The Biggest Patch to Smite in Years was Far Too Late
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- čas přidán 20. 08. 2024
- Lots of fun making this video, any love to the video would be appreciated.
If you disagree with my takes, let me know!
The biggest help you can possibly give me is about the editing. Was anything jarring? What could I do a lot better? What was the audio like? I'm still very much on my rocky training arc with it.
twig yap sesh, havent started watching yet but already know its goated
I've been a Masters Conquest player for a while and peaked in GM in Duel a few seasons ago, but I now play mostly non-Conquest modes with friends for fun. This revert has completely, unfortunately, ruined SMITE for us. For players who aren't as good at the game, this revert makes the game incredibly punishing and less fun -- for people who just want to fight and have fun, you can now get blown up in half a second from some random CC that you weren't thinking about. This does, of course, reward smart gameplay, and allows for technically more skill expression because the smallest outplay can produce big results, but ultimately I've already seen a few of my long-term (I'm talking 6+ years) SMITE friends quit the game because now it's essentially just blow up or get blown up.
My experience was the game got incredibly more snowbally, and the team who gets a gold lead in the first 3 minutes wins almost every time.
they redice hp , but all the op balance changes still in the game. conquest is now all bout burst and sustain characters really
I basically agree with most of what you said, but I think the skill expression argument goes both ways and is pretty meaningless to bring up. You get punished more for whiffing an important ability, being out of position or taking a fight you shouldn't which sure is skill, but you also have to land fewer skillshots, can work with your team much less, get punished more for bad matchups, don't have to worry about enemy CDs nearly as much, etc.
I agree with this. my friend group was a lot less skilled than me and another buddy and the revert completely killed the game for our group. The only players this patch was good for was the ranked gm players that want speedy 20-0 stomp, and TikTok clip streamers. And apparently anyone who disagrees is a “shitter” even tho I have a 60% win rate which to me is pretty good for a casual player. The fact that some of us got steam rolled by this revert without hardly any discussion is kinda upsetting. No middle ground just a full on revert.
@@Dualities Not trying to shut you down, but, what were all the OP balance changes? All items got nerfed in 10.6, and sure, some base damage numbers went up to compensate, like Mulan, but those are few are far between. After 9.5, there have been more nerfs that buffs, and kill pressure slowly declined, even after 9.5 initially kicking kill pressure all the way down. I know I'm biased because I main late-game characters, but it was really unmotivating to play the game and tickling my opponents for 80 damage per ability at level 3, while they had 800 to 900 health minimum. I get that my character is meant to feel bad early, but that's a pretty pathetic number. I enjoy doing more in the early game and actually being able to get a lead against teams that I outskill, something that was incredibly hard to do before.
Maybe it's just me, but I play all modes in Smite when I play, and I like conquest being slower paced and strategic. Pretty much every other mode is explicitly made to be fast paced and with constant fighting anyway so it's nice to have contrast.
Theres still a good number of things im kinda meh on balance wise, but games where people are killable on both sides is waaaay more fun.
Personally i have 2 major thoughts about it all, whereas i think 9.5 at the time was good because that map for season 9 and the number of macro things you needed to think about and try to work with your team to kill made you need health and the confidence that you arent immediately dead for trying to play an objective. We lost a TOOOON of macro decisions, made balancing changes that made tons of characters who kits were "yea im not THAT tanky but i do a bit more damage to compensate" were just completely useless. In a game with less macro (no scorps, no obelisk, no flowers, no catapult), you need/want kills or at least reasonable poke to pull an obj. But so many characters lost their ability to threaten when everyone gained so much hp and prots, especially characters who arent safe themselves. So now the revert is good and people dying is good.
My followup to this, is really that the perfect smite is probably inbetween current stats and 9.5 stats somewhere imo. People should be punished for positioning and playing poorly and all of that for sure, but there are plenty of kits that are absolutely ridiculous and dont need to fully endanger themselves or hit every ability in their combos to get kills, which in turn makes the game worse for some characters just as 9.5 itself made the game worse for some characters.
