https://www.smite2.com/news/open-beta-45-update-notes/

EDIT: Forgot to change this but for Susano's Aspect it changes his 1 and not his Passive. All hits deal reduced damage, the second hit gives Susano Protections for each enemy hit for 5s and Knocks Up enemies, and the third hit reduces enemy Protections for 5s.

Weekly Roundup

• August 24th Titan Talk - YouTube VOD
• Open Beta 42 Patch Notes
• August 26th Titan Talk - YouTube VOD
• August 28th Titan Talk - Twitch VOD (Twitch’s site is kinda borked right now)

August 24th Titan Talk - Solo Q&A w/ killgoon

For Monday’s Titan Talk, killgoon ran through the OB42 patch notes solo with the patch dropping earlier this week. 

Q&A Section

• Buffing Lifesteal Items - Is certainly something they’ll be monitoring following the new patch and it is very likely lifesteal will see some changes.
• TTK Being Too High - On average, matches are going a little longer but not to the extent that it’s problematic. Match time is a metric they constantly keep an eye on and will pursue ways to shorten games if necessary.
• Ranked Joust & Slash - A large % of the playerbase in S1 played normal Joust rather than ranked, and ranked Joust was pretty much only more popular than Duel, which they brought back since it doesn’t require as many players in queues.  Ranked Joust is probably the most common feedback point that they haven’t been able to act on, with players mostly wanting bans in Joust, and they’ve discussed at length the best way to go about this. Adding bans to normal Joust risks lowering the population for the mode and adding Ranked would further split it. If they had the resources, they would love to have another mode such as Slash/Clash/Siege but adding one is contingent on having another map for it, which they would rather allocate the time for towards improving existing game modes. Making a new map for Conquest or Assault is one of their main goals, but they aren’t strictly until the game’s full release to get it done.
• Echo Viability on Gods - It’s intended for mostly tick damage Gods to gravitate towards Echo builds and they aren’t expecting it to be viable on every God. They’ve seen players expressing wants to be able to destroy the tentacles made by Cosmic Horror or be able to counter Echo more, though they feel the former sentiment is somewhat driven by the item’s effect being much more visible compared to other passives.
• Complexity of S2 - Making the game more accessible for new players while retaining the game’s complexity at the highest level is one of more difficult balances to strike, as there are a good amount of players that are vocal whenever anything is changed to be more “noob-friendly.”
• Surrendering @ 10 Being Too Early - Ideally, they’d like to discourage surrendering in games where comebacks are realistic but it’s difficult to change players’ mindsets that have less tolerance for losing situations. One thing they’re considering is having surrenders only available at a certain gold deficit.
• Determining if a God has an Unhealthy Gameplay Loop - They mostly look at feedback on what players are being frustrated by and will largely take action if certain kits are very negatively impacting community sentiment, as was the case with Atlas Aspect. Freya was one of the more problematic kits throughout S1 that they could take a few ways for changes when they port her, though historically they’ve struggled with making far too drastic changes that somewhat override previous kit ability identities when pursuing reworks.
• More Enchanter-Oriented God Changes - For Gods that didn’t get touched in this initial God healer pass, they can certainly look towards making further changes to enchanter playstyle kits, such as Baron and Chronos Aspect.
• Coin Sale Weekend - The one time they tried this event, it was largely unsuccessful, so it is very unlikely they’ll be bringing this back.
• Rama Aspect Changes - killgoon agrees that this Aspect doesn’t have much of an identity currently and could see changes in the future.
• Hachiman Changes - Passive is pretty much the same as S1, but they made an update to his passive meter so it now displays the attack speed buff rather than MP5.

August 26th Titan Talk - Open Beta 42 Feedback + Q&A w/ Hinduman & killgoon

Wednesday’s Titan Talk addressed the maintenance to resolve server issues following Tuesday’s patch as well as dedicating a TON of Q&A (more than I usually include sorry lol) pertaining to OB42’s launch.

Post-Patch Day Maintenance

• At the time of this Titan Talk, the game was down for maintenance as they were in the process of upgrading their database servers, which hadn’t been scaled properly to support the number of people playing the game.
• On Tuesday night, they had a node fail which led to multiple other things failing trying to catch up to account for the node failing. They were pretty much running at 95% capacity and so they got their database team to bring the servers back on that night and then upgrade to a bigger, more powerful database structure and backend to keep up with the influx of players with this maintenance.
• Whenever the servers run into these issues, it mostly causes player inventory-related issues, such as missing certain owned Gods, not being able to see builds, and store UI elements being missing. They weren’t inherently caused by the patch dropping and were more as a result of the database backend being overwhelmed.

