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Guardian's Blessing
Talaria Boots
Reinforced Greaves
Gauntlet of Thebes
Sovereignty
Oni Hunter's Garb
Spirit Robe
Void Shield
Mantle of Discord
Breastplate of Regrowth
Midgardian Mail
Shogun's Kusari
Spectral Armor
Hide of the Nemean Lion
Magi's Cloak
Genji's Guard
Talisman of Energy
Pestilence
Heavenly Wings
Magic Shell
Horrific Emblem
Shield of Thorns
Belt of Frenzy
Blink Rune
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B
A
X
Today, we are talking about 
Horus. More specifically, a Horus guide. Now I started with a 
Set guide a while ago that you can check out as well, but I wanted to cover Horus too, even though overall, I think Horus is a fair bit easier. As of now, Horus is a more accessible god for most players though so I think this is going to be interesting anyways.
If you'd like to watch a video version of my guide, you can click the video below. Be sure to check out my channel and subscribe for more Smite guides as well.
Resolute
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Resolute, which gives you a sort of damage counter. Every time you are damaged by an enemy god (including any DoTs as well) you will get a stack. You can get up to 10 stacks, and what these stacks do is they increase your protections by 1.5 per stack (so up to 15), and they increase your crowd control reduction (not cooldown reduction), for example you'll be stunned for a shorter duration, and this goes up by 1.5 per stack as well, up to 15%. When these stacks run out (after 3 seconds), you will get healed. The heal here is 2 + 0.75 per level, meaning at level one you will be healed for 27.5 (or 27 I think it's rounded down in Smite) and up to 170 at level 20 at max stacks.|
Updraft
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Updraft. Updraft is a knockup in a very small radius around Horus -- you can usually hit 3 minions in a wave with that and not the full wave -- and it's followed by an extended basic attack, which will hit all enemies in a line. It's essentially no different from any line ability only that it counts as a basic attack and has certain interactions with basic attacks.
Runeforged Hammer does not increase the damage any further, as Runeforged Hammer does not work for knockups, so it's not an additional damage amplifier here. The damage increase is 1.5 times damage for the basic attack.|
Fracture
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Fracture, a short dash that stuns any targets it hits. It doesn't say so in the description, but it also stuns minions you go through, and while doing so deals damage. If you hit a god with this ability (during the dash) then Horus will stop at that point and will stun this god. That also leads to the attack transitioning into a secondary attack, and this is a cleave attack in front of Horus that deals extra damage as well and reduces the enemy protections by 10-30 depending on the rank. This goes for all protections. The stun lasts for 1.25 seconds and in order to hit it, you have to be relatively close to the enemy beforehand. It's shorter than a normal dash would be.|
Protector's Surge
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Protector's Surge. It's a lock-on dash/leap that allows Horus to dash either to allied gods or allied minions. When the dash is complete, then an AoE healing occurs right around Horus and that ally. This healing goes up from 50-250 with only 10% physical power scaling though, and it also gives the allies (even minions) a protection buff of 10-30 (depending on the rank) for three seconds. Both his second and third ability have a 16 second cooldown that doesn't scale down.|
To The Skies!
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To The Skies!. Horus starts channeling on the ground and he stays on the ground during this ability, but a ghost version of him flies to the sky. You can control that ghost, similar to for example to 
Thanatos in his ultimate, and choose a landing location. Once you've chosen a landing location, Horus starts channeling and you will see his model lean forward for two seconds, and then he teleports to the location you have chosen.
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| 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
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| 2 | 1 |
Purification Beads, and if they use Beads at any point of the combo, it's basically done. So that's worth keeping in mind, but then again you don't really have that many other options when it comes to your engages, because if you use the 1 before the 2, then you simply won't have the protection reduction, which is unfortunate and reduces your damage output quite a lot.
Athena ult essentially. And that means you can set up your 2-1 combo from there much, much easier.
Awilix is able to counter Horus' 3, she's able to pull that, but on the other hand it's a very quick dash, so I wouldn't worry about it too much in most situations. Also keep in mind with the 3 that it can heal and shield the waves, meaning that if an enemy is trying to clear very quickly, you can prevent that by keeping the health of the wave up or heal and shield them before they go into tower range, and that can be very very useful in certain matchups, or in high pressure matchups especially. Athena ulting while already being in the fight after using a whole combo. You can maybe get some benefits from your team; maybe somebody will jump into your ult just to get some extra protections or use the knockup as setup. Maybe you can start channeling and then you realize, "Okay, I'm in the air already and my team is kinda getting beat down and if I fly out and over there now, I can bring them all to safety." All of those options are there and you should keep them in mind.Now as for builds, obviously it depends a little bit on where you play him -- if you play him in solo or in support. Let's start with the support here.
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Guardian's Blessing and then you'd either mostly go into Talaria Boots or Reinforced Greaves. This depends a little bit on your playstyle and obviously if you have to the super high mobility from his kit already you don't necessarily need 
Traveler's Shoes, at the same time it kind of ups your mobility even more and it allows you to close the distance to use your 2 more often, which I very much like. Reinforced Greaves is nice against DoT teams that do a lot of damage over time, as it also works very well in combination with the passive. You just get a lot of extra defenses when the enemy does damage over time. Gauntlet of Thebes. There's really no reason not to with Horus, especially because you can't build 
Stone of Binding on a physical god. You can build your typical defense items after that. You can build a Sovereignty, or Oni Hunter's Garb -- that's really up to you. Mantle of Discord because what you can do with it is you can ult out of fights much safer. If you get attacked while you have Mantle of Discord and you're currently ulting away, then enemies around you will simply be stunned for a second and that means usually you will get away. So this is an excellent item for Horus at later stages of the game in any build really. Void Shield. That stacks very nicely with his own protection reduction. It means physical gods will deal a lot of damage to the enemies that way. Something worth keeping in mind for certain situations.|
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| Shield of Regrowth |
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Warrior's Blessing is going to be a start for some extra survivability, even though he already has a lot of that, I would basically almost always go with Talaria Boots because then you don't have to go into Teleport. And Horus spending a slot on Teleport, I feel it's a bit of wasted potential.
