PRELIMINARY PATCH NOTES - NOV 30, 2012

PRELIMINARY SMITE PATCH NOTES - NOV 30, 2012 RELEASE

New Gamemode: Domination

Several Obelisks of Power have appeared in Egypt. Control them to gain victory.
Average game time is around 20 minutes.
Match Objectives:
There are three control points.
Each team starts with 400 tickets.
Enemy tickets are reduced when your side controls two of the three points, as well as for each enemy kill.
Reduce the enemy team to zero tickets to win the match.
Other Info:
You start at level three with 1500 gold.
Neutral camps provide buffs but do not deduct tickets.
Your team respawns together in waves.
You will earn normal match rewards. Note that Domination has its own first win of the day bonus.

General Features:
[STILL TESTING. PRELIMINARY] In addition to the five permanently free gods (Ra, Kali, Ymir, Sun WuKong, and Artemis), there will now be an additional five free gods at any point in time. The free additional gods will rotate over time. (You will still need to purchase a god in order to ensure permanent access).
When you first enter the match lobby in either Conquest Normal or Conquest Ranked gamemodes, the top-ranked player on each side now has the opportunity to ban a god from play. When a god is banned, it is banned for both sides. All gods are bannable (Note that we had previously communicated that free gods would not be bannable, but reversed that decision after adding the additional free rotating gods).
If enough people are in queue we respect your preferred region when match making. You choose your preferred region on the PLAY screen.
In the Settings menu, you can now choose between 3 different ability casting options:
Normal Casting Mode: A targeting decal is placed on the ground when you hit the ability button, and then the ability is fired when you left mouse click.
Quick Casting Mode: A targeting decal is placed on the ground when you push down the ability button, and the ability is fired when you release the ability button.
Instant Casting Mode: The ability is fired as soon as you press the ability button, with no targeting decal.
The time spent in a “matching state” on timed queues is now drastically reduced, so that you should be sent into the match lobby much faster.
Auto-purchase settings will now be stored server-side at a player level. This should prevent users have these settings reset after each patch (Note: Settings will be reset upon this patch, but should not be reset during the next patch).
If you receive a party invite while alt-tabbed out of the game, you will now receive an out-of-match notification, similar to the notification you receive when you are alt-tabbed out of the game and receive a match invite.
Towers have had their health increased (excluding Phoenixes).



UI Changes:

The Settings menu has undergone a UI overhaul. There are now tabs for different settings areas.

The Play button on the top-bar menu is now better highlighted.
A variety of UI cleanups have been made to the PLAY screen. This includes:
Users may also now select their preferred server region.
Your last selected tab is persisted across logins (so you will return to the PvP tab if that was your last selected tab the last time you played).
The buttons now read “Join” and “Leave” instead of “Join Queue” and “Leave Queue”.
Once you join a queue, you are restricted from clicking on other queues until you leave the queue.
Several other cleanups.
The sizing and positioning of the in-game web browser has been modified.
The sell button in the in-game item store has been modified.
Several cleanups and improvements have been made to the Social menus.
Several other minor bug fixes and visual cleanups.

Abilities:

Creeping Curse
The active slow has been reduced from 35% to 30%.
The cooldown has been increased to 150s.
Hand of the Gods
Damage done to minions has been reduced by 20%.
Passive has been changed so that you take 30% less damage from Jungle minions.
Heavenly Agility
The active speed buff has been increased from 35% to 40%.
Duration of the buff has been reduced from 5s to 3s.
This ability now makes you immune to slows for the active duration.
The cooldown has been increased to 150s.
Intensify Defenses has been temporarily removed.
Meditation
The passive has been changed so that when you have less than 40% of your mana, your mana regeneration is doubled.
mp5 removed from this passive
The cooldown has been increased to 120s.
Purification Beads
This ability removes pulls again.
The cooldown has been increased to 120s.
Sprint
The lifetime of the active speed buff has been changed to 6s.
The cooldown has been increased to 150s.

Items:

Recommended items that had mana potions have now been changed to healing potions.

Jungle:

The XP reward for clearing a buff camp has been reduced by 50%.
Protection Buff Camp
The protection camp has had its buff reduced from +50 to +35.

