PonPonWeiWei

We have a few different approaches to balance. In general Warrior healers were not seen as effective and more specifically Guan Yu was not seen as effective. It did not matter that Guan Yu was statistically performing; he was often placed as a very low priority pick across the board.

Ra was in a similar spot until recently, seen as a mid to low tier mage at best. It did not matter that he statistically does well.

We have seen this year that focusing on the perceived strength of the character and how it feels to fight as them and against them in the context of a match is much better than pointing at our spreadsheets and going "We are right, sorry guys".

Gods having healing in their kit is contextual. Healing itself isn't bad; my argument is too much healing is bad. Tsukuyomi's healing is somewhat limited in that he won't find much to Basic Attack for long enough to heal. Set MUST be fighting a god to heal and Horus' heal has very low scaling making it larg...

I should clarify burst a bit. In general what I mean is that when players dump their kits into each other, someone dies. Since they have to dump multiple abilities even burst comes out over a few seconds. MOBAs should have a higher time to kill than say a game like Counterstrike by default.

When things get TOO bursty (see old Loki, when you feed a He Bo, etc.) it can become frustrating as you often feel like you cannot play a fight.

Some characters will push for faster responses (if you hear Kuku ult you better Aegis) while others will allow for slower fights but the detrimental slowness is when gods can dive each other, dump 1 to 2 rounds of their full kit, and nobody has died yet. Even if it feels fun to someone who enjoys those types of fights it can be difficult to even end a game in that scenario.

Burst does have a distinct disadvantage as if you aren't attuned to reacting to it (new player as you mentioned) you are more susceptible to what feels like...

I touched on that a little bit; the per fight feeling of your healing can wildly vary from moment to moment. It isn't even about people knowing if anti-heal exists as Diamond+ Healers have a clear advantage. Ff those players cannot recognize when to buy Anti-heal and apply it regularly then basically no-one can (or healers are not shut out entirely but can feel that way).

We have spent a lot of time over the years discussing healers, their role in SMITE, and how best to support them. I think you have done a good job outlining some of the variance caused by healers and an approach to resolve that; but I want to provide some more context of our opinions so you can see why we are where we are with healers.

Lotus Crown was an attempt for a more healer focused item. This item when released was incredibly potent creating what you described at the end as a problem state. You could largely flex this as a one off and make your heals provide super utility while still building full damage. There are likely healthier ways to do this but healing has some core truths that we also try to be careful of. These are simply what must occur when healing is strong.

When healing is too strong players die less. When healing is too strong combat can feel less meaningful.

We often bounce between a Tank Meta and a Burst Meta. While somewhere in betwe...

This is largely accurate. We discussed how impactful he weapon would be and felt in general that if we had these massive wings, the odds of us doing another set to do cool combat stuff with was likely further away. Given how many spear users we have and how explored the weapon style is we opted to play up the wings, weaving in the Spear where it made sense.

Plus as others pointed out Set does use his spear pretty heavily, from his attacks to directing his clones. There is an element of contrasting them as they were a dual god release.

Yeah, if the skin has a custom voice pack they have them. The SMITE Wiki has a pretty decent log of voice pack lines that includes these extra lines and who they reference.

Generally gods/skins have anywhere from like 5-7 references that occur when you slay a specific enemy god (and even then I think they only play some of the time).

For example Tsukuyomi references Amaterasu, Awilix, Cthulhu, Nox, Susano, Xbalanque.

Lol, no. We knew it would always be a more vision obscure than a blind so never intentionally tested.

We DID have a bug (and it currently exists on Grim Mariachi) where it basically does fully blind you if you want to experience it. A true blind would definitely be stronger, but that quickly became frustrating to play around while it was bugged.

For what it is worth, in initial testing we went back and forth on things like him having knockup immunity, him having a slow on Agonizing Visions, and his damage numbers quite a bit.

We removed it from Agonizing Visions as the quick deploy nature it brought made it often frustrating to deal with, without really helping too much in confirming the blind.

The knockup immunity was removed as in earlier tests his damage numbers where higher and we wanted to see how people utilized his zone denial and teamfight AoE stun. If you feel like you can't interrupt some portion of his damage and the teamfight boosts proved very strong we may reintroduce too much frustration.

