Developer Update - Freya

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In the November SMITE Update, we will be doing something never before seen in SMITE:
We will be reverting the design changes that reworked Freya's abilities.

For those who aren't interested in reading a lengthy post, here is a summary:

Freya's Passive, Pulse, and Irradiate abilities are being reverted to the functionality they had before the 5.13 rework.
Balance numbers across her kit will be adjusted based on historical data for her most balanced states.
The rework was unsuccessful for multiple reasons, which is clearly visible in both data and player feedback. At this moment, her play count and win rate are both the lowest in the game across all modes and skill levels.
- The primary problem with the rework, as shown by data and player feedback, is that her skill variance did not decrease. Freya was top pick/ban in pro league throughout a series of potent nerfs. By the time she was balanced in SPL, the rest of the player base had long since stopped playing her due to nerfs.
We strongly feel that Freya was in a better position before the rework.
- Her stats were low, but quite acceptable, and there was little to no community requests to heavily change her. This will bring back some of her previous design concerns, but all-around should be a massive improvement over her current status.
We learned a lot from this process and do have ideas for how Freya could be changed in even more ways to make her "healthier" for the game, but we believe these strategies have more downside than upside.
- The most important downside would be: If we continue to change Freya, she would no longer feel like Freya.
We are aware that the revert coincides with the launch of a Freya Skin. We hope that does not dominate the discussion. This change is being done purely for gameplay reasons because we feel like we have failed Freya players by effectively removing her from the game. We wanted this to be remedied as soon as possible and the HRX Update was the soonest we could achieve it. This update falls perfectly between production finishing on Yemoja and the full ramp up on other new gods and Season 7, while also not being part of the Update that the World Championships will be played on.
Our primary goal for this change is to bring back a character that had a dedicated audience. We don't expect these changes to adjust her power level or popularity by very much, but she should certainly be better than dead last. We hope that people who used to be Freya mains will be excited to hear that we are giving them back a character they had loved and lost.
We want to be as transparent and flexible as possible as we receive feedback about this design choice to make sure we can arrive at something we are all happy with.

In Update 5.13 (July 24 2018) Freya's Passive, Pulse, and Irradiate abilities were heavily changed with specific goals in mind. In this post we will go into detail about: the goals of those changes, what happened afterward, what we learned, what our new goals for her are, and why we are doing this revert.

Alright, let's get into the real deep dive on this issue.

WHY DID WE DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

As Mid-Season 5 approached we took it upon ourselves to look for problems in the game and make large, meaningful changes to address those issues. We identified Freya as a potential candidate for gameplay improvements (which sounds ridiculous now, after knowing what happened).

In update 5.11, roughly the time we were working on Mid-Season, Freya's play count and win-rate were clearly at the bottom of the pack. 94th in play count and 91st in win-rate out of 96 gods.

The year before 5.11 had been quite a roller coaster ride for Freya. She had 2 significant spikes in her win-rate stats due to small buffs, followed by her metrics absolutely tanking after any adjustments to fix those spikes. These extreme highs and extreme lows usually identify core design problems, and her popularity never grew by very much, even when she dominated the meta. Both of those are usually clear signs that a rework is needed.

We thought to ourselves: This goddess is a very well known Norse figure, she has a really cool and unique play style, she's had an art update, which we know many people weren't too happy with, but community discussions and things like cosplay and fan art have shown that people generally like her themes and visuals. So, why was she so unpopular and underperforming? Clearly this goddess has potential to have better metrics than that.

SO WHAT DID WE DECIDE TO DO ABOUT IT?

We went about discussing the pros and cons of her kit, what we thought people liked or didn't like about it, and why her balance was so volatile (very strong or very weak depending on slight changes). Our conclusion was that the Pulse + Irradiate combo was the problem. Her Banish and Ultimate abilities had clear applications (even though they had high frustration potential, but more on that later). However, Pulse + Irradiate led to very high variance gameplay and included many unintuitive features. So in 5.13 we redesigned these abilities to be more consistent in their application and more clear in their synergy with the goal of making Freya an obvious Mage ADC.

5.13 Patch Notes

For all reworks we always try to preserve the gods' core play style and unique mechanics. We learned long ago that community feedback will be overwhelmingly negative if we rework gods into something too different from their original gameplay goals. We felt that this rework reasonably met this goal while also creating the possibility of Freya being easier to balance or gain more devoted players. Oh, how wrong we were.