Q&A Section

• Cause of More Players - Gradual improvements to the game over time have helped attract more and returning players, who stick around and enjoy playing the game for a variety of reasons. They’re expecting the player count to go down from September to November with the summer season ending, and would like to prep people to know that this dip is totally fine and not indicative of the game’s longevity.
• God Select Roles w/ Aspects - Would be something they’d like to have eventually but it would be necessary to show two different versions of the God to instill that picking the Aspect version is necessary, as some players would get confused and think that going base kit/playstyle would be fine for that role.
• Ravana AA Animation Desyncs - Has been fixed internally but may have to wait until the next update, with changes like these being less safe to ship through hotfixes.
• Ability Inputs Queuing - They had seen the Reddit post on this topic and are working to fix it, being a side effect of something else they were trying to fix.
• More Wave Management - In order to do this, they would have to drastically slow down wave clear, with most players throughout S1 and S2 being used to quickly clearing them. Other MOBA’s are definitely more geared towards minion macro management, while SMITE players are more accustomed to quick clearing waves then moving elsewhere.
• Eros’ Bow in Assault - Will be part of the enchanter item pass and will likely see updates as part of it.
• Race to Exalted Rewards - Since these aren’t automatically handed out and someone has to manually on the team has to manually reward them, there isn’t an exact timeslot that these get distributed but they tend to aim for the day after the race ends. Races to Exalted have all been drastically less popular than the Radiant ones.
• Console Text Chat - In-game and post-game chat for consoles is something they obviously want to include but they would have to undergo certification with console platforms that would make them unable to patch the game for potentially up to a month, and they just have to wait for the proper timeframe and work on the existing voice chat services in the meantime to ensure they don’t have to do more than one certification pass.
• Marvel Rivals Team-Ups - Rather than explicitly stated interactions in this vein that could potentially have an impact on God pick viability, they prefer to have in-game kit abilities synergize with each other on their own and not have much of an influence on them.
• Pinging UI Elements Such as ULT CD’s / Items - Has been discussed before and is something they’d want to get around to eventually, but given that this is mostly a PC-centric feature they’d rather prioritize QoL that impacts players regardless of platform.
• Roadmaps & Balance Pass Priorities - Generally, they prefer flexibility with what’s shown on roadmaps content-wise in order to be able to address community balance concerns if necessary, and are expecting a general God balance pass following the addition of enchanter items with room to look at other things follow it. The enchanter balance pass was split into two patches as they wanted to collect immediate feedback on the God changes and work based off of that rather than saving and releasing everything all at once.
• Santa Claus as a God - Despite all the additions from various mythologies and legends over the years, it’s necessary to draw the line at some point. While killgoon wasn’t around for the addition of the Arthurian pantheon, their characters and stories are largely favored by the community. Cthulhu was more decisive as his mythos is more recent relative to the pantheons in-game but fits with the idea of an all-powerful God that is in line with the rest of the cast, and Aladdin also works being based on very old legends. While the rationale can be given that they’ve added Gods based on historical figures like Guan Yu and Mulan, and Santa could be in line with these characters, they’re mostly against the idea of adding him. killgoon also thinks Dracula is a bit of a stretch compared to some of the others that have been added, but SMITE is overall in a more unique position character-wise since the community has a wide array of expectations on what makes sense for roster additions.
• Missing Attack Speed Junglers - They aren’t inherently lining up the God roadmap to fill missing role niches such as attack speed junglers (Bakasura, Arachne, Erlang Shen being the missing ones). They slightly dread the port for Freya less than they do Erlang Shen, since the latter’s kit has changed so much since his original implementation and will ultimately let the designer on point for him have free reign on what they feel will work best for him design-wise.
• Ares Aspect Disabled - Since this is universally the least played Aspect in the game, it’s in the process of receiving a mini-rework on the same scope as the ones in OB41 and will just remain disabled for now on live servers for now while they work on updating it internally.
• Tank Echo Items - This version of Echo has been relatively better received compared to its first iteration and they currently slightly support bruiser Echo builds via Eye of the Storm, and they might open it up in the future with tank Echo items but there aren’t as many tick-based tank Gods outside of Khepri, Sylvanus, or Cerberus.
• Next Patch & Labor Day - While they won’t be in the studio on Labor Day, they aren’t expecting the next patch to be delayed because of it.

