SMITE 101: Positioning

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In every SMITE pro match the most thrown around term is, without a doubt, ‘positioning’. Even in Ranked games this comes up time and time again, especially when you or your teammates are not performing as well as you could. But what is positioning exactly? That, my loyal reader, is what I’m here to explain.

When I started playing SMITE in the early stages of open beta I had no prior MOBA experience. Hell, I didn’t have any PvP experience period! Even back then people were constantly telling me my positioning was bad, that I needed to improve my positioning, or just plainly that I sucked at the game. While that last one was true, nobody told me what this ‘positioning’ thing was. It took me over a year, and a lot of analysis of (pro)streamers playing the game to figure out what it is and what I need to take into consideration.

Positioning: A Definition

While a lot of people might want to make you think otherwise, good positioning is a hard thing to define. This is primarily because it is completely dependent on the situation, your goal, your role, the team composition and so forth. Every single aspect of the game affects your positioning needs, and as a result the ‘definition’ is constantly shifting.

The best thing I’ve been able to find is a checklist of sorts, listing the conditions you need to fulfill to have the best positioning possible:

Can I contribute to the situation?
Can i react to the enemies’ actions?
Can I advance when the situation moves?
Can I retreat when the enemy advance on me?

While they might seem self explanatory, especially to the more veteran players, there are some small points that are easily forgotten in the heat of the battle, which can result in an awful turn of events. To help you out, I’ll break down each of the points to clarify what they mean so you too can have good positioning, no matter what your role or play style is.

Contributing to the Situation

The first point is immediately the most malleable and vague point in the list, while at the same time it makes players around the world go: ‘Duh, of course you’ve got to contribute’. But what is contributing to the situation? That entirely depends on the situation and your role. Let’s take a Midlaner during a lull in the game as an example. Depending on the god(dess) you’re playing and the situation, this could mean farming your lane to get your items online, roaming to other lanes to apply pressure, maybe even group up and force an objective or teamfight. But which one ‘contributes to the situation’ the most? That is entirely up to you (and your team) to decide. Farming might be the best option when all lanes are doing well and there are no objectives to take. But this changes the moment a big objective, like the Gold Fury, is about to respawn. Then roaming across the map and applying pressure, maybe even force a teamfight or find a pick or two contributes more than simply farming waves and jungle camps.

While it’s easy to write this off as situational awareness (knowing what’s going on around the map and the best course of action to take based off of that), it is an essential part of your positioning as well. Rotating over to the Solo lane because they’ve been struggling opens up the Gold Fury for the enemy team because it takes longer for you to get there than it does for the enemy Midlaner that stayed in lane and farmed. This macro level view of positioning is often forgotten, as people tend to focus positioning as something essential to fights and skirmishes. However, this is an essential part and crucial to keep in mind.

Speaking of which, contributing to the situation is a lot easier to define when it comes to (potential) fights and (potential) ganks, but is still heavily dependent on your role. For the Midlaner we’ve been talking about, this means being able to hit the enemy team with their damaging abilities, and in the case of healers like Hel or Ra, be able to heal your allies. This changes drastically when you play a Support, as contributing usually means locking down opponents with CC (crowd control) or protecting your allies. Most roles have their purpose in fights relatively clearly defined, but this can change in a moment’s notice depending on the situation, and you might have to contribute in ways you’re not expecting. An Assassin Jungler, like Serqet, might have to zone (scare off) the enemy, usually the job of the Solo laner, or protect an ally, usually the job of the Support.

The best way to figure out what the optimal way of contributing to the situation is is to ask yourself these three questions:

What is happening now?
What is likely to happen 1-5 minutes from now?
Which one of these is more important?

In the case of a fight, the minutes of the second question turns into seconds as fights tend to move and progress extremely fast.

Let’s illustrate this with an example: You’re playing Anhur and you’re fighting a low health Athena and a medium health Janus in the jungle with an allied Zeus who is about to get his cooldowns back (what is happening now). You expect Athena to dash away and Janus to portal through a nearby wall to escape (what is likely to happen in the next 1-5 seconds). Even if Athena dashes away, Zeus is still very likely to secure the kill with his abilities. However, Zeus doesn’t have the mobility to catch up to Janus while you as Anhur can. Add to this that a kill on a Midlaner is generally more valuable than a kill on a Support, so you should probably focus your attention on the Janus and maybe even jump over the wall preemptively to cut off his escape route. While it would be easy to focus on the kill on Athena right in front of you, it’s more important to prevent the Janus from getting away (which one is more important).

