The only Freya guide you'll need.

Hello! My name is Massfragg and I am an amatuer Smite player and soon will be casting high ranked games and tournaments. This is my first guide outlining the item and skill leveling that has worked will with me on Freya. Please read the entire guide and play for 3-5 games before you vote. Thank you very much and I hope you enjoy!

Please note that a video guide will be added later. I'm currently on a training deployment and I don't have the hardware needed to record at good quality. I'll be returning in November and I will post it then. Thank you for the patience.

Brisingamen's Blessing [P]- Freya's necklace converts 20% of her magical power to physical power, allowing her basic attacks to gain strength as her magical strength grows.

This passive made a lot of people want to build her with straight magic damage. While this does work on increasing her physical power, it doesn't increase her power enough to scale well into late game. I'll explain the math in the paragraph titled "So why build physical?!"

Irradiate [1]- Freya activates a buff that lasts for 5 seconds that makes her basic physical attacks do an additional 40/55/70/85/100 (+30% of your magical power) magical damage. The additional damage is halved while Pulse is active.

Cost: 60/65/70/75/80 mana

Cooldown: 13 sec

Pulse [2]- Freya activates a buff that lasts for 5 seconds that makes her basic attacks ranged that deal an additional 20/30/40/50/60 (+20% of your magical power) magical damage and slow by 25%, doing the same damage to nearby enemies. While Irradiate is active, the additional damage is halved while the slow and area damage are not applied.

Cost: 60/65/70/75/80 mana

Cooldown: 13 sec

Banish [3]- At her ground target location, Freya banishes her enemies into the air for 1/1.5/2/2.5/3 seconds. The enemies can't be hit or take action while in the air.

Cost: 75 mana

Cooldown: 19/18/17/16/15s

Valkyrie's Discretion [4]- Freya uses her Cloak of Feathers to fly above the battlefield where she fires down blasts of 120/150/180/210/240 (+40% of your magical power) magical damage up to 4 times while flying. Freya can't be hit during her ultimate and can right click to cancel it early.

Cost: 90/95/100/105/110 mana

Cooldown: 90 sec


The reason I chose to level her 2 first followed by her 1 is because of what lane she will most likely be in. She doesn't have the sustain and pushing ability to be a solo lane. She will be out pushed by other mids (Ao Kong, Agni, and Ra) and will be losing her tower between 5 to 10 minutes. So a side lane then? With the current "meta" strategy being used by high end teams (BLG, ESG, and BM) they have been putting a solo lane-able god in the left lane with a jungler type god. Seeing as she cannot solo lane against 1 god, 2 gods will be just as hard. This leaves right lane, the lane I have used her in and believe she should be in. This lane usually has a support style god, like Sobek, with great CC abilities. She needs to stand in the back and use her pulse to farm the lane, taking kills when her support can initiate.

I level her 1 next for two reasons. First, your team needs to get used to the idea of how long a god is CC'ed for with your banish. It's needed more as a way to escape a gank than it is used for team fights early game. So at level 12 or 13 when team fights are starting to happen more frequently, everyone knows that they will be coming down 1 second, and can time their abilities accordingly. Second reason is because it will increase the amount of damage your 2 does and with getting golden bow you still do a good amount of AOE damage.

Her banish is a great CC ability that could either be used to catch up to a fleeing god or used to keep that annoying Sobek out of a team fight for 3 seconds. During early game, as previously stated, her banish ability is great for escaping a gank as well as stopping that Anhur ult from killing a team mate. The main issue with this ability is knowing then people are going to level it so the team can line up their abilities to compliment yours.

This brings us to her ultimate ability. During this ability you're able to stay completely away from being hit, but not from taking damage. Make sure you understand this because if you are low life and hit by a bleed-like ability, i.e. Bastet's Razor Claws you will die. During this ability you're able to clear all slows on you and are able to fire 4 bolts for 240 (+40% Magic Power) damage. The target area isn't that big but can be fired in quick succession. I'll go ahead and state the obvious, it's harder to hit faster gods with this than slower gods, so the best time to use this ability is when they have low life and are tower hugging or while they're slowed by your teammates.