Gladiator's Shield or 
Berserker's Shield. With Gladiator's Shield, you only have two ways to proc it regularly to the 1 and 2 but at the same time, it's kind of a nice item with the cooldown reduction and a little bit more protection. On the other hand, with Berserker's Shield, you can proc it on the full wave. It counts as an AoE, but it will proc on every single minion with the 1, so that's a lot of extra sustain as well. The question in that case is do you need extra sustain because you already have a heal? You can also go directly into 
Breastplate of Valor if you just wanted to have that extra CDR. A lot of survivability that way too, against a physical matchup.
Blackthorn Hammer I think is generally a good choice too. It gives you a lot of cooldown reduction and a lot of health. We'll get to another option there in a bit.
Hide of the Urchin is also great for Horus, it just means he's a lot more beefy, a lot more annoying in team fights and it opens up some more options for utility later in the game. If you're against a magical solo, which hardly ever happens at the moment, but when it happens, you are very free to build either 
Runic Shield for a little bit more aggression, and 
Ancile if you value the CDR more, or you have a lane opponent that's easily silenced, that can be very frustrating for them. And then you also obviously have the choice of Pestilence if the enemy has a lot of healing as well.
Golden Blade because it gives him insanely fast clear with the 1 (something I'm not sure if it will stay in the game, but for now that's the case), but it's kind of hard to fit into a build. Then there is Shield of Regrowth, which simply gives you incredible amounts of movement speed, both through your passive as well as through your 3.
Bumba's Mask. I've talked about this a lot lately, but obviously Horus is one of those gods that can make pretty good use of it through his already high mobility, through benefitting from CDR and through just being more of a general nuisance, and also movement speed increases his speed flying around in the ultimate.|
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Heavenly Wings, Magic Shell, Horrific Emblem, you know them. Anything that helps the team in terms of AoE effects, but another relic that I really want to point out here is Shield of Thorns, because if you use Thorns it makes it a lot more punishing for the enemy team to try and attack you while you're ulting away, or in other situations it gives you more of a team fight impact when your abilities are down. Blink Rune as a potential engage option which I would not really recommend because I think with Horus, while it's very nice to setup his 2-1 combo, he simply doesn't have much impact in terms of CC, as for example a 
Geb would have. So more of a niche case for him. That said, it has been used in the SPL at this point, so some players have a clear preference for it. Also Meditation Cloak obviously is a good item but for Horus it's kind of worse than Magic Shell because it makes him so easy to counter him with anti-healing. Anti-healing is very prominent at the moment anyways.
Eset' ult should be very scary against his ultimate if you actually land on some enemies with your ult, but Eset expects you and drops an ult there, then that can turn around a fight very quickly because it can put a lot of damage on your team after you just put them all in one place. So that's worth keeping in mind as well.
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So that's it for this Horus guide. I hope this was interesting / insightful / gave you an overview of Horus. If you want to see more of my content, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. See you in my next guide, DukeSloth out! |
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I only have 2 small observations to make regarding your write-up:
1. I think you should list/consider
2. On the Support Builds section of your guide, you mentioned
Your write-up is solid, your item choices are covering pretty much all scenarios and the presentation is good. I’m simultaneously happy for having a high-level guide for
I hope that’s the first of many contributions you bring to the site, so we can keep on improving our content and change the mind of the ones that see SmiteFire as a bad/troll place to discuss and post/find builds.
Edit: I almost forgot, but if you want to go more in-depth for the Solo build you could also consider
Relic Dagger: Good call, added!
Blackthorn: I don't really wanna encourage that. In the vast majority of situations, Spirit Robe gives roughly the same EHP, same CDR and various other stats that are more beneficial for sups for a similar price. It has its place for super high aggression supports, but if you're deep enough into that playstyle to know this, you're not in a situation where you'd still care much for guides on that god. For most players and playstyles, Blackthorn is probably not the best bet.
Traveler's: Fixed!
Don't worry, there are plenty of other gods that can definitely still make use of fresh guides from what I've heard! ;D
Yep, so far the idea is to release future guides on Smitefire alongside my YouTube with PsiGuard doing the bulk of the writing work for me - and hopefully improve Smitefire's rep in the process as well as getting a few new faces on here.
Guardian's Blessing: Hmm. I'm gonna think about that one a little more. Yes, it's possible and it has been done, but even one more passive solos, Warrior's Blessing is becoming increasingly more popular. Horus has a really easy way to proc Warrior's as well for extra sustain, so taking that away might be a fairly large downside for him.
I've always felt that it's much easier, once created, to keep a written build/guide like this updated, than to create a whole new video. Even one patch can significantly change how you might build a specific God.
Really hope you're going to continue to participate on SF. Your presence is appreciated, Duke.
If you have the time, I'd like to see a guide on
So in the near future, the guides that will mostly pop up first are those for recently released gods or ones that I just revisited to release them in tandem with the video.
As such, I can't say when there could be a written version for an Arthur combo guide as I already made like.. 3 different guides for him at this point. You can find a video version here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYpCfjWOnPw) for now!