Giving SMITE a Try

There’s Another MOBA Out There?

Well yes…I have finally stepped back from League of Legends for a change. After playing and getting frustrated with toxic players, AFKs, and broken champs, I took a break from LoL yesterday and gave a different MOBA a try…SMITE. Actually, I had downloaded this from the PS store a while ago when Izlain over at Me vs Myself and I mentioned how much fun it was.

SMITE

The game seems to be similar to League in that you shoot down towers and battle your way to a “Nexus” of your opponents to claim victory, but it’s also different. The fact that I’m on my PS4 is a nice change. While I’m still working on being comfortable with the controller, the controls for abilities and items seem to be pretty easy to use. Another big change is the third-person “over-the-shoulder” style of gameplay. Having to point my god in the direction of abilities I want to shoot is definitely interesting.

Auto Everything

Another nice touch, that I’m using full time at the moment, is the Auto Level and Auto Item Purchase. The Auto Level picks which abilities get upgraded as you level through the game. It makes things easier for a noob like myself. I don’t have to pour over research to figure out the optimal build paths and such, I just play and level and the game automatically picks how I should advance. It takes care of the extra effort I’d have to apply to learning the ability details and lets me just learn how to play the game. I’m sure I’ll turn this off soon, but for now, with the two champs I’ve played, it makes things so much easier.

The Auto Purchase feature is another great part of the game that I’m getting heavy use of. I’m not even sure of the names of the items I’ve been using, they’re just getting selected for me…and they seem to make me more powerful. I’m sure there are items to buy that will be more defensive or more offensive but I am just enjoying letting the game pick for me at the moment.

If I keep playing, I’ll start getting into learning the abilities and items since I know that helps drive the type of game someone wants to play, but for now, I’m just enjoying the game.

A Couple of gods

As things stand right now, I’ve only been using a couple of the freely provided gods…

Neith is a Hunter and seems to be similar to an ADC type champion. She’s got a bow and the items that are selected for her tend to be attack speed and physical damage from what I’ve seen.

Ra is a Mage who seems to need a bunch of mana and mana regen items along with magical power items.

Both have a decent straight line based AOE that’s good for taking out minions. For ultimates, Neith has a Caitlyn type shot that hits a single enemy god for a bunch of damage while Ra has a second line based AOE that hurts enemy gods pretty badly. Ra also has an AOE heal that gives him a leg up on tower and team fights. If you can stay in the healing area you and minions can survive when taking tower hits.

Results so far

I’ve won about 50% of my matches so far and think I’m starting to get a handle on the game so I think I’ll keep at it. Right now this seems to be a much more civil MOBA compared to League and I really have grown tired of the toxicity when I just want to have a fun game to play. I’ll keep you updated on how things go.