How To NOT SUCK With Horus!

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.

We will begin with his abilities. We'll also talk about combos, and his strengths and weaknesses in that regard, as well as his leveling order and his item choices.

Resolute

Going into the abilities, the first one that we have is of course the passive. That is 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.

So overall it's a survivability passive that helps you in fights in various ways by taking less damage and being less controlled by the enemy team, but also helps you once you get out of the fight. 3 seconds is not too long; sometimes you can even get that while in a fight. The heal here isn't massive, but as Horus also has another heal, that's not really a problem.

Updraft

His first ability is 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.

The damage of the first part is relatively high, and the damage of the second part is just a basic attack with a little bit of additional damage, but the second part is amplified if you hit an enemy while they are knocked up, so that way they can take bonus damage. Please note that 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.

Additionally, the gust also slows by 25%. The cooldown starts at 16 seconds and scales down to 14 seconds.

Fracture

The second ability is 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.

You primarily want to try and hit gods with this; you rarely will use this purely for clear. You can also re-aim the second part of the ability, so you don't have to hit the same target with the cleave that reduces protections, so you could switch from one target to the other or use the second part on a wave for example.

Protector's Surge

The third ability is 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!

Horus' ultimate is 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.

What also happens is that while you choose this teleport area, allies can walk into a circle area around you, and if they stand in this area when the channel is completed, then they will teleport with you. When you and maybe your allies drop down or teleport to the other place, you deal 150-550 damage plus 80% physical power scaling and you and your allies get a shield that is 160-480 depending on the rank. If you land on an ally, they will also get the shield. The ability also cannot be interrupted and has various interesting interactions with other abilities and has a cooldown of 100 seconds.

Now that we know what the abilities do, let's talk about the leveling order. In most situations, you will probably level the 1 first simply because it reduces the cooldown and it is your main clearing tool and it gets a little bit of extra damage that way as well.

That said, Horus is incredibly flexible with what ability you level first. You can level the 1, 2 or 3 and they all have a purpose in that regard. The 1 is primarily a clearing tool and it still allows for good aggression. If you're for example supporting, and your ADC has super good clear and you think you don't need much of that, then not leveling the 1 is okay too. You're usually just gonna use it once per wave then, and most of the damage comes from your basic attack on the second part anyways, so for that increasing the rank doesn't do that much. It's an increase from 14 damage to 50 at max rank, so just 36 extra damage across 5 ranks.

On the other hand if you level the 2, then you get 25 damage per rank on the first part, but an additional 35 damage per rank on the second part, and the protection reduction gets increased from 10-30. So if you want to play hyper aggressive in lane, then you can consider leveling the 2 and just trying to hit that as often as possible, reduce the enemy protections (especially in early levels), and get a lot of damage off that way on enemy gods.

Or you can say you want to do the opposite and you want to play your lane very safe and prevent the enemy from clearing effectively, and you level the 3. In that case, you will have more healing at any point and you will have protections for you and your allies.

Last but not least, leveling the ult can absolutely be worth it. Not so much for the damage, though that's still a nice bonus, but primarily for the big shield your allies will get. The amount of damage that you can soak up if you max that out is insane. You can get beyond 2000 extra shielding if your full team was to teleport.

So anything goes here really. I think what we primarily see in terms of leveling order is something like the 1 and the ult maxed first, and then the 3 afterwards, and then the 2, but really it depends completely on the game and on your playstyle.

When it comes to general ability usage, Horus' main combo is his 2 and 1. You use the 2 first to lock the enemy down and reduce the protections and then you go directly into the 1 to knock them up and get the extra damage on your 1's basic attack.

The problem is this is also very predictable and easily countered by 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.



The 2 overall is very easy to read as well. It's something the enemy expects; they expect you to walk up and dash into them, so enemies will often try to prevent that in one way or another, and you have to bait accordingly. If the enemy has an escape that can get them out quickly, then you might have to try and walk up to them a few times and maybe just use the 1 to see if you can bait anything with that before you can even use the 2 and then set up for your allies that way.

When it comes to the 3, I think that's the most interesting ability when it comes to playing around the enemy. You can utilize it to dash to your allies as well as minions and in that regard it can be an escape in many ways and it can even be chained with the 2 for a long escape range. But it can also be used to engage. If for example your jungler is going into a fight and he's flanking from the side, you can just use the 3 right on them. Maybe you're wasting a little bit of the heal but in return you will give them a protection increase as well for the early engage which can be worth more and maybe the heal is up by the end of the fight anyways, and it means you can completely reposition yourself to wherever your jungler is. Maybe like a mini Athena ult essentially. And that means you can set up your 2-1 combo from there much, much easier.

You have to keep in mind that 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.

For the ult, keep in mind that you are not safe while ulting. You are still on the ground, you can still be hit and that can become a problem. There are ways around that though (we'll talk about that in a bit). Also at the same time, keep in mind that the ult windup is not as bad as some people think. Some people think you will never get out by ulting in the middle of a fight and that is simply not true. There are situations where you're tanky enough and the ADC isn't there where you might be able to simply get away with the ult. If you have nothing else up, you have nothing else to do for your team, then why not ult. It's the same as an 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.

It's also not bad to aggressively ult on your own sometimes. I wouldn't always wait for teammates. Sometimes the knock-up as a setup is all that you need for your team to play off that and it's better than constantly holding onto the ult and hoping for the super big play to happen that never happens and you could've used your ult 3 times in the meantime.

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.

You would typically obviously go 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.

After that, you want to build 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.

At this point it becomes more flexible, more typical support choices. A few things I want to highlight are especially 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.

It's also worth mentioning that, different from any other supports, he can build 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.

Overall, whichever items you choose towards the later slots, I would recommend getting a little bit of cooldown reduction in there, because I think Horus is a god that simply works very well with cooldown reduction, as he only really has his one combo and a team fight and you want to use the ult as often as possible. So you want to have your cooldowns down as often as possible.


Before we get to some overarching items, let's look at the solo lane side of things as well. 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.

Then you can go into 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.

After that, 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.

I think 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.

Other items that are worth mentioning in one way or another is 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.

And then there's 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.


When it comes to relics, the main options here are obvious. 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.

Then we have 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.

Horus is also generally somewhat weak to any form of crippling ability because he has two dashes and relies on that very much. Also, I haven't seen it yet, but I think 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.

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!