August 28th Titan Talk - Open Beta 42 Community Q&A w/ Hinduman & killgoon

Last Titan Talk of the week was mostly dedicated to Q&A to close out OB42 release week.

End of the Week Announcements

• Ravana Aspect is now live!
• The hotfix meant to go live on Wednesday had been delayed and will have a few additional fixes tacked onto it with it planned to ship later today. Full details will be available on the S2 wiki, but this hotfix will include the following fixes:
  • Some Ravana animation desyncs
  • Ravana ULT while crippled, may not be getting full CC immunity this hotfix
  • Featured bundle ownership
  • Voting input pop-ups for surrenders and pauses on controller
• There is a chance that the Ishtar Twitch Drop meant to run this weekend may be delayed, since it’s currently not in-game and should be added with this upcoming hotfix.

Q&A Section

• Movement Tech Update - Is actively being worked on with some good results and some bad from this week’s playtesting, but no firm target date on when all these changes would ship.
• Egyptian Background on Home Screen - Isn’t meant to tease any upcoming Gods and the UI team just felt it would look better with this background configuration.
• Aphrodite Post-Changes - Some players that don’t closely follow the game and its changes are probably still playing her Mid and aren’t seeing as much success. Any Gods that have adjusted to fit under the enchanter umbrella are expected to be performing a little below standard until the enchanter items arrive in the next upcoming patch.
• Gilgamesh Dropkick Issues - They’re aware of some people having problems with this ability but don’t have enough concrete to isolate what exactly needs to be resolved. They tried to approximate the camera angle and treatment from S1 as closely as possible since they weren’t able to port it 1:1 from UE3 to UE5.
• PS5 God Pack Pricing - killgoon had seen the Reddit post on this and from what he could tell, this was an odd instance where the in-game UI hadn’t updated while the sale on the PS platforms had ended and didn’t affect very many players outside of the OP.
• Official Release & God Ports - While they intend on porting every God from S1, S2’s full release isn’t contingent on reaching this goal and some Gods may be saved for afterwards. DOTA 2 had 5-10 Heroes that hadn’t been ported from DOTA 1 when it fully released, with one of them taking ~5 years to finally be added.
• Work on Cliodhna’s Wall Walk - Whenever they have some leftover programming bandwidth, they do put in some work to tackle some of the more problematic God abilities for future ports in the background. While it isn’t indicative that she’s coming any time soon, there has been some work done on Cliodhna’s wall walking.
• Effect of Enchanters on Team Comps - They recently had a playtest where one of them went Hel Solo and had difficulties closing the game without a dedicated frontliner. Their expectation and hope is that having enchanters promotes more varied team composition drafting to the extent that players will see enchanter Supports and opt to go with tankier Junglers or Solos.
• Crossovers in S2 - Although they still get requests from some IP’s for potential crossover pitches, they aren’t really seen as a priority at this current point in time and they’re more focused on delivering God ports every 2 weeks rather than allocating that time on a skin line for a patch.
• Porting Unpopular Gods - They are trying to mix up the God pipeline and work in some of the more unpopular Gods where it makes sense, with Bastet and Hel being some examples, but they generally will avoid having a string of non-popular God ports since the community tends to complain that nobody wants those Gods.
• Geb Aspect Nerfs - These were done in reaction to the prominence of CRIT / Echo and now that it’s been out of the meta for a while now, they are considering potential buffs for the Aspect and possibly looking at his basic attack scaling again.

https://www.smite2.com/news/open-beta-42-update-notes/

Weekly Roundup

• August 10th Titan Talk - YouTube VOD
• Open Beta 41 Patch Notes
• August 14th Titan Talk - Twitch VOD
• Pantheons Collide Art Contest

August 10th Titan Talk - Open Beta 41 Patch Notes w/ killgoon

Titan Talk on Monday was the rundown for OB41 patch notes on the sole show that killgoon was on for the week.

