Season 3 PTS Patch Notes | January 21st, 2016

I love that idea. It should only be applied to relics like Purification which currently have no progression. Some are fine as-is, like Frenzy or Shell, because they affect a percentage of your existing damage/protection. But, as a potential counter to the deadliest ults/pulls, automatic progression of Purification would be nice...say, 150 seconds at level 1, 120 when you hit level 12, 90 when you hit level 20...something like that.

As for the items, well, I'm excited to try new builds for some gods. I really like the fact that Sovereignty/ Heartward Amulet don't provide crossing protections (e.g. physical for you, magical for teammates), as that's a definite positive for supports in duo, or counter-building lopsided compositions in other modes.

For Assault, I'm concerned about the health+MP5 split from protections... Stone of Gaia was great when you didn't have a healer, and now with just health/regen...and I'm also concerned that Hide of the Urchin is going to take precedence over other protection items because of its good balance + health + mana...it throws off a lot of my bruiser/tanky warrior builds.

Just have to see how well they really work...and I assume we'll see some adjustments by the time S3 officially is released.

I take it back, Season 3 is going to suck and the Smite Team are doing **** all to make the first patch any good. First impressions are everything, and so far these are not good and I'm sue the rest of Season 3 is going to blow like the beginning of Season 2.

Whats so bad about the S3? Seems like many people are enjoying it so far.. Kinda.
is it just the Conquest?

It's mostly the balancing, or more like lack of. The recent patch notes are so incredibly stupid it makes me want to quit the game. They nerf gods who didn't need a nerf like Ares and they gave Sol her slow on her 2, also the item balancing is stupid as well. I'm not much of a jungler, but they removed speed buffs from the game because Mercury was able to abuse the hell of of them plus they wanted to remove early aggressive play so no invading even though THEY REMADE THE CAMPS FOR THAT REASON.

Hi-Rez need to pull their heads out of the ***es for the last time before people start dropping this game and move on to some other game developer that gives a **** and want to make their game fun.

Sounds like this is just a problem for Conquest mains. I thought Sol always had a slow on that massive radius move of hers. Maybe I should relook into this s3 stuff. Everyones all hyped about it and then it got me hyped.
Hopefully joust is amazing

Phase 2 Round 2 Patch Notes

Slow on Sol's 2 was removed in phase 1 of PTS. People complained it didn't address the problem of her 3 so they add the slow back and nerf the 2 in a different way not proc'ing poly or demonic. ay lmao

What they are patching are countering their previous claims basically. I personally liked that Sol had no slow, cause she didnt really need it, it was an extra thing that everyone hated. Now they take away that it counts as a basic and added back in the slow. Im personally against it, cause even though the poly effects are gone, what really made the ability annoying was her slow. Its like a guaranteed hit for both procs of her two.

They remade camps for invasions, yet they remove speed for no early aggressive play? Now the elementals are just...there. And what happens to junglers speed some desperately need?

They nerf Ares cause of beads cdr, but they could just buff the beads or make it progress over time. And what about Athena? Or any other gods with cc? You cant just nerf one and leave out the others if you plan to leave beads like that.

Only thing I really like is the Bull King only affecting one tower and giving it more health. The extra exp and gold from camps is nice too but still, no speed. (Also RIP Winged Blade)

I personally never built it for cooldown anyways. I like the Crowd Control redictions since CC is strong in this game. I like it on my end. I still think it will be good.

So far (for me at least) analysis of the good & bad in Season 3:
*Note: this is not a complete list because I'm probably forgetting many things rn*

Good:

• New Joust map, because it's gorgeous (duh).
• New Chang'e Mastery Skins (duh).
• Hades is now a mage (duh).
• Removal of purple buff. ADC's never really needed this extra power in the early game and it helped certain hunters more than others leading to weird balancing. Having it gone means that hunters that have ways to increase their attack speed become more valued (like the rarely seen Ah Muzen Cab and Artemis). The movement of the back camps is also kind of nice.
• Changes to lifesteal (can no longer heal more than damage dealt on killing blow), small but nice change.
• Highlighting options and unified CC images. Basically just nice changes.
• Attempts to reduce the need for beads. I'll cover why this went wrong, but the intent was good.
• Attempts to reduce bloat items (ie: items that do everything for you). This leads to less stale building giving itemization a more dynamic feel. Did they do it right? Not really! But their intention was good.
• First round of buffs and nerfs: overall good, but there definitely needs to be more balancing in the near future.