Gods:

General
Base movement speed of gods has been increased by 10%.
Projectile speeds on basic ranged attacks has been increased from 70 ft/sec to 100 ft/sec. Anhur, Artemis and Cupid are still at 110 ft/sec.
Artemis
Calydonian Boar
Crowd control immunity duration decreased from 6s to 3s.
Cupid
PASSIVE - Lovestruck
When an ability is used that consumes 10 stacks, Cupid also gains a 20% buff to his physical power for 6s.
Heart Bomb
Damage type has been changed from physical to magical.
Base damage has been increased from 50/80/110/140/170 to 60/100/140/180/220.
Damage contribution has been changed from 60% physical to 100% magical.
Share the Love
Base healing has been increased from 30/50/70/90/110 to 45/70/95/120/145.
Damage contribution has been changed from 40% physical to 30% magical.
Flutter
Attack speed buff duration has been increased from 4s to 6s.
All ranks now gain 2% attack speed per stack of Lovestruck.
Lovestruck stacks now consumed by Flutter.
Fields of Love
Damage type has been changed from physical to magical
Base damage has been increased from 175/225/275/325/375 to 225/290/355/420/485.
Damage contribution has been changed from 100% physical to 120% magical.
Freya
Irradiate
Decreased the cooldown from 13s to 11s.
Pulse
Decreased the cooldown from 13s to 11s.
Banish
Increased the duration of the banish from 1/1.5/2/2.5/3s to 1.4/1.8/2.2/2.6/3s.
Sobek
PASSIVE - Armor of the Nile
Name has been changed to Blessing of the Nile
Each hit now also gives Sobek +15 physical power, stacking up to 3
times.
Thor
Tectonic Rift
The fissure now appears almost instantly, doing 75/115/155/195/235 (+60% of your physical power) physical damage and stunning enemies for 1/1.25/1.5/1.75/2s.
Anvil of Dawn
Reduced the amount of time the warning is visible when Thor is about to come crashing down.
Ymir
Frost Breath
This ability now does 50/90/130/170/210 (+50% of your magical power) magical damage.

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so the jungle now works as they intended it. and all abilities got nerfed
mid meta is going to change drasticly 0.o

and cupid is so wierd now
i have no idea on what to think about this 0.o
I mean he gets a buff but goes from physical to magical (da****)

and thor zues lane OP
thats going to be a hard double storm lane XD


ymir and sobek got a buff so they can be played as dps

and freya got buffed like she wasn't op enough.

and for my opinion on the banned gods go check the other forum post

geez please let me know what you think

Goodness. There is so much that I've decided to comment line by line on what I'm gonna comment on...



Completely awesome. Was hoping that the Egyptian map would be a new game type. Can't wait to try it out!!



About time. Good for the game imo.



Kinda dumb that they're doing this in normal conquest. Maybe they just want to see who gets banned the most to take a look at them, but otherwise I think only ranked matches should have bans.



Spam away, folks.




Christmas has come early, pending validity of truth to these statements.



Another think I have hoped they'd tweak. More forgiving, at least to a point and in some aspects, usually equals better game play.




HiRez loves abilities, they love them not. HiRezBart loves abilities, he loves them not...

I understand the need to tweak and test, but wow. Two DRASTIC patches to abilities in a row. This fixes some abilities that really needed a nerf like Sprint and Meditate, although the only change to meditate is that it stops you from being able to horde mana. A slight change in strategy and it's pretty much the same thing. Except that most of the durations god bumped up. HOG is now, again, suuuper powerful.

Purification Beads needed that back. And I actually like what they did with god speed and ability speed in general. Unfortunately this just makes jumps even MORE powerful...say hello to your permaban Wukong.





Hwat?! So they don't nerf HOG because they nerfed the jungle!!! XP reduced by 50%? Holy moley, another complete game changer. The yellow buff needed a tweak. It was too powerful considering that any mid with a brain could keep it up near constantly at least the first 20 minutes of the match.

We're gonna have to see how this plays out with the reduced XP.



I think I like this. Kinda like everyone now has an ability speed passive and the speed abilities themselves are just for a small amount of time. It always seemed that some ranged attacks were faster getting there, *cough* Anhur *cough*, but I always assumed that it was just attack speed. Now I see the light. Good or bad? Again, we'll have to see if we can even notice any of this.



Good, 6s was an eternity of non-cc'able Artemis.



Love. it.