Q&A Section

• Action Cam for New Players - From everything they’ve tested, making action cam as the default does have a positive impact on new player retention. There are a few other camera-related changes they’d like to try, but presenting an option between camera types for players starting the game isn’t something they’ll likely do as it can overload new players.
• Rod of Tahuti Changes - All the item passes they’ve recently done have been prioritized over what they’ve wanted to do for Rod of Tahuti since it isn’t seen as important as some of the other things they’ve tackled. If they were to do a pass on INT items and Rod of Tahuti’s passive, it would probably look similar to the % protection item changes that replaced % increases with flat bonuses.
• Candidates for God Buffs and Nerfs - They look at pretty much every metric that can be pulled relating to a given God’s performance and are generally aware of how they are doing in various game modes. Subjective player feedback is also taken into consideration, and sometimes they avoid making changes to a God when they expect other things in a patch to affect their performance or are awaiting sweeping changes in an upcoming patch that are likely to impact them.
• Saga Skin Themes - They will almost certainly do a more fun, whimsical skin theme for a future Saga (may not be the next one up). Dark and serious skins have historically sold well for them, so that’s generally why most of the Sagas have followed themes in that vein. Because Saga skins involve more animation and rig work, they could theoretically do a chibi skin for a Saga but doing enough within that theme to sell it as a Saga may pose a challenge.
• Map Weather w/ Gameplay Effects - Weather is something they’d like to possibly implement at some point, but striking a balance between map aesthetic and gameplay is important for them as they’d like to keep things rooted as a MOBA and avoid some of the more impactful map effects the way HOTS does it.
• Future Aspect Updates - Their goal with the enchanter item pass is to target specific item additions, but they’re aware some enchanter-style Aspects may need to be touched up as part of it so the pass may need to be in parts.
• Esports Nowadays as a Mid Tier Game - Esports attracted a lot of potential since investors saw it as a path to making a lot of money, but this hasn’t really materialized since media rights can’t be sold the same way and sponsorships from non-gaming industry companies hasn’t pushed much for advertising money. It’s difficult to have a high prize pool without being a big game like League or Fortnite, and even those scenes’ prize money has gone down over time. When crowdfunding for S1, it didn’t drive enough of a difference in sales compared to when things were marketed normally.
• More Pathfinding Items - They’re in favor of Pathfinding as a stat and will largely incorporate it into item effects in place of move speed where possible; Caps had intentionally made the buff from Damaru movement speed rather than Pathfinding.
• Success of Adaptive Starters - They largely favor the freedom in options afforded by the current starter system but have run into issues where some of the effects overlap too much with each other, and would like to ideally push more options that open up gameplay styles rather than being strictly role-based.

August 14th Titan Talk - Open Beta 41 Feedback + Art Q&A w/ Hinduman & Ben

Today’s Titan Talk was without killgoon, who is out on a family vacation, and featured the art director, Ben, for some art-related Q&A.

Thursday Hotfix

• Totem of Death proccing too often
• Staff of Cosmic Horror not proccing often enough
• Omen Drum stacks falling off too quickly
• Fixed an issue with AI Bots and vortexes
• Khepri
  • General
    • Basic attack sync fix
• Ix Chel
  • IxChel not being selectable under mid or support
  • Threads of Light
  • Aspect of the Mother's Light
    • Cooldown increased from 6 to 10s
  • Lunar Invocation
    • speed increased
  • Rainbow Crash
    • speed increased
  • Great End
    • Cancelling targeting ultimate still takes the mana
    • Rapid cancelling the ult to keep echo bonus or spam inhand is fixed

End of the Week Announcements

• Ix Chel Aspect is now live!
• Another hotfix is planned to ship soon but may slip into next week.
• Submissions for a new SMITE Prime art contest with the theme of pantheons colliding are open and includes Diamond prizing for the 2nd-5th place entries and $200 USD for the grand winner. Submissions will be open until September 20th, afterwards voting will take place for a week before the winners are then announced and showcased on Titan Talk.