The 'fix' isnt worth doing because really every single god should probably get a look over of their stats and gameplay and adjusted a certain percentage, but smite has never really had the team that would require, especially now with smite 2 being a big focus.
Hi rez needs to decide what they want smite 2 to be out the gate AND decide if they are going to continue making sweeping changes to the game every season or so completely changing the balance and way the game is played at the CORE of it all.
And conquest should ALWAYS come first imo, the other modes will adjust and have their own metas no matter the changes, theyll be fine in due time (because if something is incredibly broken in say joust, its probably broken in conquest too, maybe not to the same degree but at least a little bit)
I want to also add that by the end of season 9 I thought smite conquest was the most balanced I had ever seen it, it was super fun IMO, and the amount of different gods you could choose anywhere (except adc where we had 3 run rampant for too long imo) was incredible. I don't really remember other metas where jungle picks had everyone as an option, from Osiris to he bo to Kali to cama all in one session of games (amateur scrims at the time for me) with no issues. I argued for a loooong time about it and hell even at worlds you could see it was fine. Variety solod SOT as Mulan right? Like by the end of the season it was quite good. It took time to get there, but man season 9 by the end was so sick imo.
yeah cause pre this revert it was a farming simulator if they went gold you go different objective it was most optimal playstyle. and games would go almost an hour all the time. also 4 v 5s were almost impossible. now you wanna fight objectives cause if they lose too much hp doing them you just wipe their team. and win game. this patch is also starting to weed out the bad players as they getting pushed down in ranked. i still run across them but for most part my ranks been going up cause i get decent matches where if i lose i don't feel like it was teams fault and there was something I should work on.
Thank you so much for doing this
This implication that conquest is less strategic seems so off-base to me. In plat/diamond I notice more strategy in ranked now than pre-11.6. There was so little actually happening in most games it didnt feel like much of anything mattered until you got to 30 minutes and then the game descended into an Arena match around fire giant to determine the winner. The game feels more strategic now because people are actually picking fights around early/mid game objectives and using leads to push for more advantages.
If you want a slower paced game with more strategy just play an actual MOBA that doesn't baby you with gold and xp. Smite has very little that scales post full build so the game effectively turns into arena around 35min with the team getting the wipe usually deciding things. 9.5 pushed the game in a direction that it wasn't actually built for, games like League and Dota have more macro to offer after full build where late game is actually interesting. Smite feels so much more alive in the mid game I dont know why you wouldn't tune towards that.
Interesting perspective, I have very limited knowledge of dota and league as I’ve only watched their esports, so that’s good to know.
I just don’t think shorter time to kill can in any way lead to more strategy. Can you explain that strand of reasoning to me?
@@Captaintwiggywell I think in some way he’s trying to say that due to the high time to kill some moments in the game, in pre 11.6, that required a lot of skill difference were less relevant, like getting a gold fury at 15 minutes probably meant the enemy team did some huge mistake or one of your players popped off yet the reward from all that did seem to not be enough to put you in a significantly advantageous situation, you’d need a very big lead that would slowly build up to really make a difference and by the time you obtained that everyone would be lvl 20.
Even if you were an assassin with 3 lvls and 2k gold ahead obtained through optimal play, at 20 mins you’d still struggle to easily kill their backline with your whole kit due to the high TTK so the punishment from being behind due to your own mistakes wasn’t quite impactful.
Overall you’d only truly be able to deal significant damage once you reached full build or through specific build paths like the book one for mages and by the time that happened you’d be in full on teamfights around fire and would have a small time window of like 5 minutes where your enemies wouldn’t reach the max scaling cap and catch up to you before the 30 mins mark for you to feel like you’re at an advantage.