HOW DID HER PTS AND LAUNCH GO?

Immediate community feedback was surprisingly neutral or missing entirely. The r/smite thread regarding this Update Show doesn't include much discussion about Freya at all. Ravana becoming an Assassin, the addition of the Mask Tree, Hades buffs, and Bakasura buffs were the top comments. (There is one rather obscene Freya joke completely unrelated to her balance/rework.)

5.13 Reddit Discussion

This signaled to us that people weren't overly excited about it, but in theory the changes and messaging made sense and didn't spark backlash, which is a good thing for a rework.

However, once we got to PTS, the issues quickly became apparent. Even though these PTS threads aren't covered in Freya discussion (except part #3), there were a lot of issues surfacing in other posts and other forms of social media.

5.13 PTS Thread #1

5.13 PTS Thread #2

5.13 PTS Thread #3

Even if the kit was theoretically moving in the right direction, we fell victim to the same problem Freya had before: the extremes of her kit were just too extreme. Pulse + Irradiate did entirely too much damage in a short period of time, and inexperienced players were running out of mana far too fast, effectively recreating the same problems we had before. Her interactions with items were confusing and potentially overpowered if you knew how to properly optimize it.

WHAT ABOUT THE POST-REWORK METRICS?

*Data is shown as a rank among all gods. So win-rate of 87 means she was the 87th most winning god out of the total of 96 gods at the time (bottom 10 in the game, losing a lot). The same is true for popularity and ban-rate.

In 5.12 both Telkhine's Ring and Demonic Grip were buffed, causing Freya to have slightly better metrics than she usually did. She was not at her all time low before the rework. Looking back now we would be quite happy to have her at her 5.12 spots again. This was actually a spot in-between her previous peaks and valleys in data.

We launched the rework and the initial changes in core metrics didn't look bad. We saw a huge increase in popularity in all game modes, with an even bigger boost in Conquest. We also saw her win-rate go down in unranked modes while skyrocketing in Ranked Conquest. These were generally what we expected. Her peak performance seemed too high, but the rest looked ok.

She still had huge problems with her frustration and variance. The primary data point that we follow for this is ban-rate. She went through the roof. Another important data point for these cases is pro play pick/ban. And of course, this frustration was also visible in community feedback. Average players were still struggling with her, while veteran/pro players were making her look absolutely broken overpowered.

After her rework Freya:

Became the #1 most banned god in Ranked Conquest.
Nearly 100% SPL Pick/Ban from 5.13 until 6.1
Constant stream of negative community feedback about her feeling clunky to play or frustrating to play against.

We had a solid balance plan for this scenario: Bring down her top end to balance for Ranked/Pro play while adjusting her visual FX to help new players better understand and fight against her. We went forward with this plan but it didn't seem to help much.

Even as she was nerfed repeatedly. ban-rate, SPL pick/ban, and frustration all stayed high. Freya was nerfed 8 times over a 6 month period, with many of the problems persisting through the nerfs.

Freya was nerfed in the following updates: (not complete for each update, but includes main points)

5.14 – Decreased Explode Magical Power Scaling
5.16 – Decreased Explode Base Damage
5.17 – Decreased Explode Magical Power Scaling
5.19 – Decreased Base Movement Speed
5.21 – Decreased Explode Base Damage
5.22 – Decreased Ranged Bonus Damage and Scaling
6.3 – Changed Explode to deal much less damage over multiple shots using ammo
6.4 – Decreased Explode Bonus Damage, Slow, and Minion Damage
6.8 – Decreased Ranged Bonus Damage, Increased Scaling

Freya's stats started to level out to a reasonable ban-rate, pick rate, and Ranked win-rate around the time of the 6.3 and 6.4 changes. 6.3 was one of the biggest changes she got since the rework, which converted her explode damage into 5 smaller shots with an ammo count. We felt that this change would be a huge improvement to both the frustration as well as her top-end issues.

With her stats and feedback settling we thought we might have found the sweet spot for Freya, finally. Even her pro stats had dipped down to a 54.35% and 57.14% pick/ban-rate in SPL during 6.3 and 6.4. After being nearly 100% ban-rate in 6.2 and 6.1 this was reassuring.

Her May 2019 stats, right after 6.5 launch, looked almost acceptable. Her popularity and winrate had settled back into the spot in between her pre-rework spikes and dips (close to 5.12), her ban-rate was low and reasonable, yet her win-rate was lower than ever.

