[ARENA] Mercury: How to be the #TOP1 SMITE BOXER on Arena

ALERT: THIS IS AN ARENA GUIDE ONLY!

Hi. My name is Luan, im from Brazil and i play smite since it was playable on Hi-Rez. I stoped and came back a few times, but right now im only playing arenas because of my college studies. As a brazillian speaker, forgive me if i made any coherence mistake

(oh, and im a layman on html and programming languages, sry for that too...!)

So, first of all, in respect of this community and the effort to keep with good contents, allow me to present a guide without statistics. The purpose of making this guide is precisely because I think I found gold with several characters especificaly in this mode. I'm playing so much arena that I ended up catching the dynamics, the relationship between time and money and the pressure. I plan to post more Arena guides, focusing on burst damages since the first second of the game. So it wasn't by chance, it was a lot of testing, but unfortunately, due to the time I need to dedicate to things in life, I couldn't write down any numbers. The tests gave me a lot of understanding of how the mode works, its duration, its dynamics, the time of teamfights, therefore the order of items that need to be done.

I could see that we don't have a lot of time and money to do things, so with Mercury I didn't find the Glyphs very important other than the Envenomed Deathbringer, but I preferred to leave it for last, after Death's Temper. About Death's Temper, leave it for the final levels, if not 20 (buying Death's Coils on lvl 19~20). It is going to be the last thing before Envenomed Deathbringer. So probably you wont have time to buy Envenomed Deathbringer, because you wont even have time to finish Death's Temper or even Bloodforge

~ I consider 7-9 minutes to be half a game. And at this stage, 3 items need to be done, or at least 2 finishing the third.

~ The game can end on the 4th item.

~ The game is fast, it needs effectiveness since the beginning so we can have the ascension and strong punches.

PROS

High damage due to critical, therefore quick checkout to escape soon

When completing Dominance, high damage to tanks

At the end of the game you can mend from one kill to another before fleeing

Any crowd control cancels you

Too much escape does not cooperate

CC and escape is the perfect combo for an extreme threat

I tested a lot of attack speed along with movement, only movement, only attack speed, crit with movement, only crit, and so on. But the focus here is to organize the items in order to keep up with the rythm of the game and its duration.


The mixture I found the best DPS was this, mixing critical with penetration, and using Hastened Katana as it nullifies the basic attack movement penalty and offering us more (flow maybe? idk the word). Wind Demon is the third item, offering buffs and crti pen (10% crit penetration, 10% movement speed and 10% attack speed when crit), without adding the bonus of your second skill. The items we tend to consider priority within a build during an arena match are 4. From 4 to 6, this is the default. We won't always end up doing Death's Temper or even Bloodforge. So I chose items that take into account the first 4 in their respective priority orders.

Deathbringer is the best start, considering 1350 gold on Short Sword, providing 25 physical power and allowing you to do the speed buff for the first second of the game alone without the help of the team (thats not 'awesome', but its a matter of advantage and surprising the adversary, sometimes you end up getting the 'first blood' because you finished the monsteers faster than the opponent). After completing Deathbringer, 2:30~4:00 minutes have passed. 2 or 3 team fights happened, the next one will be imminent. Critical is an excellent start. Always consider that you are not alone, the assassin will always be one more obstacle, coming from behind or around corners. The second item will be the Katana, as it nullifies the basic attack movement penalty. Wind Demon providing a buff from critical hits, movement speed and attack speed. The fourth item would be one of the lasts, if we think about the duration of the game. So we will consider the first 3 items in choosing this one. We have a lot of critical damage, 30% attack speed, without adding the buff of the second skill. Dominance would be the item, giving us 30% extra penetration from our basic hits. Mercury just needs it now, the crit already gave us a little damage, we are now growing by 30% penetration and 55 physical power (which would be one of the first options before the massive damage on a mage perhaps). And then the massive damage. The fifth item is the damage item, it has to have high physical power. Therefore, I chose the 75 power ones. I picked Bloodforge that offer movement speed and shield when knocking out an enemy, considering that we're going to kill a lot with this build. Death's Temper is the 6th item of the build, and it is going to be finished in the last moments of the match, when the ambient sound increases and the game is about to end.

Considering that we always start with the first 3 levels, I always put it in the 3 first skills.
His third skill doesn't scale the damage much, and it's not meant to. Until the end of the game, it will only be an escape or a start for a possible isolated prey.
Your first skill is the only one that deals damage, but its not effective considering your damage is on your fists. So focus on the second skill, the one that gives you movement and attack speed.

You will almost 99% of the time start from behind or from the sides of your opponent. So you can leave the third skill for a possible escape when you knock down somebody.

If the pressure is by your side, try to use your third as a starter. You can throw the isolated pray to your team by turning your camera to them. Remember that: your escape also grabs and throws someone!

His passive that converts movement speed to damage does not scale as much as mana for Kukulkan. Even using a lot of movement items, we didn't get the damage that this build offers, because the movement items don't offer as much physical power or critical, being more focused on attack speed or penetration.

So i could think of 3 types of items to assemble the build, with the exception of movement speed:

critical damage
damage converted by mana
attack speed