Q&A Section

• Recent New Skins - Another member of the art team, Jason, was on the forefront of this Saga, previously working on S1’s skin themes during the transition to S2 and works on model updates for Gods like Awilix and Bastet. Ben took over for the splash art for this skin since the previous splash artist had a family emergency come up. The Dapper Demon Ah Puch had come from a concept done by Ena, who was previously on and very prominent on the art team.
• Ben’s Involvement w/ Map Art - Although Ben is the art director, he mostly only overlooks what gets done by the rest of the team and lets them do as they’d like on the artistic side, only really checking to make sure things are in line with SMITE’s art style and offering suggestions for improvements.
• Bastet’s Art Update - For very old models such as Xbalanque, Hun Batz, and now Bastet, that require drastic model overhauls sometimes ends up splitting player opinions when going from one re-design to another. The art team paid attention to a lot of the community discourse on wants for potential Bastet model changes and made sure it would reflect off of what most players want and casted a voice actor with a strong Egyptian accent for her new VP.
• Creatures Character Models - Non-humanoid Gods like Bake Kujira definitely limits the team with what all they can do, as they have to treat their basic attack and emotes such as claps differently compared to human characters, and this does make Gods in this vein more expensive to make and animate. They’re also more limited on skin themes, but delivering on major figures like Jormungandr is just as important for them as it is for the fanbase so they develop creature Gods as they’re able to within their budget. As an example of things blowing out of proportion due to having to work on a non-humanoid God, Tiamat affected the God development schedule so much that they had to skip a God release and come out with the Loki rework instead just to keep in track for Tiamat’s release.
• Memes for Global Emotes - Early on, Ben would hand animate global emotes such as for Danzaburou’s butler skin, which was time-consuming when they could be spending their time elsewhere. It’s also tough for them to get easy wins for emotes like they could for Janus’, which Ben referenced some Rick and Morty-based art done by the SMITE community. Eventually, global emotes ending up dropping in quality due to time constraints and members of the dev team leaving while other members like their UI artist, Erice, were being overloaded with everything on their plate. The art team saw a lot of the community discourse on the quality of global emotes and Ben took it upon himself to get these back on track and start solely referencing memes and other media. As a teaser for Ravana’s global emote, Ben considered referencing a meme with UFC commentators and Joe Rogan but with Ravana’s multiple heads taking their place and also considered looking towards something similar to a character from Baki iconically grinning. What they ultimately decided on was to reference Akuma from Street Fighter’s Raging Demon move and pose with a Ravana twist.
• Underdog Mythological Figures - Personally, Ben would like to work on under-represented characters from pantheons such as Japanese yokai, potential Lovecraftian figures, and more Yoruba or Maya Gods. He also mentioned wanting to have work done on Anansi, although that may slightly overlap with Arachne.
• More Attractive Male Skins - It’s tough to entirely gauge what the playerbase is interested in in terms of skin ideas but they tend to play towards fans’ tastes. For the Moolan skin, it was intended to be a badass female warrior in line with Red Sonja as an inspiration and was meant to parallel with the Horus farmer chicken skin as rival animal-themed clans. As mentioned before they pay a lot of attention to community feedback on these subjects and based on the outcry for more male-oriented skins, they are certainly willing to work on more skins in that vein. As a teaser, Jason is working on one such skin and based on what Ben had seen that was being used as reference, there are some cheeks involved.

Titan Talk today gave the latest roadmap of Gods and content tied to the upcoming Saga event that’ll be showcased in full on Wednesday’s show. This roadmap includes Ravana, who marks the 90th God to be added to SMITE 2!

Link to YouTube VOD

Update 41 | August 11

• New God: Ix Chel, The Light Weaver
  • +1s:
    • Slight heal scaling on A02
    • ULT can now Echo, conditionally
  • Aspect:
    • Enchanter.
• Design Focus: Echo Itemization
  • Echo payoff items: “When You Echo, Do X”
  • Most power of Echo shifted to these payoff procs
• Design Focus: Minor Aspect Reworks
  • Updates to Hercules, Cupid, Athena, Sobek, Apollo Aspects (and more!)
  • Example: Cupid Heart Bomb Can Now Attach to Ally Gods to Heal
• New Saga Event: Dark Tapestry
  • Collect to unlock Rewards, or Buy All for Event Contents
  • Includes all new Wandering Market Content through OB45 (Oct. 6)
  • Featuring a new Saga for Neith: Grim Pact
  • New Cosmetic Type: Level Up Skins
  • Also launching with a new Ah Puch skin
• Race to Exalted: Neith
  • Starts Tuesday, August 18th!
• And More!

Update 42 | August 25

• New God: Ravana, Demon King of Lanka
  • Will be available in an early preview on PTS, Aug. 5
  • +1s:
    • TBD, testing a few different approaches at the moment
  • Aspect:
    • EX Moves
• Design Focus: Enchanter Itemization
  • Items to support Healing/Shielding Support Mage Gameplay
• Dark Tapestry Continues
  • Classic Traveler for Xing Tian
  • New Travelers for Medusa and Ix Chel
• Race to Exalted: Medusa
  • Starts Tuesday, Sept. 1st!
• And More!