The low win rate signalled to us that her player skill variance was still too high, seemingly higher than it was pre-rework, which was a specific goal of ours to fix. This showed us that change had failed. Just in case it wasn't clear enough to us that we hadn't solved her problems, the pros helped by giving us another reminder.

They quickly figured out ways to build and position Freya even at that balance state, causing her pick/ban-rate to jump back up to 98.15% in SPL during 6.5. This was followed by the Mid-Season Invitational which highlighted the issue even more.

At the Mid-Season Invitational, Freya had the following stats:

100% Pick/ban-rate
29 Bans
5 Picks
60% win-rate

After this we attempted to nerf her one more time, focusing on her early game poke damage that pros were heavily utilizing. This 6.8 nerf was actually a shift, decreasing base damage and increasing scaling damage, but players still overwhelmingly perceived it as a nerf, and her stats did too.

Freya's SPL pick/ban-rate had finally dropped off. Unfortunately, so did every other measurable metric. The final result put Freya dead last in popularity and win-rate in every mode and skill level. These stats are much lower than all of her previous all-time lows. The additional nerfs to Mage ADC items for meta reasons didn't help this fact.

She is still at those terribly low metrics today. Here we can see the final descent after the 6.8 nerf.

*Data shown by rank out of 104 or 105 total gods.

Notice how even before the nerf, she was doing terribly in all modes except Conquest. That nerf then sent Freya to the absolute bottom of the charts in Conquest as well. After watching the trend continue for 3 straight patches we felt the need to act quickly. No one has ever displayed metrics this low. Community has been asking for Freya changes for the last few updates in a row. All of the criteria are met for making a big change.

This brings us to the reason why we are writing this report:

HOW DO WE FIX THIS?

First we had to evaluate how things went wrong, mostly what I have covered in this post in the above sections.

Community had no desire for a Freya rework. Gods generally need low stats and Community request for the rework to be successful.
Our primary goal of "decreasing her skill/balance variance" was not met. This was shown clearly by her continued dominance of SPL while all her other stats tanked.
It also became clear that we had adjusted the kit flow more than we should aim to for ability reworks. Freya felt considerably different to actually play than she used to.

So we had a few options. Each with their own sets of pros and cons. All of these options had the potential to dig Freya out of her all-time-low stats that we are experiencing now. There are even more options than this but here were some of the top contenders:

Continue to balance the current version
- Pros
  - There was some possible place in the stats where she had some hope. The plan would be: partial revert of the big 6.8 nerf and some additional adjust for ADC item changes. This could put her in an okay place, maybe.
- Cons
  - Players are absolutely exhausted with Freya balance. They would likely have little hope, excitement, or trust for a Freya buff, even though the community is keenly aware of how poorly she is performing right now.
  - Doesn't change the fact that her new Abilities for 1 and 2 are not meeting the desired goals.
Push further into the rework
- Pros
  - We could end up with a really exciting and fun god that feels balanced and interesting.
- Cons
  - This would require a large rework. The plan would be: Change ability 1 or 2 entirely, rework passive again, add much better pre-fire and counterplay mechanics to Banish and her Ultimate.
  - This goddess would cease to feel like Freya. In order to achieve this Freya would be losing many of her defining features: Double Stim, Banish CC effect, High Risk High Reward play style.
Revert the Passive, Pulse, and Irradiate
- Pros
  - Veteran Freya fans would be very pleased, as would any long-term SMITE players who often request reverts of reworked characters and strongly appreciate when we are honest about our mistakes and take action to remedy them.
  - Freya would definitively still "feel like Freya."
  - Players would possibly be surprised and relieved to see this change, instead of bored and negative about it.
- Cons
  - Freya will have the same problems she had before the rework.
  - We have never done something like this and players might backlash harder than ever before.

Player perception, especially among our veteran players, is of the utmost importance to the design team. All new gods and balance decisions throughout Seasons 5 and 6 have been focused toward this change. The results have been overwhelmingly positive. New god launches and balance patches have been more positively received by players than any time in SMITE history.

This Freya decision was made with this concept in the forefront of the discussion. When discussing which direction to take Freya we always asked ourselves: "What change will get the largest number of our players excited?" The revert met this goal more than any of the other options.

Option 1 didn't feel honest and transparent to us. We know the community really appreciates the truth, and we couldn't continue to tell them that the current design was an improvement.