Bad:

• There are still bloat items like Sovereignty and Heartward Amulet. These items were "nerfed" to give one type of protections aura, which is a nerf, but it doesn't make them any less mandatory. Especially with protections being less readily available to most classes now, these items are pretty much required in every support build locking in 2/6 items, and one of the rest still has to be some form of shoes.
• The way they approached nerfing CC. This was done HORRIBLY. The overall strategy was this: let's nerf Greater Purification and give lots of items CC reduction. Except that doesn't work on SO many forms of CC (eg: Nox's channeled CC isn't affected, any knockups or pulls like Tyr's Fearless, Sobek's Charge Prey, Ares' No Escape, aren't affected, CC in an AOE isn't affected (think Poseidon's Whirlpool), basically most CC in the game that you would normally use Greater Purification to escape, isn't affected. There's a list of every form not affected here). To nerf CC, you need to
  1. nerf these abilities and beads all individually or
  2. nerf the way these abilities are applied instantaneously
  One way to help some CC being applied unavoidably (like Ares with blink) is to get rid of blink as an active (or "relic" whatever...). It offers very little counterplay outside of using Greater Purification and it would require Ares to use his positioning to utilize this ability, rather than a button press, allowing for more counterplay. If Ares and other gods need a buff in lieu of this change, then so be it, but take into account that beads would already have been nerfed in this scenario leaving gods that normally use blink (ie: gods with strong CC) in a pretty good spot.
• Unbalanced items. This comes at the beginning of any new season, but some of these items are just stupidly unbalanced. Just gotta wait out the inevitable nerfs.
• Speed buff changes. They encouraged invades.. but then took away what you normally invade. On top of that, placing the speed buff around fire giant leads to spectacularly bad gameplay. You either have to get your jungler to get it the second it's up since the other jungler will take it, forcing them to access a rather far away part of the map from where their route normally roams for ganks, or forces the solo laners to duke it out over speed buffs at these intervals. On top of that, it makes jungling a less accessible role for newer players, guaranteeing that the more experienced jungler will always be going faster than them, getting more ganks and experience and forcing newer junglers to assume that they're terrible at the role. This pushes people who would normally enjoy jungling the most as their role in conquest away from the gametype entirely, which is the opposite, the EXACT OPPOSITE, of what HiRez wants.
• Relics. The old active system was well thought out, and even if it needed some additional balancing, it made sense as a whole. Relics, as of right now, don't make sense. I do agree that having 90% of the playerbase not utilizing an aspect of the game needs fixing, from a developer standpoint. However, this implementation feels wrong. The biggest issue is the power spike at level 12 right now. If a player gets ahead a couple levels, suddenly they have this super potent second active on top of their stat and gold advantage. Combined with adding in items like Doom Orb back again and luxury items that are ridiculously potent, snowballing is once again rearing its ugly head as a huge issue in smite.

Hopefully most of these changes will be resolved once we're a few weeks into the season, but until then they remain the most problematic parts of Season 3 for me as of right now. That's not to say I'm not still hyped for the new season though, the only time I ever didn't enjoy smite was the hunter-guardian meta (because **** that meta). Anything to add or disagree with, feel free to respond too :]

IMO the way they should have made relics is: free with tier 1 at lvl 1 tier 2 at 10-11 and tier 3 at 20. Even if they kinda copy dawngate with that I'm fine with it as a tier difference is a weaker powerspike then an extra active.