Update 43 | September 8

• New God: Hachiman, Lord of the Eight Banners
  • Design Explorations:
    • Considering if/how to incorporate additional Banners
    • Playing with several ideas around making his Dash more interesting in his kit flow
• Dark Tapestry Continues
  • Classic Travelers for Sol and Tsukuyomi
• Race to Exalted: Tsukuyomi
  • Starts Tuesday, Sept. 15th!
• And More!

Update 44 | September 22

• New God: Hel, Goddess of the Underworld
  • All New Model!
    • In the process of casting for a new voice pack
  • Too early for design teasers on +1s or Aspect
• Dark Tapestry Continues
  • Classic Travelers for Charon and Amaterasu
  • Reward Traveler for Thor
• Race to Exalted: Charon
  • Starts Tuesday, Sept. 29th!
• And More!

Further Look Ahead

• Holiday Studio "Break"
  • Over the holidays, just like last year, we will have a longer break than normal between patches
  • This is for two reasons:
    • Platforms are also on vacation, and we cannot safely update the game during the weeks of Christmas and New Year's
    • We are people and would like to spend time with our loved ones
  • We are currently targeting Dec. 15 for the last update of 2026, and Jan. 12 for the first update of 2027
• Rest of Year God "Class" Lineup
  • Two Guardians
  • One Warrior
  • Two Junglers (including Ravana)
  •  Three Mages (including Ix Chel and Hel)
  • Two Hunters (including Hachiman)
  • 10 total more Gods before end of 2026

Q&A Section

• Aspects for Gods That Don’t Have One - Is something they’d like to when they have time, any Aspects that need extra FX has to be slotted into the production schedule. Adjusting existing Aspects can be done more quickly without involving as much design bandwidth.
• Native North American Pantheon - Not something they’re 100% opposed to but would require a cultural consultant that’s an expert on the represented religions to treat them with respect.
• Races to Radiant Burnout - There has been an increase in discussion on this matter but these events have always been geared towards rewarding players that are interested in participating rather than being for everyone. They expanded the tiers since there were more interested players than they anticipated, though the Races to Exalted haven’t been nearly as popular.
• Only 1 Remaining Warrior - They aren’t intentionally avoiding classes and are rotating through them as they make sense, but the Warrior class has the least amount of remaining Gods and the most requested ones in Tyr and King Arthur necessitate work on the movement system overhaul to work well. The movement tech being worked on is mostly done to better address disagreements between client and server positions of each player as they move around.
• Work on Pet Tech - Is mostly focused on increasing the number of things pet AI can do and make them more complex than Nu Wa’s clay soldiers.
• Anti-Heal Item Pass - Has been something they’ve gone back and forth on but aren’t intending on going back to its state in S1 where healing is completely shut out when anti-healed but very potent out of combat. Increasing the base cap of 25% has been considered but not a direction they’ve confirmed to go with.
• Dracula as a God - Personally, killgoon thinks Dracula is a bit of a stretch but his inclusion is something that has come up a lot and may work well as an assassin.
• Xbox Race to Radiant - There’s a plan of action that’s been discussed as compensation for affected Xbox players in the Cu Chulainn race that they’ll have more details to share shortly.
• Wandering Market Coin Gain - Are aware of players having issues getting enough coins in this economy and are still looking into ways to best handle buffing this.
• Twitch Drop Recolor Availability - There were a few methods of attaining these in-game or as rotating Twitch drops that they’ve discussed but haven’t confirmed exactly what they’ve decided on. 
• Scope of Aspect Changes - Aren’t completely new or different Aspects and are leaning towards making them work more cohesively.

Weekly Roundup

• July 27th Titan Talk - YouTube VOD
• Open Beta 40 Patch Notes
• July 29th Titan Talk - YouTube VOD
• SmiteSource Open 2026
• July 31st Titan Talk - Twitch VOD

July 27th Titan Talk - Open Beta 40 Patch Notes w/ killgoon

Monday’s Titan Talk was the usual solo show running down the most recent patch notes and taking Q&A with killgoon.

