HiRezAjax

Not quitting or leaving! Just very proud of Clumzy's work and making sure his title and compensation match his responsibility and skill!

I am still the Design Director on SMITE and will be doing a lot of the same things as always.

Clumzy will now manage his own team of designers, mostly focusing on balance, gods, and other in-game designs. Clumzy will still report to me.

So: the Lead Game Designer (Clumzy), Lead UI Designer, Systems Designers, and Event Designers will be who report to me.

I understand how this is confusing as people often misinterpret my job title in the first place, and SMITE Design has never had this structure before.

Over time my promotions have led me to spend more time working on different problems with more teams, and that gives me less time to work with all of our designers individually. Clumzy has stepped up and been a mentor and feedback source for those designers, so this promotion is quite fitting for him and wor...

we actually did ask them

It was acknowledged in this post too in the first point of the middle section but it seems a lot of people missed that.

https://smitegame.com/news/smite-server-connectivity-update/

This is intended.

DANG SOMEONE GOT IT ALREADY! yep thats the only god I can recall that changed class during development. As in, after the kit was designed, but before the initial launch. +1 respect point to you!

Ah yes this reddit comment comes up a lot. Ive been looking for an opportunity to jump in and share some insight on this exact type of justification.

So, to get right to the point, this did not happen on Lancelot and pretty much has never happened in SMITE history ever. We do not "design" gods as another class and then change course.

Gods are often planned out over 12 months in advance and adhering to the class rotation is very important. Its not a very practical option to change classes mid development. This could throw off classes for gods down the timeline who are also being worked on and have their own specific goals.

It also generally isn't how the game design process works. We always start with the specific class, visual themes, and gameplay themes clearly defined before we start any kit ideation. We work through multiple kit pitch rounds using documentation and presentations, then we move to a prototype. The key thing about the god design process tha...

haha much appreciated.

im working hard to help this community understand why this solution works better than they think. People seem to be mostly against it because it feels too good to be true. Something so simple shouldn't just work like that!? But it has worked quite well!

We prob should buff cupid hearts, and fix this Sun Wukong issue since he literally cannot be in combat and heal in his cloud at the same time (he is the only god with this situation) - but besides that I've seen no compelling points on why we should get rid of brawling.

its not. SMITE has tons of global effects, many of them even less visible. Base protections globally nerf everyone's damage from the numbers they see on their ability screen. Lowest level player on conquest gets bonus XP. Everyone gets their movement speed reduced when strafing or backpedaling or basic attacking (except medusa) - there are many examples.

If we aim to nerf every single out of combat heal, this is the correct way to do it.

Reddit seems to think it would be better to specifically put "this ability is 40% less effective if you have not dealt/received damage within 3s" on every single healing ability - then tweak some down to 30% and others up to 50% - which I understand, that's a fair assessment, its a more precise way of doing it. But we can control the heal already by the base amount and applying the same reduction for combat is arguably more fair and better balance than allowing some specific gods to heal more out of combat than others.

i dont think im going to be able to convince you here, but I disagree.

the commenter above was suggesting that we make more UNIQUE types of anti-heal items - to counter only specific types of healing - ex: an anti lifesteal and an item and a different anti healing item.

That in no way improves build diversity, it gives you theoretically more options, but if self sustain is even slightly strong both become mandatory then limiting your flex build slots

more items doesn't mean more diversity.

mayyyyyybe just making a bunch of different items that all have a passive like divine ruin could have an effect like your suggesting, but its still not really build diversity, its just a few options within the same mandatory slot

why is this better than nerfing out of combat healing? if your numbers were slightly lower you would have just pitched exactly brawling, with the only difference that the healer themself gets a slight bonus.

As I've mentioned in multiple other comments, this rule came from the fact that many gods could regenerate their own HP too much, from lifesteal, self heals, and group heals. This pitch does not solve the problems we are currently solving with brawling.

thats just a small part of my response. but how is forcing people to buy 2-3 different types of anti heal items encouraging build diversity? it does the exact opposite and makes more mandatory items.

all of those abilities we would still encourage you to stay in combat and we see it as a good thing that you cant just run away to heal out of combat with them. The only exception is SWK because he is literally removed from combat from his ability and only heals himself.

eventually we might. but people tend to want healing, and in any possible way we rework them we still want to reduce out-of-combat healing more than in-combat healing.

The main point I'm trying to get across in this thread is:

• Brawling is good - its good because in ANY possible world of how healing works in SMITE, its almost always going to be desired for out-of-combat healing to be weaker.

Well its hard to answer this question because there are a lot of matters of opinion across the scenario.

You said you didn't see lifesteal as a problem. We did see lifesteal as a problem.

Your pitch suggests adding complexity and specific modifiers for situations that you think should be handled differently. We think they should be handled the same way, so that's why we implemented a solution that handles them the same way.

Your pitch is much harder to understand and apply strategically, in my opinion. But pretty much the whole reddit community who dislikes brawling is in favor of more complexity because they think its necessary to nerf only specific types of healing more than others. We think that we needed to nerf all types of healing in similar ways, specifically decreasing it substantially when not fighting enemy gods.

Introducing more unique counter items is generally not a good thing. People already have a low purchase rate on anti-heal, so w...

it absolutely was not the goal. We specifically did intend to nerf all healing in SMITE. Not just group healers.

because healing is really strong, even in small amounts. We have a lot of data to back this up. Cupid was essentially sleeper OP most of his entire career, even when he wasn't considered meta he was top win%. This is true for many gods with even small amounts of small healing, Chiron is another example that comes to mind.

They still heal the full amount in combat, to discourage players from sitting under tower and waiting to pick up more hearts.

Agreed this is a strange counterintuitive example, but I feel like the comments are using this as a platform to remove the entire system. We will be looking into some ways to prevent this type of specific scenario with SWK, but we are still very happy with the brawling system as a whole.

Brawling is a better solution for healing for 2 specific reasons - in combat vs out of combat rules and applying to all healing

We want to have rules attached to ALL healing for in combat and out of combat. So, even if we were to implement something more specific to each healing god/item and lifesteal - we would be redundantly stating that things have decreased out of combat healing everywhere. Which just feels messier and achieves the same effect.

We also do intend to nerf all healing, this includes lifesteal and smaller self heals, not just group healing. So again brawling is a nice solution for applying game wide, as we would want it to anyway.

Apologies for skipping over this on the update show. It's been discussed and tested a lot internally but we should have gone over it in more detail.

Historically in SMITE, when you use a CC cleanse while standing in a persistent CC area, you will remain immune to that CC until you leave the area or the effect fades, even if your god is no longer CC immune.

This has led to many bug reports over the years including clips rising high up on r/smite like one that showed a Thor using his full ability combo from inside a Nox silence. We felt that this was indeed a bug and should be fixed. It was not an easy fix so we finally just got it ready for this next update 9.6.

It will have some significant impacts on specific character matchups, and it does nerf gods with very short cleanses like Geb or C...

wrote some more about this here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Smite/comments/uwucjj/95_bonus_balance/i9y92od/

https://hirezajax-blog.tumblr.com/post/165343727888/do-gods-have-different-sizes-speeds-or-ranges-in