To put some things into perspective, all your teammates getting a 3 k pot and possibly out-scaling the evened up enemies by not even a lot requires an average of 15 k gold team lead, and even then that’s the maximum amount of advantages gold brought you.
Basically if something went consistently wrong for the enemy team during the pre late game phase it wouldnt matter as much unless they would have been severely outclassed in several lanes. While at the same time if something went wrong in a late game fight for your team despite having a consistent advantage throughout the whole game, you could still lose and none of that would matter against a 60 seconds respawn timer.
Had like dozens of games where I “carried” my way to late game, my teammates weren’t good or we ve committed one mistake around fire and despite everything else going well up to that point we’d immediately lose any advantage we had for the past 30 minutes.
Now after 10.6 everyone is getting punished for being behind and making mistakes, but as a countersnowball effect you’re still very killable even if you have a lead. Now many things like map awareness, warding positioning relics usage, small objectives like pyro and gf are all more relevant, individual skill is more relevant and most importantly you can get big objectives like a phoenix or fg with ease before ever reaching full scaling and you can basically make the lead that you’ve been building up even more relevant.
makes sense but he also argues against snowball and this does make snowball more of a thing so tbh i like everything you said smite just might need even more comeback mechanic or we might as well just always draft all the nooby early game gods
Honestly I just play. If I have a build, plan, and some of my buddies in down for some conq. Ttk isn’t really something I care about. If I snow ball, great! If I feed…. Less great but whatever I’m down for a come back. I just enjoy the game. Nice video!
Hey Twig, I would say the overall editing was solid. With the audio you can tell its coming from a lower quality mic than what would normally be used for commentary, but it didn't affect the overall clearness of your voice and everything was understandable and good enough to be heard. Editing-wise I would say come up with a more clear idea for what you want edited into the video and when beforehand. By that I mean that there were parts in the video where it felt like you weren't sure if you wanted to do a commentary-style video with mostly your face, or a gameplay-style video with your thoughts on the patch on top of it.
For example, to start the video you greet us with yourself from your webcam, but then almost immediately have a kind of jarring cut to the loki gameplay with music that was just a tad bit too loud in my opinion, especially with your voice and the in-game sound effects on top of it. In this situation I would choose to either fade into your webcam or the gameplay and stick with it for a minute or so before cutting back to the other thing.
I think if you do want to include gameplay in these types of videos you could also benefit from making your choice of gameplay a bit more intentional. For example, in the part where you talked about how the game has a lot of un-missable abilities like Nem ult or Neith ult, the gameplay you showed was randomly of bastet (who imo has a skill shot for an ult). Here you could instead put a few clips of you on some of those gods you mentioned like Nem and cut between the clips of you owning on that god or hitting those un-missable abilities that those gods have.
Another small thing that I think was indicative of you not being sure of the style of video you wanted to make was the music. I already mentioned the levels seemed a bit off, but the music also completely cut off at just 5 minutes in the video. Which overall was a bit jarring especially because to me it was already a teeny bit loud.
These three examples of some general principles I found in your video don't make the video bad by any means! But mixed together I believe they show just a lack of experience and vision for what you want the content to look like. And I think they point to the idea that you aren't exactly sure how you wanted this video to come out (this is speculation and I apologize if it is coming off as rude). I think this video is in this weird limbo space of being a commentary-hayzer type of video with light editing, versus a mostly gameplay video showing examples of what you're talking about with small jumps back to your webcam.
If you took either of those routes more strongly I think the video would just be that much more cohesive feeling. And you did some good things too! Like I think in the beginning when you edited in the screenshot of the tweets next to your face, and edited in the picture from your worlds championship, those were good editions to making the video feel more webcam-commentary-Hayzer-like.
This is great feedback thanks for taking the time to analyse the video. Overall i just rushed it and tried to force the few clips i had. Good points to learn from.