Q&A Section

• Holiday Break - Come December, the team will be taking another 4-week break over the holidays and skipping a patch in the 2-week cycle. They aren’t able to undergo certification for console text chat during this time since the platform certifiers are also away for the holidays.
• State of Junglers - The designers had watched the video by Weak3n and were discussing it but killgoon hadn’t. Jungle has historically been one of the strongest roles in S2’s lifespan and are making the necessary Conquest changes to ensure that junglers aren’t super weak, and they believe some people feel jungle is weak right now due to their historic strength. Right now, they don’t feel that there’s a crazy imbalance between roles.
• Remaining God Ports for the Year - At least one true guardian God is planned by the end of the year. No new news to give on development on the ports for Cthulhu, Lancelot, or Kuzenbo.
• Hotfix Nerfs for DPS Items vs. Tank Items - For items that necessitate quick hotfixes as they did with the penetration items, they evaluate the scale at which the items are being used and its impact on the game state, and something as severe as causing players to die far too quickly was something they decided needed swifter action against.
• God Healing vs. TTK - The only real outlier at the moment is Guan Yu Aspect which they are addressing this most recent patch. None of the other healers’ numbers are particularly out of line from what they’ve observed and they’re constantly monitoring these metrics as healing is heavily favored in metas with longer TTK.
• End of Match Animations - It was a decision made very early on not to port these over since many players didn’t pay attention to them and would skip over them to view the EOML stats. Doing them now would be a massive arc of work given the number of animations having to be added. They do want to make improvements to the EOML screen and possibly re-do it, but this would not include the old victory and defeat screen animations.
• God Lineup Plans - The God ports up until the end of the year have all been planned out with some room to shift things around in case priorities have to be moved around. When their team was bigger in size, they were able to plan out ports a year ahead.
• Starter Item Pass - Is among the things on the radar and comes up often that they’d what to get around to in a future patch. They appreciate the ability to build any starter in any role but there are a few passives that overlap with one another that they’d like to resolve with a pass like this.
• S1 Tier 2 / Bridge Items - For items like Ichaival, it’s less appealing for a majority of players to have to sell an already built item when they just want to reach full build with a set of T3 items.
• Displaying Ping In-Game - Most games measure ping differently from the way it was done in S1, and choosing one or another was a decision they deliberated on for a while before deciding to prioritize working on something else.
• Unique AA Chains for Gods / Aspects - On Aspects that change their range type, they are limited by having to use existing animations so it’s rare for them to be able to re-purpose ones well enough to fit for Gods like Kali.
• Buffing Underutilized Tank Items - In the most recent protection item pass that targeted getting rid of % increases, they prioritized buffs for tank items that players already utilize. As of recent and in the future, they’d want to buff items that aren’t as used as much, such as Eye of Providence.

July 29th Titan Talk - Open Beta 40 Feedback + Q&A w/ Hinduman & killgoon

Titan Talk on Wednesday following the launch of OB40 went over what happened on patch day with the update being unavailable on certain platforms and taking in feedback over the latest changes.

Open Beta 40 Patch Day Release

• After their build was certified with Xbox, it ended up being stuck in the process of publishing with no way for them to unpublish it to revert to an earlier build or re-attempt at publishing. They had reached out and had it investigated around an hour after running into the issues but the initial responders weren’t able to resolve it. It was then escalated to Xbox’s engineering team and they were able to get the publish unstuck about 12 hours after the initial planned ship time.
• This was a different case from when they had to delay the patch last time and was mostly out of their control, possibly being related to the Xbox outage on Monday.
• For an error on their end, they erroneously forgot to publish the build for Sony Europe, though this was unrelated to the issues they were having with the Xbox build.
• Since they were unsure how long the game would be unavailable for the affected platforms, they hadn’t fully established the plan of action on what to do for the players participating in the Race to Radiant for Cu Chulainn, with them being told that the Xbox side may not be available for a couple of days.

