Is the Hand of the Gods consumable worth?

I never stopped watching SPL though, and never stoped playing other games with my friends who play Smite. And never heard any complaining about it.

I think my main issue is the free ward and actives though.

"Oh you dont want to spend gold on wards? Here you have some for free!"
"Oh you are dying because you don't want to spend gold on actives? Here you have a free active on lvl 1!"

The free ward change was probably to encourage people to learn warding.

compared to the bought actives relics are quite nerfed tbh. But I think that was quite a healthy change as the other actives were more prone to snowball the game cause the T3 could be quite overloaded.

Also, there is a difference between watching and playing. So even though you saw it in action you wouldn't;t really know how annoying it would be

True true, but the active thing is **** IMO

To my knowledge it was just added because "bad" players didn't buy them, at least that is what Kennet told me the devs said was the reason when he asked about it :P

I would be fine with either of the ward or HOG consumable (but not both).

I just like that they make the game easier for "bad" players instead of just teaching ppl to get better at the game if you know what I mean.

They added HOG because invades were so frequent and so hard to counter people needed a fail safe, because it could skew entire games unfairly to one teams favour. Even with a fail safe it still happened, hence the invaders curse added that Kriega mentioned.

As support I place a ward on the enemy purple to get the respawn timer (or as close to it as possible if they are already there, just to see if they're coming over to our purple). Then if I think we are being invaded I can save purple with Hand of the Gods and if they aren't I hit it as soon as it spawns to clear the camp quicker.

It doesn't matter how good a player was at the game, picking gods like Hercules just gave you an unfair advantage to steal a buff. If you were playing during the last half of season 6 you would understand.

as far as I remember in my games with the old relic system, pretty much everyone was buying an 800 gold starting item and spend 600 gold on 2 T1 actives leaving 100 gold for 2 pots.

Also, I would actually say the opposite depending on active. The old system was better for bad players as spending the equivalent of a tier 1 item to upgrade it from T1 to 3 (which for the benefits the actives could provide was well worth it) would, for example, change your blink from 150 sec CD to IIRC 45 sec. This allows you to mess up your blink more often. If you mess your blink up now you've gotta wait at least 2 min.

Ofc picking a god like herc support will give you an advantage on a buff invade, same with for example Ne Zha support (that is basically one of the reasons to pick it). I don't agree that it is unfair, you pay for it in the end game when something like a Khepri is a lot m9re valuable.

And ofc you ward enemy purple, as support before you had to buy a ward run up ward then back buy you stuff and get to your buff before the game started. Or go to lane with wards and health pots.

There is a lot of stuff you can do to combat an invade, you can just go to lane instead and clear then go for enemy purple. You can fight them (if you got a good lvl 1 comp), or just play safe. The problem is that ppl just play as if they don't get invaded (at least that is how it was when I played and I invaded eeevery game).

I can agree that T2 blink was busted AF, but the new system was basically added to the game because bad ppl didn't buy actives. And in for example duolane as support a lot of ppl ofc did buy an active not that it automatically made someone not bad (seen a lot of terrible active usage after I got back).

I do like the fact that you can only have 1 active until lvl 12 though.
But 100% think you should have to buy it, before you had to decide if you wanted to buy an active then decide what active to buy. Now that is reduced to just one decision what active do iI buy. Which dumbs down the game.
It also almost forces you into a defensive first relic, because you always know a beads or aegis will be worth.
Before you could get an aggressive active if your team is fragging etc. or counter something fed with your active. So it felt a lot more fluent IMO

BME I dunno why but every time I see you mention an invade it's only the purple (duo lane) one. This was not the major reason for it to be added in most cases nowadays it is used for gaining early pressure in lane for the Lvl 2.

The major reason was the Lvl 1 speed invades. The life of the support didn't really matter as much. It was a coinflip for winning the game in high Lvl of play. If your jungle lost speed and their's didn't, their jungle would be majorly ahead. If the support died and manage to steal it, it was worth it. If he just died and did not manage to steal it doesn't matter. Pretty much the mantra of support became: "My Support role life is worth less than the enemy Jungler's, therefore, if I kill my own experience and farm to harass them and ruin their experience of play and literal farming experience, we (can) win the game".

Also, a lot of relics were even then pretty "standard". The only difference being which version from a certain item you wanted. In most cases, beads were a must-have for squishies. the only squishy not picking aegis was the jungle cause of needing HoG (or the even now rare sprint ADC)

Oh yeah was mainly thinking about how important it is on a support atm, hence purple invades.

When it comes to speed invades I can definitely agree that supports just suiciding for a possible buff steal i quite redicuels and not a fun interaction. But wasn't it mostly 2 ppl going for invades last season (solo and jungle or solo and support)?