Historically SMITE players hate when we change gods into something completely different. Regardless of how unbalanced or unpopular it may be, we always try to keep the characters core design. This ruled out Option 2.

The revert seemed like the best option, although a far from perfect one.

THE PLAN (AND THE DATA)

We will return her Passive, Pulse, and Irradiate to their previous states. We will revert all of her balance numbers to earlier ones in her career.

This next chart shows Freya's entire history, across all game modes and skill levels. Data starts at the end of 2012!

BLUE line is her match count shown as a percent of total matches

This makes it immune to changes in total player count
It's expected for gods to gradually drop down as more new gods are introduced
Notice the times when Freya rose and fell in her popularity; it corresponds closely to certain patches as well as changes in win-rate and ban-rate

ORANGE is win-rate

This is shown without any adjustments for player skill or population shifts
Her highest win-rate ever was 52%
Lowest ever before the rework was 46%
Currently at 38%

GREEN is ban-rate

This is also shown as a percentage of total bans
Notice the relative differences between her spikes
Even when she was powerful in the past, she was never banned more than she was after the rework

You can see an area in August 2016 when she was visually updated. Her popularity spiked initially, then dropped.

Afterward, from November 2016 to February 2017, her ban-rate went way up and win-rate went way down. Although her ban-rate rose here, it was never as high as the more recent spikes.

Her first huge spike was in August 2017, after a Base Attack Speed and Pulse Damage Buff. The Attack speed was immediately reverted and the Pulse damage halfway reverted in the next patch.

She would receive no other changes until 5.3, February 2018, where other next spike occurred. 5.3 was actually significant nerfs to her, so she spiked due to meta shifts or item changes. Likely the 5.1 changes to the meta caused this.

Notice how extremely intense these spikes were but they still don’t reach the intensity of her rework ban-rate.

It is important for us to understand what caused her previous rise and fall in order to launch this Freya revert successfully.

Based on this data we will aim for February 2017 balance point. This was the medium popularity, closest to 50% win-rate, and lowest ban-rate.

We aim to launch her in this state with the hope she will feel slightly undertuned in the current meta and item builds. We certainly do not want to have to do a series of balance changes after this launch, due to players already being quite sick of Freya balance.

Hopefully this revert will do the following

Yield positive community feedback through honesty, transparency, and righting a mistake.
Yield positive community feedback by returning a reworked god to their classic state, something often requested for Freya.
Place Freya in "niche popular" match count stats, meaning: someplace in the bottom 40 but not in the bottom 10 gods.
Place Freya in a "high skill balanced" win-rate stats, meaning: under 50% but still feeling potent in the hands of a player who has significant time played with Freya.

WHAT ELSE DID WE LEARN?

To restate Freya's unique features, and why they are hard to work with:

Freya is unlike any other god in SMITE. She is a Mage that can flex between an Assassin or a Hunter. This flex potential makes her design inherently hard to adjust. Focusing in one direction could cause a lot of disappointment.

She has Banish, a rare form of Crowd Control which only appears on Freya, Janus, Kumbhakarna, and Ne Zha. This type of CC is very high variance. Freya's Banish does no damage so it must be followed up on in order to be effective. It can also save enemies from allies' attacks.

She has 2 stims with interlocking synergy, something that no other god has. This causes a multiplicative effect that leads to her being very effective and then doing literally nothing.

After this arc of work we changed our opinions on what causes problems with her kit:

If we had to make changes to Freya after this revert. We do have a plan.

Her Passive, Pulse and Irradiate would be numbers focused, possibly with additional improvements to visual or audio clarity on her effects. They would be adjusted through balance only, never reworked again.

Banish would need significant changes. It has a lot of problems that need solving

Its essentially un-dodgeable
- Add pre-fire time or deploy time
It can save enemies from allies attacks
- Let enemies be hit during it, but drastically decrease duration
This would make it feel like a normal skill shot stun
- Add unique elements for flavor and feel to make it unique
- Let enemies hit by it hover lightly off the ground, and still have some control over their movement although greatly slowed

Her Ultimate would also need significant changes

This ability feels rather lackluster to many new players, when in reality it provides an absolutely insanely powerful combination of easy to confirm damage, mobility, and immunity frames
- This ability should most likely have the normal channel time that a global ult has, where Freya should be rooted and vulnerable before leaving the ground
- Each individual shot should be easier to dodge with better warning deployables or slower projectile time
- Find another utility feature to make it interesting and unique since its mobility and damage potential would be decreased.