Not only did Smite need a ranged MP non-mage, but Cupid just got stupid powerful. Similar to many MP tanks, if they were built PP it'd just be to easy to build in one direction and create a crazy basic attack + skill monster.

It appears that they compensated correctly with increased damage to all of his abilities with the shift to MP; especially with the extra Physical Power on his passive. Also, no more fluttering around holding onto 10 stacks.



Freya needed a buff? Ick...



Something for Sobek! Not saying his nerf wasn't necessary but, similar to Ares' recent bout of ineffectiveness, I think they went too far.



Good 'ol Thor. HiRez's favorite son. Why not just let him teleport to the end of the Tectonic Rift as well??



Big daddy Ymir comin atcha! Oh my...

Very cool that these came out.

I'm very curious to see if Cupid will be more or less powerful with this patch. I think it will probably increase his burst via abilities but his overall damage output will suffer. Though the nerf to his Share The Love ability is very welcomed! Now he can't have infinite mana and his partner infinite healing without sacrificing his stuns! Though mana will be a non-issue mid/late game now since he'll be stacking magic/mana items.

Edit: I misread this. Flutter consumes the Lovestruck charges. This is still good because he can't escape/chase and combo with a stun.

Ymir will need that Frost Breath buff now that his ultimate will be less effective due to EVERYONE moving 10% faster.

Sobek will be a menace early game with his +45 physical damage steroid. He'll be JUST as bad as Bacchus early game without the mana problems that come with it. That's gonna hurt.

And Thor, welcome to OPhood.

Also, Xareth, could you explain HoTG being very powerful now? It seems like a HUGE nerf to me. It no longer gives the 10 point HP regen on minion hit, jungle creeps no longer give a sufficient amount of experience to be a viable source, and the Protection Buff, though still powerful, isn't what it used to be. Now the only advantage it gives is what it was intended to give, buffs early game that will be more important due to ability nerfs. I see HoTG leaving the hands of mid and other full time laners and going back to the more jungley gods with this patch.

The changes on Cupid smells like Beta for me. Nice we can test something like that but it's not good.

Leveling Flutter now only reduce the cooldown? Don't like that :/
Reduce that skill to an escape mechanism.

Looks like you can play him AD or AP now but both not really well.
For AD you need more or less only the lvl 1 of each skill. You use Heart Bomb only with 10 stacks for the stun and you are not able to use other skills or you loose your stacks...

For AP - I don't think this will work well with this changes. I will try - we will see.... :)

Share The Love didn't change in the infinite mana part or have I missed something?

Freya changes..
With ACDR it's possible to have >50% uptime of Irradiate and Pulse? Sounds like I will play here more in the next days - if I'm fast enough to choose her...

instead of releasing another god thats OP, they just made the existing gods OP haha

We will see - I thought about it and I have to see the new Cupid in action before I form an opinion.

If we assume 400 AP a 10 stack Level 5 Heart Bomb will do (220 + 400) * 1.3 * 2 = 1612 damage (806 now and 3 sec later the other 806 in an 20 ft radius area) and a 1 sec stun. Ok, that's nice in combination with 20% addition damage on the basic attacks but you really need that 10 stacks.

If you use also your ulti afterwards for additional 485 + 400 * 1.2 = 965 damage it's maybe enough to hurt DDs.

But less than 1000 damage after 3 sec in a marked area sounds not so great for me for an ulti and an AP hero with only one damage skill and his ulti...
+10% movement speed makes the ulti not better.

You will do a lot basic attacks but without real damage between your spells if you play Cupid on AP. Interested to see how easy (or not) he get buffs in the jungle or killing creeps.

If you play him on AD the 20% physical power buff is nice but it will be near the same overall damage as before.

I think additional combined Physical and Magical Power items like Girdle of Might would be nice for this kind of heros.

Still no Ares, fix >.<. But eh...I'm excited that Ymir does damage with his Frost Breath, makes me wonder if some MP Ymir builds will start showing up.

You assume that Cupid will go MP and not still build AS / PP with his abilities being utility. That build will still be very effective, just not OP.

I think both ways are possible now.

AS / PP got a buff with the 20% PP but Flutter consume the stacks now and it's less easy to use it together with Heart Bomb. Skills got nerfed hard for AS/PP :/


I saw something in another thread to MP Cupid: