same damn problem of being too good at everything.

If you want to change this [blank] meta, you need to rework the game from the ground up - items, abilities, map design, god design.

Is it just me or every patch, there are less god changes, only bug fix

And hopefully some people will now get the reason why sub finds the game unbalanced this meta is the perfect example.

And also the 3-4 god pool normally while in dota (don't know it for LoL as you even pro's won't have everybody) the amount of heroes who don't see play in the TI is around 1-5 from the 110+ (starting at the qualifiers)

I gotta agree that hunters should have more items because the build is pretty mcuh always the same.

In my opinion, crit items should not give power.
It should enhance your build by adding chance to double dmg.
The same way attack speed items should not give power.

By changing that, a hunter build would be 2 power items, and either attack speed or crit, not both.
Then, it would be easier to counter build, with anti-crit and anti-attack speed items.

Another way would be to make hunters even more squichy.
Even if they have full lifesteal, if they don't have much health pool to survive a burst, it could be balanced.

But right now, I feel that the solution HiRez found was to release gods that are just unbalanced and don't fix them. That way, yeah hunters are OP, but many other gods are too, so that's balanced.

Going to agree with all these points except for the first one. While lifesteal does not matter as much in a teamfight, it's often the difference between surviving engagements for hunters or dying due to being focused. This would also give Assassins more viability in dueling hunters especially in the mid game since they could out-lifesteal them without items like Brawler's Beat Stick or Weakening Curse being required.

While I do think that smite would be more balanced with a full item rework (you wouldn't need much of a map rework if you did the item rework right), I still think that at least in the short term, you could reach enough of a balance just by reworking hunters itemization and certain gods' kits (not just hunters, but other classes) to get around 80% of the gods playable in SPL. This is of course a rough estimate, and very opinionated. Don't take any of this as fact, I'm just an optimistic person.

well this goal needs more then just re-itemisation. as the biggest problem smite has (and LoL too IMO) is power creep. All new gods are so OP then get nerfed to be a bit balanced but old gods don't get such a change meaning people will abandon them and they won't see a lot of play as they are bad.

power creep is one of the results of bringing out new gods fast (2 a month is a lot I don't know if hi-rez has gone to once a month now) especially since the pool is growing. the problem that exist is that you have less time to look at balancing compared to older gods.

this doesn't have input on ranked as I believe they aren't playable after they come out

there is a reason why it takes so long for dota to get hero's especially if you go and look at ranked. Oracle is the second last god and is still not in ranked while the newest already is)

When I was saying balancing changes, part of what I was referring to was nerfing gods like Bellona and Serqet and buffing gods like Hades and Zeus. Power creep has been a very pervasive issue recently, more so I feel than at any other time in smite ( Bellona was so overpowered it was simply painful).

To be fair, right now a lot of the early gods are still viable. Sure, gods like Bellona are overpowered even after "nerfs" (Come on HiRez! Duration decrease on Eagle's Rally is enough of a nerf?), but out of the original gods, most of them are amazing. Out of the first 29 gods, Agni, Cupid, Hun Batz (originally SWK), Anhur, Ares, Bakasura, Bastet, Hades, Hercules, Sobek, Thor, and Xbalanque are all still played.

That said, the power creep in Smite is insanity. I think with new additions to the design/balancing team (-_- Drybear), design doesn't realize how broken new gods are compared to their class. Remember release Medusa with a 2s 40% slow, an incredibly scaling steroid, and the safest clear in the game? Forget Bellona, we all know she's broken a la Serqet, and I personally think she was made specifically for pro play. The real problem is that HiRez doesn't know what's good and what isn't, and when they make changes to gods, they don't know how to make them viable. At least not anymore.

And of course, there's the other side of the spectrum. Some of the newest gods, e.g Cabrakan, Nox, Awilix, are underpowered. If HiRez doesn't give us a balanced god soon (and Ratatoskr doesn't seem that way, at least from pro videos of how broken the healing acorn is), I don't know if I can trust the ranked scene anymore. Six bans isn't enough to get rid of insane products of design like Bellona.

TL;DR: I'm probably playing casuals until player skill becomes more important than "Hello, I'm Sylvanus/ Bellona so I win lane now uwu".