Twig has a kid and then starts complaining about kids nowadays having a short attention span. classic
(joking)
Don't know if you're going to read this, but if you do, I appreciate it. My take on this whole thing is bittersweet. I hated 9.5 when it came out because it felt like the game was being balanced in the wrong way. When Gilgamesh dropkick did 300 damage at rank 1, and Erlang Shen had a 3.5s cc combo, the issue wasn't that everybody was "too squishy". Lanes were usually over really quickly because some gods just ran through everybody, and those some gods were usually always warriors. Specifically, the Assassin-Warrior hybrids, like Gilgamesh, Erlang Shen and Camazotz. Camazotz being the more balanced version of the other two. The simple fix would've been to rework the damage in their kits, like maybe making Gilgamesh dropkick deal some small, maybe 10% of enemy max health as damage instead, so at level 3, it'd do like 80 damage instead of 300, and it'd still scale to late game and wouldn't screw up the early game strength he had, but wouldn't just be an auto-win either.
Besides all of those specifics, Smite needs to just find its identity. Is it a fast paced action game that has some MOBA characteristics? Or is it a MOBA that has some fast paced action characteristics? For the longest time, Smite has been the former instead of the latter, and I believe most of the pros and in their position because they are good at the fast paced action and fighting stuff, rather than the more slow and methodical version of the game. Both have a skill requirement, one is just different to the other. If Smite wants to be a fast paced action MOBA, then Smite 2 is going the completely wrong way. Removing camp leashing, and other stuff that sped up jungle clear would make the game be more macro-based and require you to have more planning than ever before, but if Smite wants to be a methodical game, then they're going in the right way. However, this TTK drop will definitely hurt them. I'm not really sure what they want to do, as I enjoy both styles, but tend to prefer the slower methodical gameplay. Though, I still like the kill pressure and methods of winning I have with the 9.5 revert. Maybe there's some sort of middle ground? I initially suggested a shift to god health and prots but not to the waves and objectives, because I believed that was a good place to see the balance of the game, and right now, I believe that would be better? I'm not sure, though.
This is very well said. And I completely believe that hirez are going with the former of your suggestions, a fast paced action game with some moba characteristics.
I did make the case that the world is going that way towards the end of the video, with attention span going down and people not wanting to really think anymore (which is a shame for people like me and perhaps you). I can only hope enough people want to play this weird hybrid going into smite 2
i think i come to the conclusion that the revert is all good as long as they find a way to contain snowball through things like comeback mechanics or anything other than longer ttks which i think is probably possible to do in a likable way, however the other way was also fine as long as they actually had less comeback mechanics and more ways to scale or things to do in late game besides stand around fire
Good take. Healthy snowball is hard to balance but it’s possible we’re going from one extreme to the other.
This comment section gives me hope again. I'm not completely against the revert of 9.5 but they should've thought this through. From 9.5 to 11.5 there have been 2 years of balancing around the original change and you can't just make a revert without changing anything else. The result is an incredibly snowbally game, where matches are basically over in 10 minutes and people would rather (rightfully) f6 at 10 than playing it to the end. This was basically a patch made for people who like to win more than playing itself + people who can win consistently. I've played dozens and dozens of games since the patch and I still have to see losing teams make a comeback that doesn't depend on the enemy team literally throwing. Fineokay (one of the pro players I love but that I strongly disagree with concerning the patch) says it's easier to make a comeback because you just need to group and shutdown the person with a lead. Turns out, you can't. First of all, you need some good communication to do that and it's not guaranteed at all in ranked games. Secondly, I played a game solo yesterday (Mulan). I was ahead and when 3 people came to my lane to shut me down, I literally 1v3 them. And I'm no pro.
Third, the whole game is solo and jungle dependent now. If both solo and jungle lose to their respective opponents, congrats, you lose the game. There's nothing a mid, supp or carry can do.
I'm not Diamond+ but my experience counts for something AND I watch enough pro players and youtubers to know how games go even in higher ranks.
