Patch 4.22 (Passage To Egypt) - Bran's Thoughts

I still believe that her 2 on her Druid form is stupid as hell. A slow (if use her 3), power reduction, and a cripple on one ability. Don’t forget about her passive that also shreds protections. Now you’ll say that Ares’s chains are like the same thing a slow, cripple, and DoT. The difference between those two is one is a skill shot and one is a AoE. Next you’ll say that Ares’s chains are easy to hit. Well the fast travel time is nice, but still you’re still able to miss the chains. If you do actually miss the chains this happens. One, making you to look like a idiot. Two, wasting your most important ability making you exposed. The chains do have down sides to it. While Artio’s 2 you don’t need to aim just get close to the damn person and just cast it. Easy kill.

That's where the danger comes in. Admittedly in a 1v1 this isn't as dangerous but when multiple enemies are close to eachother this is harder than it may seem. If you face an Artio who can simply walk in and pull the damn thing off without issue that's you and your team's fault for allowing her in the first place. A single root or stun can be enough to get a teammate out of the radius, unless the Artio builds CCR in which 2 may be needed or extra slow should be applied.

I never had the feeling the heal was over-the-top. In fact most of the time it felt rather useless. The Life Tap / Heavy Charge ability may've been a bit much at the start, but only when you would hit all ticks on a full minion wave, in my opinion.

Now she's nerfed so much you could practically bury her and people still complain. Meanwhile we still have things like Chronos or Ah Puch walking around who're a bigger pain to deal with.

Currently I feel like most gods are in a good place. Ymir's buff is fine and Cu Chullain's nerf is justified. Fenrir buff wasn't necessary and Artio's nerf even less.

It's not insane that's the thing. HiRez is nerfing the wrong things on her and that pisses me off. After 35+ hours of playing her, I can say confidently that they're focusing on the wrong things w/ her.

What gets me even more mad is their excerpt in the Patch Notes on this. To summarize they note that [{Artio]] has leveled off in gameplay, but is frustrating in Competitive w/ players who are good with her. A FRACTION of this games players are in the SPL or play on a highly competitive level.

I'm honestly THIS [] close to quitting Smite. I can't handle their ignorant nerfs much longer. I know I'm going to get some flak for having Artio's side, but it's just facts. They're focusing on abilities that aren't the issue.

Noting my writeup of this newest nerf, I also would say that the heal isn't the main issue here. And I know people say "oh, it's easy to shut her down if you know what you're doing, just stun/freeze her out of her dash," etc., etc., etc.

You can say that about basically ANY god, so that comment, speaking earnestly, is on the stupid side. The fact is that, although she doesn't have a fight-influencing ult, she has 6 abilities that, combined, provide about as much utility as any god can have. Remember, we're not talking duel, we're dealing with multiple gods on a team, and her ability to disrupt is very strong.

• 2 stuns (1 requires all hits of Life Tap, one is instantaneous AOE)
• 2 slows
• 2 heals (one a self-heal, one a situational self + teammate heal)
• Protection debuff for 4 seconds (at max stacks is roughly half that of The Executioner and Obsidian Shard, and is for BOTH protection types)
• AOE Cripple (up to 6 seconds!!!)
• AOE Power debuff (up to 25%!!!)
• Medium-speed, long distance dash (initiate or escape)
• Up to 24% added movespeed and 80 MP5

Tell me that's not a bloated kit.

But yeah...I have less of a problem with the heal than the amount of AOE or multiple-god-hit abilities and what they can do. But it's also not going to make me quit the game...I love this game, even though I'm not great at it. I can get really frustrated, and I'll be itching to play it again the next night.

This is why I hate her so much her entire kit has more types of affects than 3 separate gods. I don't know what Hi-Rez was thinking designing this god, and saying this god is totally balanced. No matter who is the lead designer of the game, the game is always unbalanced. It disgusts me when game developers do not listen to their customers. The only change I seen in the entire time I played SMITE there was only one change that they mention the SMITE community. And it was a damage nerf on Camazotz's Bat Out of Hell.

I was fairly unclear earlier and in light of recent comments I feel like I should explain more in detail. Artio heal was at release insane, and is still strong in context of the rest of her kit.

Entangling Vines 6s moving cripple: To clarify I love this. Unique design space that's strong and encourages an aggressive playstyle as it does better in a proactive sense than a reactive one. However, in order to enable this you generally need some sort of sustain or de-buff to make it work. With Ares he has Bolster Defenses to enable you to survive the positioning to get a strong cripple play off. Osiris has a damage reduction modifier on his Tether which allows him to use the ability that's probably the best way to make a comparison. As when the opponent is in the effective range they have an overall damage Debuff.

Artio really only reduces the scaling on an ability with her debuff, which is fine considering that hers is extremely easy to apply, has a longer duration, and can repeatedly be put onto new targets depending on who you are going on. However, before this patch her 1 starts at a heal of 140 per god hit, we're going to disregard scaling for this. Now, I've found it extremely easy to hit 3+ gods with this during a teamfight, and almost always hit 2. So in a solo case we have between a 280 - 420 base heal on yourself and on tanks those hundreds of HP are actually worth quite a bit more due to how protections mitigate damage and usual builds. Frequently there's at least 1 other person that recieves the heal from your one which scales it to a 560 - 840 heal combined, which is much more than it seems if you're healing another tanky target. If there is a second teammate near you that goes to 840 - 1260 combined healing.

All of that on a character that has an extremely easy engage on 99% of comps people run is insane. Not to mention that she has an instant stun to reduce DPS on her, a second heal over time that works on anything she can hit, and a meta where she's probably building Stone of Gaia cause knock-ups are fairly prevalent because of gods and the fact that it is probably the strongest CC in the game. She's regaining huge amounts and if she buys shell she lives even longer.

If you look to nerf the power reduction on the ability you really aren't helping much cause it's only increasing the damage on a gods scaling, and since base damage in most cases is fairly high that doesn't help a ton outside of mages really as the amount of scaling needed to equal out to straight damage reduction is fairly large.

If you nerf duration then you're hurting what makes her really unique in terms of gameplay and the duration isn't huge to play around. Yes, she's a stance changer, but we already have a bunch of those so it doesn't really make her unique.

If you nerf the stun it becomes really lackluster imo so you'd basically be removing most of an ability.

If you nerf the Heal over Time, which they did, it becomes a bit easier to out DPS the sustain to kill her, but that's been done and isn't as huge an issue as it once was. Plus it only hits her.

So you look to nerf the burst heal that also affects her teammates, and can absolutely swing a teamfight. She's still able to heal for a lot and outlive damage, but it becomes a bit less ridiculous and targets what really makes the god unfun, getting her low and having her be full HP again with 1-2 abilities.

She's a really fun god to play as her kit isn't hard to use, has a fair amount of outplay potential, she's easy to carry a game with, and she's a fairly big pub stomper still. However, cripple isn't necessarily a fun mechanic to play against for most people and pubstomping in what is supposed to be a team game generally shouldn't be encouraged. She's also much harder to shut down than gods like Chronos or Ah Puch, as she isn't super item dependent, due to her guardian stats, and continues to scale well into the late game. However, Chronos and Ah Puch, especially Ah Puch, can be shut down early on and generally need a few items to be relevant. So you can camp them and snowball of that most of the time. Sure, they'll reach end game eventually, but you should be able to amass a large enough lead in the meantime to close out the game.