We hope we never have to do those things, but we might as well be clear about documenting and communicating them since we spent so much time working on this goddess.

OTHER GODS

This might bring up some questions about other gods and our decisions about resource allocation, so let's discuss the possibilities and trade-offs.

First let's describe our criteria and constraints for a god rework. We will not rework a god's abilities unless all 4 of the following are met:

Popularity is significantly low (bottom 10 gods or significantly dropped below previous data for the god).
Balance problems exist (very high win-rate, very low win-rate, extreme difference between skill levels, extreme difference between community perception and actual stats).
Community discussions and requests are asking for a change to occur with significant frequency or magnitude (big reddit posts, constant twitter discussions in multiple circles).
Kit exhibits clear ways to improve clarity, theming, or frustration issues.

Once we Identify a God meets these criteria, we will begin designing the reworked abilities. We keep the following constraints in mind:

We have no plans to rework a gods complete kit in the foreseeable future. Only certain abilities will be addressed in a rework. Usually around 2 abilities are adjusted.
Try our absolute best to preserve their core play style. This refers to the kit as a whole, and less to specific abilities.
Try not to remove core unique features from the kit that are only present in the game on this god. Always try to keep their unique features, usually by preserving specific abilities.
Be specific about our goals for gameplay and thematic improvements, and focus rework design toward those goals.

A common concern from players about something like this is, 'This work is taking away resources from a god who needs it more."

We hope the data and feedback shared in this writeup prove that Freya needs this badly
We can confirm that Odin and Bastet reworks are our top priority for Season 7
- The Freya revert did not affect this timeline
- Odin and Bastet are currently planned for reworks in 7.1 by meeting the above criteria and their design changes will follow the above constraints.
- Odin's goals will be:
  - To preserve his core play style of an aggressive, high damage warrior with an Ultimate that blocks player movement.
  - Improve his ability to fight over long periods of time.
  - Add more flavor to his kit through runic magic and the use of his spear.
- Bastet's goals will be
  - To preserve her core play style as an early game high DPS assassin that can dive in and out of fights.
  - Add utility to her kit to help her better scale into the late game.
  - Focus on using her cats in more interesting ways than normal pets.
- It is possible that one of these reworks does not ship in 7.1. Depending on how design iteration goes we might delay or hold on one, but we are starting work on them.

Another discussion likely to arise from this is the request to revert other gods who were reworked. Some of those were quite successful, some were not. We can share our thoughts on those gods too.

Ratatoskr's goals were mostly justified at the time of release, but we are considering a partial revert for the Rat. We have current designs in progress to return his Acorns. Each Acorn would provide a new twist to each of his current abilities, but these effects would be a bit more tame than the frustrating, confusing, and poorly balanced ones of old Ratatoskr. This most likely launch later in Season 7 depending on the scope and the success of internal tests.
Nox is also a common point of discussion when it comes to classic gods. Current Nox can be frustrating and is difficult to play, but she is actually quite popular. We do not plan to revert Nox to her classic state. Classic Nox had a slightly more bruiser/battle mage feel with her shield, which we agree had its merits. Tuning Nox slightly more toward a support could be good for balance but we worry it would upset current Nox mains. The other features of Classic Nox are her low cooldown circle damage ability, and her Ultimate. We still consider both of those designs to be clearly unsuccessful and have no desire to bring them back. The circle damage spam created high frustration and high skill variance, while being especially unplayable on gamepad. The Ultimate had a confusing negative feedback loop where players were punished for making decisions that are usually correct, which was unfun and difficult to convey.
Arachne has been quite successful lately, after admittedly requiring years of buffs, balance, and meta changes. She is currently quite popular and strong while providing an Assassin play style not quite like any other in that class. Her old kit was especially high variance resulting in either the Arachne or enemy feeling helpless.
Nu Wa's kit is often looked back upon nostalgically. Current Nu Wa is quite successful and balanced, so we have no plans to revert her either. However, we do think that core concepts of that Classic kit do have a lot of potential for fun and interesting designs, and we will consider them for future gods, although no one is currently planned to draw inspiration from Old Wa.

CLOSING

The Freya revert will be a very unique situation that we will all be able to learn from.

Even though this post is a lengthy read, we wish we could go into the data even more closely. Maybe we will on some sort of follow up discussion! Please share your thoughts about this decision on social media and make sure to keep the discussion going.

Remember that our number one goal, always, is to make our players happy.