Here is the chapter you've all been waiting for. In this chapter I will hopefully show you why it's so much better to build her for physical damage.

My main reason is the way her pulse works. When activating her 2, you don't use an ability like Agni's Flame wave. This skill changes her basic attack, a melee attack, to a range attack for 5 seconds. She has 35 physical power starting off, zero magical power. This means that early game you're doing 35 damage in your basic attack on minions. Activating your 2 with no items means you'll be doing 55 damage to the first target you strike, and 20 to surrounding enemies. Starting with Executioner 2, you'll have 55 physical damage; using your 2 will do 75 physical damage to the first target struck and 20 to surrounding targets. Not too shabby right? Lets look at a popular start for her, Doom orb 2. Doom orb 2 gives 30 magic power. Again activating her 2 gives us her base physical damage, her 20 extra damage plus 20% of her magic power. 20% of 30 is 6. So her main target will be taking 61 damage, and the surrounding enemies will take 26 damage. Not as big of numbers on the main target, and only 6 more damage in AOE.

Lets look at her first ability, Irradiate. At level 2 when I get this ability it gives me 57 physical damage plus the 40 from the ability, giving me 97 damage at level 2! Going back to that same magic build to compare, I would be doing 37 (35 plus the 2 from the level) basic damage, plus the 40 from the ability and 30% of 30, 9, for a total of 86 damage. Not bad, but 9 damage shy of what I could be doing.

BUT WAIT YOU'RE FORGETTING HER PASSIVE!!!11!!!!ONE!1111!!

I'm getting there!

Her passive increases her physical damage by 20% of her magic power. So opening Doom Orb 2 will give me an extra 6 damage, narrowing the difference to just 3 damage. So what's the major difference at lvl 2?! Honestly, there isn't one. The difference starts to become much more evident at higher levels, once you start stacking critical damage increase and crit chance with Deathbringer, Golden Bow, and Warrior Tabi.

Well we've already shown the differences between the Executioner open and the Doom Orb open. In this section I would like to discuss and show evidence of what I picked and why I picked it.

Firstly, never upgrade to boots 3 until the ENTIRE build is complete. NO BOOTS 3?! BLASPHEMY! Alright lets look at the math! To upgrade from Warrior Tabi 2 to 3, it costs a whopping 815 gold. 815!! What could we buy for 815 gold then? Well next thing on our shopping list is Deathbringer. Interestingly enough, Deathbringer 1 costs 840 gold. So staying in lane for 1 more wave, and not buying boots 3 means we get our Deathbringer starter earlier! Lets look at the differences. Warrior Tabi 2 gives 20 power, 4% Crit chance, and 4% attack speed. Upgrading that to Warrior Tabi 3 gives an extra 10 power, 2 crit, and 2 attack speed. Deathbringer 1, on the other hand, gives us 15 physical power. So we don't have that extra 2 crit and attack speed. But we do get an extra 5 physical power. Not a lot, but lets look at what is happening at about this time for the enemy team. They're building physical protection to counter you and they're building up their damage. Well their physical protection means nothing to you because you've already finished your executioner. 3 attacks and you've lowered their protection by 60! If you've played Freya, you know it's quite easy to hit an enemy with your 2 once they're slowed. So now that we've gone through their armor we need to be doing as much damage as possible. That's where the extra 5 damage comes in. 5 Damage per attack, and the amount of attack speed that you've already gained, you should be doing (pending on your level) around 1.2 attacks per second. If you only hit them with your 2 for 5 seconds that's an extra 30 damage on top of your damage that you're already doing! Pretty sweet, huh?
Next, there are a couple alterations to this build depending on your team composition. Soul Eater is very situational. If you have another physical carry on your team and they have it, it's not worth getting 2 of, Devotion Gloves are comparable and it's quite easy to get stacks with pulse.

Next, why I chose Qin's Blades as opposed to Fatalis. Fatalis is a great item on her. The extra 10% attack speed on fatalis gives her an extra attack on her pulse. Then why Qin's? As a hybrid god, building physical, you need to get some more survivability. The 150 life helps with that. Second, fatalis doesn't give us any physical power! Qin's will give us an extra 30! Third, the cooldown reduction really isn't needed. By the time that you're done using your pulse, then your ult, your pulse is already off of cooldown or is about to be. Lastly, Qin's gives us a 30% chance to do 10% of an enemy's health in damage on basic attacks. Seeing that her pulse just changes our basic attack to a ranged one, IT STILL WORKS! So spamming your pulse and getting nearly 8 or 9 attacks in that 5 seconds means that 1 in 3.3 attacks gives us an extra 10% of their total life in damage. BOOM! Take that, you annoying, health stacking Ymir!

Lastly, my choice of Golden Bow. This will help us stack our crit chance, and thanks to Deathbringer we do an extra 50% crit damage. Not only the crit, but it's passive makes it perfectly made for Fraya's abilites! So my pulse does an extra 35% AOE damage, or 50% AOE damage when I'm going toe to toe with an ulting Ymir with my 1 activated? BOOYAH! If you ever get into the... wait for it... Fray... of it (yes, I went there), you're doing your damage with your pulse, with an AOE and slow, then an added AOE with Golden Bow.

As you can see all of these items cooperate with her abilities. And with her physical damage scaling so much faster than her magic damage, you can do some INSANE damage. I can tell you, from experience, I have, by myself, bursted down a Thor at full life trying to ult away. Yes, 2k damage in the time it took him to cast his ult. That is all due the crit chance, with both 1 and 2 skills activated.

Abilities

She is very open to stuns in this build. Because of the way she is built, she needs to be attacking to keep her health high. Either get beads or Aegis to counter this. I prefer beads because I can ult out or banish or just run away, rather than CC myself for 2 seconds allowing their CD's to be up. The next ability I really like is Girdle of Might. This is a non stacking steroid that amps up her physical and magical damage. This benefits us in 2 ways: increased auto attack damage, and increased bonus damage from her magic scaling. Getting this early could be the difference between getting a double kill in a lane and having both of them escape with little to no life. This also helps out your lane partner with damage and allows them to get an other ability like Creeping Curse or Heavenly Agility. Why don't I get those abilities, you may ask. It's because these are more of a support like ability. Besides, with her ult and banish you don't need to catch up or escape a god, so Heavenly Agility or Sprint are out of the picture. Creeping curse is more for a tank god, that way he can be the first in and slow the entire team from escaping your teams skills.

Still not convinced on Freya's physical ability? Want to try a more traditional build? Then this is the section for you.

First, start off with boots 2 and keep these boots until you've finished your build. It'll save you 580 gold for your next item; Spear of the Magus. This is a very powerful item for any magic scaling god and even after the price increase, is still worth it. After finishing your SotM, start on your Qin's Blades. The reasoning behind this choice is above.

You're forth item is situational, that is why I put in 2 different possibilities. If you're getting killed by carries, take Staff of Mana, if you're dying to casters, take Void Stone. SoM gives you some decent physical protection as well as increasing your mana pool and your physical damage. This will still give you a decent set of protection into mid game without losing too much damage. VS does the same, but boosts your magic damage.

To finish off this build I have Rod of Tahuti and Titan's Bane. RoT is a HUGE magic boost and you're going to need it because your damage is going to start falling off at this point. This will get you back on track with the other casters and physical carries. To make your pulse hits and irradiate hits go the extra mile, I threw in a Titan's Bane. This build will give you the amount of both physical penetration and magic penetration.

Again for items I suggest Beads or Aegis. My preference is Beads, but again this is situational. Girdle of Might really makes you and your team pack a punch and should be bought early to make up for your lack of power early in the laning phase. However, this item no longer stacks with other girdles. If someone on your team already has it, save yourself the trouble and buy Heavenly Agility. I tend to take this one more than Sprint because as a caster, you should never be alone outside the laning phase.

Why I didn't choose Warlock's Sash. Warlock's Sash is a great item.... for a mid. As we discussed earlier she wouldn't be as good as a mid as the other casters in the game. Having established that fact we're forced into a sideline. This means we have to compete with another player to get last hits. While it is do-able, I don't recommend it for this reason. Example time: Had a terrible cupid in lane with me, kept spamming her heart bomb to push the lane, then wondered why I was mad at her when I was doing no damage in the mid game... You obviously don't have that issue if playing with a friend but you will if they decide to build a stacking item as well.

Building her like this means you can't take a lot of damage. So lets look over how to kill off the enemy team while not dying yourself.

She is a great "poker". With her 2 activated, if anyone is trying to get close and initiate, you can easily keep them at bay. In a perfect engagement wait for the tank to initiate. YOU SHOULD NEVER BE THAT GUY INITIATING! Once they go in and blow their ults, run in and start poking away at the squishies with your 2. This keeps them from being able to run away as well. Once they get low, if they're not dead already, pop your ultimate and burst them down. You should be able to have picked up 1 or 2 kills by this point. The only people that should be left is their tank, their healer (because you can burst them down faster than they can heal so don't bother trying to kill a fed Hel until later), and maybe a carry. This is when your banish becomes very useful. Banish that damage dealer or healer that's left so your team can get situated around them. Once they fall they can blow them up and body block their escape. This leaves their tank left, assuming someone else on your team got at least 1 kill.

That's the perfect engagement. Lets discuss what to do when initiated on. First, if you're being focused, be sure to pop your ult to fly away. It's only down for 90 seconds, in the late game that's almost as fast as the respawn timer and you can still do damage while alive! If they're not focusing you and move on a teammate, you can get multiple people in your banish. It's hard to do, but possible. Once you get the damage dealer out of the fight, pop your 2 and start slowing the rest of the team that is chasing. You can do quite a bit of damage at this point and might be able to kill one of them off and even the fight out. If you don't get that kill, and you don't have people coming to help, run. It's better to stay alive than it is to try to force a bad fight and get you and your teammate dead in the process.

Early game, your banish is great for interrupting ganks. What's this? Bakasura jumped in and hit his Butcher's Blades? NOPE! Banish and run. He's still chasing? 2, and run while spamming VET VET VET. You really have the power to keep you and your lane partner alive.

As an example of what you can do I'll share my favorite Freya story with you. I was overextended in right lane very late in the game like a nub. I was jumped by Arachne, Anubis, and Artemis. I'm screwed right? NOPE! I started with my ult because I knew Anubis was going to wrap and ult and kill me in seconds. I was able to kill him with my ult, all 4 shots. I land and Banish Arachne to keep me from being silenced. I turn and activate my 2 right when Artemis hits her ult. I one shot the boar before it can jump to me and stun me. (TRU FAX) Activate my 1 as well for the extra damage and take her out before Arachne even gets out of my banish. She drops and we do the melee vs. melee dance. Going back and forth. She, for some reason, uses her devour at full life (norm queue...), I run to my creep wave. She gets off and my 2 is off cooldown and burst her down from there using my pulse and regaining all the life lost because of my soul eater. I don't have a screenshot, I was too happy and killing their phoenix to remember to, so take it as a fish story. The main point I'm trying to show off is the ability she has if you know how to play this build.

In summary, I would like to thank you for reading the entire build. Please feel free to ask questions or point out something I may have missed. I'll be sure to give you credit for any and all additions to this. As stated before, please play a few games with this build before rating or flaming it in the comments section. CONSTRUCTIVE criticism is greatly appreciated. "ZOMG WTF PHYSICAL FREYA IS TOTALLY USELESS YOU NUB" is not constructive. Again, I would like to point out that this build was the result of both me and my friend Koochbrah and I am in no way, shape, or form trying to take sole credit.

-MassFragg

Edit 1- Added a section about abilities
Edit 2- Added a magic build for you people that are not convinced! Also added the neat pictures for the skills! Screen shots to come soon of the physical damage wrecked!