Well said. I believe you on every point. The thing you said about not being able to comeback without a significant mistake is very true
I think my perspective whenever 9.5 dropped I began to dislike the laning phase more and more since it never felt like I could really express my skill over my opponent (Specifically talking about solo lane). With the map change as well in year 10 it felt nearly impossible to proxy waves since you were so far out of position and couldn’t easily walk through the tower since it was way larger than the previous map. Therefore our farming or pushing your opponent away from the wave was your way of being better but it was never as satisfying to me. I can say whenever I swapped to jungle though I really enjoyed the feeling of macro oriented farming instead of constant ganks in order to win the game. I felt like if I was on every timer and clearing the map efficiently I could be 2-3 levels up despite the enemy jungler having multiple kills. So laners I felt like disliked 9.5 and junglers enjoyed 9.5. As long as you enjoy macro and micro farming as a jungler which I enjoyed personally
Maybe 9.5 was better for top 1% of players but for the rest it was a slog. I'm currently enjoying changes and my W/L ratio went up. Yes, I'm "less skilled" player but so are 99% of the players.
Also I like shorter games due to time constraints. That's why I very rarely play Conq. When I have to sit in Assault game for 40min+ I stopped playing that mode too.
So yes, Ranked conquest probably suffered but lets be honest how many plays that mode daily? For other maps and modes its a win.
I think this is a good take. The game is more fun now surprisingly!
I have been enjoying this new patch but I would have been interested in seeing what would have happened if they only nerfed the values to 50%. I dont believe in heavy balance swings.
You played or watched starcraft?
Yeah I’ve watched it on and off for about 10 years, only played it a bit though
Arena/slash based on premade games:
Non-ability based hunters are unplayable (There is no time to basic attack)
Non-tablet mages became playable
Tanks still dominate the game
Assassins still dominate the game
Casuals is certainly better now because the first 10minutes of the game used to not matter at all and were really boring. But the balance is still just horrendous.
Casuals (and even ranked) ended in concedes at 10 a pretty decent amount of the time so to say that the first 10 minutes didn't matter before just isn't true. People easily got tilted and gave up before 10 if they died a few times, now it's easier for those players to die early and give up sooner.
The patch has been great and it’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time. It encourages fighting instead of PvE. Now if they still had more on the map to get like they did before that’d also be dope because it opens up more options. Early game matters more whereas before I rarely had any games over before 25 min and one late game death lost you the game. Slash and arena have been way more fun with constant fighting. It’d get very boring just staring at the other team waiting for someone to make a move. Assault truly feels the same with people still sitting under tower so that mode can be gone for all I care now. I don’t do duel or joust because it was either tanks or the other person just PVEs and never fights. Could be different now but haven’t gave it a shot to see.
I’m sorry but your take around 9:25 about Smite having a lot of unmissable abilities is just not true at all. Neith ult and Nem ult are like some the only exceptions to the fact that every ability in Smite is technically missable. In League, basically half of the abilities in the game are point and click meaning u literally cannot miss them as long as u are in range. Same thing applies to auto attacks. In Smite, every auto attack is a skill shot, but in League, as long as u are in range of an adc’s autos, you WILL be hit. Literally almost everything in Smite is a skill shot
I don't love your comparison to League since it's a completely different POV to smite. My point was a half decent player just won't be missing a good amount of skills on you (for example bastet jump and 2 are hard to miss) and if you combine that with how low the cooldown of blink is relative to aegis, sometimes deaths are just completely unavoidable providing you're trying to get in there in team fights.
@@Captaintwiggy I understand that, but if you played League I think you would be even more irritated at how u legit cant miss certain abilities which is even more frustrating to play against. I agree with your point made in the video, I just wanted to point out that Smite's unmissable ability count is not nearly as bad as League. Like imagine point and click Achilles execute, Or point and click susano 3. Those are legit some abilities in League
I’ve uninstalled smite goodbye Hirez good luck on failed games