Thanks for reading.

Source: https://www.smitegame.com/news/developer-update-freya/

Thanks to Janitsu for the signature!

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This is an interesting adjustment, being the first time they do an official revert of a rework.

I applaud them for the transparency and discussion; it's actually quite interesting. In most senses, I'm one of those that's excited about the revert. I always felt more comfortable with her old style, though a lot of that probably stems from the simplicity of that kit. That said, she always felt very unique to me. The rework, although also exciting at the time, was never one I particularly wanted.

Now they're saying they're going to revert her kit to the state it was in February 2017. (Here's a link to SMITE Wiki from that timeframe) This probably needs further discussion. As they did, I'm going to do a slight deep-dive, but more based on the current state of the item meta at the time. Based on their discussion, there's obviously been a lot of coverage on various subjects, but it almost feels like they're greatly overlooking some aspects of that time.

Core items: Links provided will be the stats for those items as of Feb 2017. From recollection, at that time, her core items included Shoes (usually Shoes of the Magi, though I've always liked Shoes of Focus as well), Bancroft's Talon, Hastened Fatalis (yes, Fatalis was there in Feb 2017), Demonic Grip, Spear of the Magus, and Telkhines Ring. Alternative items that could be considered included Rod of Tahuti, Magi's Blessing (before it became Cloak), Gem of Isolation, etc. I'll talk about some of those main items in a bit.
Movement speed: Freya was always one that was very reliant on MS. With the old kit, it was an all-in thing...get in, do damage, get out and wait for skills to be off CD as she does absolutely nothing when she doesn't have Pulse/Irradiate up. She also notably (still) does not have any enhanced mobility in her kit, such as a dash, MS boost, etc., which put her at a bit of a disadvantage over comparative ADCs that did have mobility abilities. She relied upon slightly enhanced base MS through itemization, and proper timing/use of Banish and her ult. As of Feb 2017, she needed 2 items for her base MS: Shoes and Fatalis. Shoes provided the standard 18% MS, while Fatalis at the time provided 10%. This gave her a really solid 28% MS. These were built as #1 and either #2 or #3, giving her great early MS. She could even increase her advantage against enemies by adding Gem of Isolation to the kit.

Right now, Hastened Ring provides 7% MS when it's built, so her base MS when using this item, but the item, which used to cost 2,150 gold in its Feb 2017 Fatalis version, now costs 2,700 gold, pushing it away from obvious early-item purchase. So, in the early game, she'll have the base 18% from Shoes, and be at a disadvantage MS-wise compared to any god that has mobility abilities or early itemization into Boots + items from the Katana tree. She loses in the MS aspect with regard to this revert.
Shoes: Magi in 2017 had 45 power, 10 pen, and 18% MS, at a price of 1,600 gold. It now has 55 power, with no other changes...so she gets a slight boost from this revert.

Focus in 2017 had 40 power, 250 mana, 10% CDR, and 18% MS, at a price of 1,500 gold. It now has 55 power, with no other changes other than the price was slightly higher at 1,550 gold...so she gets a slightly higher boost from this revert as well, if she itemizes into Focus over Magi (compared to 2017 of course).

In the end, though, the difference is fairly negligible as to not need further consideration, IMO.
Bancroft's Talon: Bancroft's Talon in 2017 had 100 power and 15 base lifesteal, with a passive increasing up to 100 power and 15% more lifesteal at 25% health, for a price of 2,300 gold.

Today's version adds a base 150 mana, and a max 20% more lifesteal at 25% health (5% higher lifesteal than the old version), for an increased cost of 2,500 gold. Although the mana is nice, it will at most provide 1 more Pulse/Irradiate combo (or 2 solo Pulse uses for waveclear), and the passive lifesteal increase isn't enough.

If anything, I'd probably consider this a wash in an isolated environment, but the increased cost does hurt her early game a bit, and with the consideration of other item changes, isn't a positive.
Hastened Fatalis / Ring: This is the big one. Fatalis in 2017 was an overpowered bastard, providing 10 flat pen, 20% AS, and 10% MS, plus the passive that didn't have a cooldown for the Fatalis effect (and only required that you keep hitting the enemy). This could be had for the low, low price of 2,150 gold. No power, you say? Freya says eat my Pulse/Irradiate.