After feedback his damage seems to feel fair, the ult seems to feel fair and is telegraphed enough, and it takes some finesse to utilize his blind. You need to either use it for zoning or force into onto other control to really put the hurt on (or lock down an opponent yourself). Since these all wou...

Merc ult probably outranges it, depending on the distance. More specifically if I recall it correctly it has a max time, and it estimates if it can make it to the target in the max time left at the speed it is going at.

If a god specifically dashed, maybe? Most super long "dashes" are closer to other forms of movement than a true dash.

For example, Fenrir will follow a Cupid Dashing but not a Hun Batz leap. One is continuous movement while the other is closer to teleporting from location X to location Y with a delay. Fenrir cannot follow Hun Batz 3 since that isn't continuous movement.

Yeah. You can even do one better.

Ares ult deals 0 damage on connecting. This means it doesn't stop recalls.

Someone can recall, you can ult them, they can return to base, and you can pull them right back.

Some abilities have a max distance built in for sanity, mostly those that involve travel time. Horus 3 for example will give up after a set distance. For things that are instant in their displacement they can often follow. Tsuku ult is close to instant, Hun Batz monkey, and Susano 3 can follow most displacement.

Anecdotally, the frequency of these types of threads is near an all time low. Having been around for a while, large threads reaching the front page were the norm, while even this thread is struggling. Even just by new it feels significantly less.

I am less in-tune to it than I was when I did community where more of my work hours were spent looking directly at this type of metric, which is why I qualify it as an anecdote.

We have internal metrics on "Match Quality" as well as how many people actually engage with Ranked Conquest and stick around. These are across the board at an all time high. More people engage with Ranked. More people stay involved with Ranked. Each match on average is significantly closer.

We are looking at ways to improve things, but some of the feels improvements will directly impact these other improvements we have seen. We aren't against doing those types of changes, but we have to approach is carefully otherwise we risk disrupting wha...

For the sake of this, I will go with the idea that Gold Matches are somewhat a coinflip, that matches are riddled with rage quitters and trolls. Let's even quantify this a bit. 5 players in every single match you play are queuing with the sole purpose of tanking the team they are on. Not just bad, but malicious.

You are trying to win to the best of your ability in each game you play and are always performing well. You are essentially a constant for your team. This means that there are 9 slots for these 5 trolls to go into, 4 on your team and 5 on the enemy team. The enemy team is more likely to actually have more of these trolls than you are.

Sure, if you look at an individual match that may not be the case, but on average you should be able to climb. Even look at your statement, 50% of your losses are from rage quitters, 25% are from matchmaking. Is that not something that is paralleled on the enemy side? Wouldn't this mean that 75% of your wins are the same? If n...

Because picking any other number is somewhat arbitrary, and shifts the curve such that it becomes the new "average".

1500 is selected not because we assume everyone coming in is average, it is that we have 0% confidence we know their MMR. This is true, we have no data on them yet. This lands them as potentially being anywhere on the bell curve, the average place of the bell curve is 1500, so they go there.

We can move them to 1200 for example, but over time this largely just changes 1200 to be the new average. Players who are really 1500 today would see themselves over time shift to 1200.

The second issue listed there is initial placement fluctuations. Since we have no confidence in their MMR, we test them. The "quickest" way to test them is to move them around a lot and heavily, overshooting and undershooting their real MMR until we can narrow it down.

This is the fastest method of placing everyone and finding their actual MMR, but it has the downs...

I couldn't keep the secret to myself. The meta will never be the same.

This looks like a result of the change to his Clones actually scaling their damage with Rank. There were some back end stuff created for that and it may be interfering.

Have a bug listed and will look to get it fixed. It is intended that clone attacks should proc the ult.

The ultimate ability draws more on the same themes as Mangetsu. He glows in light of similar color, he fires a beam of white light, and his after images are brighter rather than shadow. Rather than using his weapons specifically as a conduit he is embodying that power.

He specifically calls on things more related to the Full Moon but since it isn't weapon specific we didn't reference Mangetsu. The full power of the moon implies that it specifically calls upon the same powers both Shingetsu and Mangetsu use, which isn't really true.

Yes please.

Rather than turning into an orb of light he could skank while traveling the bifrost.