Thoughts on SMITE Season 7 (2020)

Hey everyone,

As 2020 is quickly coming to a close and we look ahead to 2021 and Season 8 of SMITE, curious to hear your opinions on how this season has shaped up. Anything SMITE is up for discussion:

• God and item balance and changes (major changes to magical and physical pen, significant changes to Gladiator's Shield and Berserker's Shield, addition of Vision Shard, Ratatoskr / Odin / Bastet / Loki reworks, etc.)
  
  
• New god releases
  
  
  
  
• Conquest changes (new Jungle Shrine, jungle buff/minion behavior, announcement of new Conquest map in Season 8)
  
  
• High quality skins / battle passes
  
  
  
  
• Increased SMITEFire support (guide contests, god creation contests, weekly challenges, Hades4U (MVP!) contributions, SF Prime membership, SF Collaborative guides, new site features)
  
  
• Controversy (e.g. DMBrandon)
  
  
• Interesting things in the competitive scene

Please remember to keep the conversation respectable. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and thanks for all of your contributions here on SMITEFire!

Baba sucked, Mulan was mediocre, some of the metas were cringe, but magical pen rework was good and physical pen rework was decent.

I love Mulan's kit and how she plays I just wish she was more viable for solo. She's only good as a very niche counter pick and even then she falls off so bad late game which is rough in Season 7 given late game is often where matches end up.

I do like the sustain meta though. Solo, ADC, Mid and even some jungle builds all heavily rely on fast sustain that lets people heal quickly. This adds some fun to the game cause people play more recklessly instead of like Season 6 where everyone built tank items and camped towers all game making laning super boring. But this also means anti heal items have become absolutely required in every build. I'd like to see characters who have interesting ways to deal with anti-heal in their kit rather than having to rely on items. Gods like Cerb and Ah Puch might become more important in the meta then if they can deal with anti-heal giving them an extra item slot to have some unique builds.

Secondly I do not like the way CC has been going. Back in the day some characters and support had CC which made them valuable but now it seems almost every god has CC. It makes Beads way too important. Some CC chain combos are so annoying to deal with not even beads can save you when 4 enemies have a CC making it so you stop maybe two CCs but the second beads is done you're getting hit by the other two. As a tank it's even worse cause you aren't going to get beads very often so if the team decides to waste a CC combo on you just to kill you quickly so they can go kill your backline then there's nothing you can do about it. Even with full CC reduction the CC combo will last long enough to burst down a tank with ease. I don't know how to balance CC but right now there's some team comps that are designed to make it so you can't play the game at all.

really curious why you're saying this part as in my opinion this really hasn't increased at all. when I started playing just before release, there were maybe 10 gods max without hard cc (every god had at least soft cc somewhere) and at that point we were already around 50. even the 13 gods the game started with included 2 or 3 hard ccles gods from the 17.

On topic I'm pretty neutral overall about the game direction. The art department is putting in tons of work that honestly some other departments should follow. They are the MVP with the amount and good quality of skins lately.

god release team while the god kits are still interesting I prefer the balance part more as I won't always be the one playing the new god. With 2 OP to broken releases and 1 weak release being the latest god (only mulan being decent at release) I fear the last god won't be able to tally the score. Even the reworks they did won't be able to balance out as they balance each other out already imo. Part of this reason is also going towards ignoring pts feedback.

Item changes were fine blew open some of the more stagnant item builds for a while even though they are slowly stagnating again, but made the game healthier. Really curious how they gonna keep items interesting for S8 without adding more items that will only serve a rare niche.

conquest changes I'm pretty neutral about as their impact is usually less impactful. only happy they killed invade meta at the start of the season. I am more curious to the impact of the new map they promised.

on the latter part I fear the small competitive scene isn't really interesting. the skill gap between teams is pretty visible making certain matchups boring. The first half was surprisingly good but the second not that much. They try and the caster team is great, but my attachment to the competitive scene has no way to be able to reach the one of LoL. partly because it's an all NA competition. the pros personalities are on par for me though.

their battle against toxicity took a step (albeit I do find it small as some of the gapfillers are just a 2.0) but is far from over.

A lot of the newer gods have insane kits with multiple CC. I mainly played joust back in season 1-4 but the amount of CC didn't feel like what it is today. Erlang has a root, knock up and taunt. Mulan has a grab, slow, root and knock up. Yemoja has a slow, stun, knock back and wall. So on and so forth. At least when I first started playing the gods who had multiple CC were supports like ***bha. They just hand out CC like it's candy. And the gods that don't have any or have much escape options become nearly worthless because of it.

But yeah the new gods being broken for two weeks before getting nerfed to hell is a problem with every single MOBA. It's a really lame way to entice people into buying them. LoL does it, HotS did it, DOTA 2 did it. It's a tradition at this point. HotS was the worst offender. They would release heroes that would be so insanely broken they wouldn't even be allowed into competitive until after a month or so, they called it "balancing phase" but really it was because they wanted to sell the hero to us before nerfing them. I did love that game that though...

yeah some have that but some good examples from the old days and some of these aren't even a bruiser/tank class:
[[apollo] mez, knockup and a knockback/aside (on his dash).
SWK, 2 knockups (now 1 slow 1 knockup) and a stun
Belonna: slow, disarm stun
anhur: slow, knockback and knockup
neith: root stun attackspeed slow
poseidon: 2 knockups and his whirlpool.
( Zeus stun)


I agree that releasing overtuned gods became a tradition. it's pretty much needed because of first impressions, but I do feel that LoL has found a general point of overtuned that a character is strong but not broken (and otherwise their frequent patching and harsh approach fixes it faster than smite)

Yeah but back then my main Artemis at least had a super long CC immunity :(
Now there's just so many characters with even more combos like that almost the entire team consist of endless CC combos. If my beads are down sure I ult one CC but there's probably 10 more coming up after. And don't get me started on AMC poor guy doesn't even have escape or CC immunity. A lot of the newer gods have crazy kits that are super flashy with a ton of stuff in them then you look at the older gods and their kits look like fine aged milk.

Look at Tsuku he's got a disarm, slow, ranged attacks that steal movement speed, stun, with a CC immune ultimate that teleports as well as built in high base speed. Susano? He's got... a pull, another pull and teleport. I'm just saying these new gods are getting crazy stuff. And I'm fine with it cause it's fun but the older gods could use a little help. So many of my favorite gods from back in the day just keep getting lower and lower on those tier list cause they're doodoo compared to the newer ones. (Except Ullr he's always been floating around good but hard to play and best hunter in game). Not saying they need complete reworks like Loki, they just need a little TLC.