The current iteration of this item, Hastened Ring, trades flat pen for 70 power, provides 25% AS (a 5% increase), and 7% MS (a 3% decrease), while giving you the "Haste" passive for a straight 6 seconds (and a 25% cooldown). Oh, and the cost is now 2,700 gold, making it a fairly luxury item.

If I could emphasize anything about this revert and needing to consider other tweaks, it's this difference. It's major, and it's a huge nerf in comparison. This does NOT put her back to where she was technically at, stat-wise, in 2017. This is a straight up hard nerf. The crazy price difference hurts her early game should she want to itemize into this as item 2 or 3. The decreased MS (though technically minor) can be shrugged off, and perhaps the trade-off of pen for power (and a 5% AS boost) can be considered a potential bonus. But the cooldown of the Haste effect means she can no longer have the Fatalis advantage whenever Pulse is active. Remember, she relies on Pulse for her ranged basic attack function. The rework allowed her to trigger the range on and off. This revert means it's on for 5/6 seconds, and then off. And now she won't have her juke/boxing capability like she had in 2017...she'll have to play more conservatively until the Haste effect is back up.
Demonic Grip: Here is where she starts making up some ground, at least as the T3 item. Demonic in 2017 gave 60 power and 20% AS for 2,300 gold. The passive hasn't changed from then to now.

The current version provides 75 power and 30% AS for the same cost. Alright, a significant boost here. The one potential negative, which won't always affect buyers, is the T2 variant. The old version of Enchanted Ring provided 30 power and 15% AS for 1,400 gold, which was nice for the AS specifically. The new version provides only 45 power, but costs 300 gold less. Maybe a tradeoff/wash, and minor in the consideration of a full build. But in the end...this is a significant buff, though it doesn't make up for the lack of Fatalis. Let's continue.
Spear of the Magus: Magus in 2017 provided 50 power and 15 flat pen for 2,150 gold. The passive hasn't changed from then to now.

The current version provides 65 power (a 15 power increase), but costs 2,450 gold. At full build, this is a buff, but 15 power isn't worth 300 gold.

The one other aspect to consider here is how it interacts with her kit, and this is significant. Both Pulse and Irradiate triggered the passive stacks. Her rework only allows Northern Lights (basically Irradiate) to activate it, and her ranged form of Aurora Blade (Pulse) can't do it by itself like Pulse could. One major positive function of a rework is when she's got a good AS boost. This allows one trigger of Pulse to give her 10, maybe 12 shots before it goes on CD. Instead of a hard limit of 5 hits, this means she can build those protection reduction stacks on more than one enemy if she chooses to switch targets. Definitely a buff for her kit in reverting the rework, but not so when considering this item's differences in 2017.
Telkhines Ring: This is an interesting one. Telk in 2017 provided 80 power and 20% AS, along with up to 5 stacks of a 10 power buff, for a price of 2,800 gold. (Note this could stack on structure hits)

The current version provides 90 power (a 10 increase) and 25% attack speed (a 5% increase), along with bonus damage equal to 10 + 15% magical power scaling, for a lower cost of 2,700 gold. Unfortunately, the passive doesn't apply to structures.

IMO, although still essentially a luxury cost, it's a solid buff in general comparison for god v god fights. Magical gods scale basic attacks at 20% (physical is 100%), so when looking at the passive, 50 extra power at full stacks is basically that flat 10 damage boost of the new version, and that's not even considering the added scaling. Add the slightly higher base stats and a slight cost decrease, and you have a better item compared to 2017. Just not significant enough.
Other items: With the revert, she'll be one of the few gods to get good potential out of the nerfed Gem of Isolation, and that can be built later. It helps that we now have Elixir of Speed, so she can itemize into more items at late-game...though of course all gods have that advantage. Tahuti's new form is probably just fine and possibly better situationally...haven't done any math and not going to do it, but figure it should still be a solid item. Magi's Cloak has a shorter CD than the old version, so that's nice, but again, these are changes all gods benefit from.

TL;DR: Reverting her to February 2017 balance isn't actually going to revert her stats for win rate, general strength, etc. Although the old kit is better IMO, the lack of Fatalis at its price point just cannot be made up by or any of the other items in a general sense. Yes, in a single, short engagement with 's passive available, she has a damage output advantage mid/late-game in a bubble considering only herself and not her opponent, but otherwise, she's going to be fairly exposed, especially with all the new gods and the CC out there. The CD of the passive hurts, and the high price especially hurts.

I might have overlooked some other points, or maybe gotten something wrong, but if you took the time to read through this novel, would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

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