Deimos & Phobos by Polevolter

I hope that you enjoyed my god concept for the SMITEFire Halloween 2023 God Creation Contest!

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My personal interpretation of Deimos and Phobos are that of a pair of twins that work in tandem, during battle. Fear and dread are the feelings that are accumulated while terror is the culmination of those feelings finally being released. Because of this, my interpretation of these twin gods required Deimos to "go first" in terms of interacting with gods. You have to build up the fear in enemies before striking after all. Therefore, Phobos is the follow-up to all of that fear and dread that has been building, leading to a devastating release of power. Admittedly, these two gods have very little veritable sources to draw from. What is agreed upon is that these two are the sons of Ares and Aphrodite. Information that is inconsistent is in regards to what domain Deimos and Phobos preside over. They are both attributed to being gods of fear, particularly fear during battle but some sources simply attribute them to solely "gods of fear" while other sources are more specific and cite Deimos as representative of dread & Phobos is strongly associated with terror; this is even his name in his Roman equivalent.


Deimos and Phobos concepts have been done before by different community members across different platforms but they way they go about implementing the two gods, wasn't satisfying for me. I think partly that is due to the challenge of implementing a stance-changing assassin but a lot of designs felt like they weren't using the full potential of these two gods.


One strong influence for my god concept is another video-game, Dead by Daylight. Specifically, the killers known as The Ghost Face and The Wraith. I love this game a ton and have put too much hours into it, and when exploring Halloween god concepts, I of course had to draw from this video-game as well as other horror influences. I particularly wanted to implement a "stalking" mechanic into a MOBA but the problem was that Dead by Daylight is very different from SMITE. In SMITE, you can't really afford to have a "stalking" mechanic unless the payoff is appropriately huge, due to the fast paced nature. All things considered, I am happy with the design I landed on.


The premise of my Deimos & Phobos concept is that you play as an assassin with very high map traversal without revealing your position until you decide to finally make a move. However, your damage is very dependent on the Dread you accumulate on enemies which rewards prior preparation and punishes recklessness. Deimos & Phobos double-down on the idea of the assassin as this patient malicious force that makes enemies uneasy whenever their location isn't known. These two are weaker in direct combat and any gods that can exert dominance over them directly will have an easy time denying Deimos & Phobos from becoming a threat too soon.

This section is meant to be a quick break-down of my god design, to help better understand it or if you are reading this very quickly.

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The passive allows Deimos to be invisible unless he breaks it manually or takes damage. It can be regained when no longer in combat. When Deimos breaks his invisibility manually, he will fear all enemy gods near him.


For Phobos, this passive drains stacks of Dread and these stacks empower his next attack with %missing HP damage.

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The first ability lets Deimos place dormant hallucinations which appear like clones, but can't be seen by enemies. He can recast this ability at the same location as a dormant hallucination to activate it, causing it to imitate Deimos as if he broke invisibility.


This first ability lets Phobos teleport a short distance like Ao Kuang, but this ability can target dormant hallucinations from a longer range. Upon telporting to the hallucination, they will be activated and fear enemies near Phobos.

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The second ability is a massive movement speed boost to Deimos BUT it makes a massive global audio cue.


For Phobos, this ability is just a cone attack in front of him, with a lighting effect added on that bounces from the initial targets hit. The lightning spreads to enemies with Dread, and its cooldown resets each time it does.

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The third ability for Deimos is a channeled dash attack that makes noise and does not break his invisibility during the channel. The distance of the ability scales with how long it is channeled.


For Phobos, the third ability is a channeled dash attack that damages and stuns the first enemy it strikes. The stun duration and the distance of this ability scales up with how long it is channeled.

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The ultimate functions as a toggle whenever Deimos is invisible, that lets him stalk enemy gods in his line of sight and cause them to accumulate stacks of Dread. Toggling this function also works on the dormant hallucinations, causing them to build Dread for any gods in line of sight.


However, if Deimos is visible, this ultimate changes to a standard stance switch ability that lets him swap places with Phobos and vice versa.