Reacting to the Enemies’ Actions

Luckily, this aspect is a lot easier to work with but that doesn’t make it any less important. Discarding the obvious: “Of course you have the react to the enemy! It’s a MOBA!”, what do I mean by this? Simply put: You have the space to avoid enemy attacks or abilities, you have the space to help or assist team members with reacting to the enemies’ actions and you can change your positioning (reposition yourself) based on the enemies’ movement and positioning.

Part of this is already described in the final paragraph of ‘Contributing to the situation’ above. Seeing the Janus move towards a wall means he’s positioning himself to use his portal to escape through it. Reacting to that by jumping over the wall and blocking his escape is a perfect example of reacting to the enemy’s actions.

Another great example, but of the exact opposite, is what often happens when teams are trying to get the Gold Fury. Many players tend to bunch up around our Golden Maiden, making them very susceptible to powerful AoE abilities like Hun Batz’s Fear No Evil or Zeus’ Lightning Storm. While a late game Hunter with some lifesteal might be the best person to tank it from a health perspective, it does mean that the ADC is in melee range of the objective. Add the (usually) Warrior, Assassin and Guardian to that and you have 80% of the team in a few feet of each other. This leaves you unable to quickly react to the enemy’s actions as even the best players body block each other in that situation, putting the entire team at risk.

Assisting team members with reacting to abilities is not that complicated either, though executing it well can be hard. This could mean body blocking an enemy so a low health ally can escape, using an ability to create distance with a knockback like Anhur’s Impale or simply healing them and giving them increased movement speed with Hel’s Inspire.

However, on a more zoomed out scale, reacting on enemy rotations is also part of this aspect of positioning. Seeing the enemy midlaner move towards the Solo lane to alleviate some pressure means you have to make a decision: do you follow? Do you keep farming? Do you rotate towards the Gold Fury to take advantage of the enemy’s absence? All of these fall under reacting to the enemies’ actions.

Advancing When the Situation Moves

Nothing in a match is static and any aspect of a situation, or the situation as a whole, can change in a second. I’ve purposely divided this into two parts, advancing and retreating, as they have their own criteria and thought processes tied to them.

Advancing when the situation moves is most applicable in teamfights. A retreating enemy can escape fairly easily if you position yourself incorrectly and don’t take your abilities into account. Ne Zha, for example, is at a disadvantage in jungle fights when you compare him to gods like Thor and Serqet who have the ability to traverse walls directly. This requires the Ne Zha player to be much more aware of the walls and obstructions around him to be able to chase fleeing enemies.

However, moving when the situation moves isn’t always that directly tied to a teamfight. You’ll see a lot of pro ADC players rotate to the Mid lane when the rest of the team is centered around the Solo lane, even when the fight already dissipated. While the initial intent might have been to join the fight, the purpose of the rotation changed before they got there and applying pressure in the middle lane is more important at that moment, especially if the tower is already low. The situation ‘moved’ from a fight in Solo lane to an objective push in the Mid lane.

Retreating When the Enemy Advance on Me

Or more simply put: can I run from a losing fight? Where the previous paragraphs revolved around moving forward, this revolves around moving back. Being caught in the corner of the Mid Harpies pit might enable you to chase an enemy running into the jungle, it also completely cuts off your escape, unless you have a teleport or jump ability off cooldown.

Regardless of whether it’s in a team fight or about enemy rotations, you always need to have an escape route planned. While having an open path behind you (or some object to jump over) is the first and most obvious step, the enemies’ abilities need to be taken into account as well. A Hun Batz with Blink and Fear No Evil up can delay you enough for the rest of the enemy team to catch up and finish you off, as can an Odin with his Ring of Spears available (and we all know the cooldown of that is 5 seconds!). Both require you to keep more space between you and the enemy, and thus requiring you to increase your ‘circle of awareness’, than a Zeus and Artemis need.

The same ideas apply with regards to enemy rotations. The only difference being that they’re not pounding on your face just yet.

Is This a Complete Guide?

Honestly, no. As I said at the start of the article: this is the information I’ve gathered after playing the game for over three years and watching pro SMITE for roughly the same time, so it’s possible I’ve missed something. However, this should give you a good start, at the very least, with understanding positioning and what to take into account. All I hope for is that this helped you improve the quality and your enjoyment of the game!

Written by Jorg Van Der velden

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