Q&A Section

• Hunters Feeling Strong - From the very early numbers they ran, nothing indicated that carries are performing much stronger compared to last patch and are nowhere near the level mages were right after the INT pen item pass, but they will continue to monitor their performance as time goes on.
• Aspects & Assault Healer Tiers - The issue of classifying certain Gods for healer tiers when their Aspects provide much more healing than their base kit has become more prominent and is something they’re paying attention to but can’t entirely confirm what direction they want to go to resolve this. Locking players into an Aspect in addition to what God gets rolled sounds interesting but this may or may not be something every Assault player is interested in.
• Daily Reddit Skin Polls - killgoon doesn’t pay attention to each post that goes up since there are a lot, but these polls are taken from a very specific subset of the playerbase and the results may not line up with what they can realistically accomplish since their main focus is improving the game state while getting whatever cosmetics they can get done in.
• Ix Chel Patch Show - Is scheduled for next Wednesday and they’ll be joined by their newest designer who took point for Ix Chel. The proposed Echo pass that includes changes to its functionality, its existing item effects, and new Echo items is still planned for this update but there is a small chance it’ll slip to the patch after. Mage bruiser items such as Warlock’s Staff and Tablet of Destinies are still on their radar but aren't as immediate of a priority.
• Next Ported God Survey - Since it’s still the middle of the year, they aren’t expecting the results to be too different from the survey they last had but would like to possibly have another at the end of the year.
• Time CC’d as a Post-Game Stat - These types of stats are fun to see and have some merit but it’s tough to quantify since there are differing CC types and durations. They’ve also wanted to include shielding as a potential EOML stat.
• Worshipper Gain Adjustments - There is a decent difference in worshipper gained when winning compared to while losing that may be a bit much compared to when this bonus was initially established for most games, and has been something they’ve actively discussed. 
• S1 Collabs’ Revenue - For in-game crossovers, they would pay the rights holder a % of the proceeds for the crossover cosmetics along with a minimum guarantee regardless of sales numbers. For the Maxonomic chairs where they licensed the SMITE IP, they would gain a portion of the earnings from each chair sold and the studio also received free gaming chairs!
• Minions Being Too Squishy - Their intentions were to make them weaker in the mid-game but stay relatively the same in the early and late-game, and if wave clear feels off following this patch then they’re willing to adjust accordingly.
• Game Mode-Specific Balance - Barring a few things such as Hecate Aspect, they’d like to avoid making too many balance changes specific to certain modes if they can so that players don’t have to re-learn their Gods’ kits when playing various modes.

July 31st Titan Talk - Open Beta 40 Community Q&A w/ Hinduman & killgoon

Titan Talk today was mostly dedicated to Q&A and the hotfixes that have recently gone live to cap off OB40 release week.

End of the Week Announcements

• Cu Chulainn Aspect is now live!
• SmiteSource will be running an Open circuit league format starting this September with a $21,500 prize pool and Diamond prizing. Registration opens on August 19th.
• The next God Roadmap will be on Monday, August 3rd, and will include more Gods than the previous one. Hinduman teases that he was able to one shot with a not yet revealed God’s ULT in their playtests (it was obviously bugged).

Hotfix Roundup

• Thursday Hotfixes
  • Fixed a mana cost issue with Artio’s Shapeshift that would prevent use.
  • Fixed various issues with Cu Chulainn’s voice lines not working as intended.
  • Fixed an issue with Atlas where his Astrolabe would sometimes get stuck deployed.
  • Adjustments made to Loki’s Vanish audio attenuation and occlusion.
• Friday Hotfixes
  • Fixed an issue with Cu Chulainn’s Vent Anger getting into an odd state and not working if stunned while transforming.
  • Re-enabled Xing Tian Aspect after fixing a bug where loading into games didn’t give the Aspect version of his ULT.
  • Fixed an issue with Dwarven Plate’s tooltip displaying its stats twice.

Q&A Section

• Upcoming Aspect Changes - With the coming update, there will be a few improvements to underutilized Aspects that aren’t strictly balance changes and more tweaks towards their functionality.
• De-Cluttering Skin Selection w/ Prisms - The current implementation with each Saga form being separate is intended so it’s easier for players to get to a given prism for a form. For recolor and mastery skins, they’re against combining them the same way they do for prisms since how each of these skins are acquired is different and some skins in this vein have unique ability FX unlike most prisms.
• More Hybrid Scaling - Their current philosophy is to utilize hybrid scaling in order to enable different playstyles when going STR or INT as they’ve tried with Nut and Sun Wukong. The previous usage of hybrid scaling early on in the game where abilities would alternate between using STR or INT for certain abilities didn’t work well and lead to it feeling off for players since they’re used to building just one stat.
• In-Game Esports Tab - This would be a UI task that would need to be developed alongside all the other UI QoL improvements that get brought up, and they would rather prioritize the latter at this point in the game’s lifespan. The clan system is also commonly requested and they’d like to implement the clan tag and LFG aspects of it and might not prioritize the cosmetics that were tied to it, but they know some players may not be thrilled about this.
• Objective in the Middle of Assault - Has been something they’ve considered in the past but have been deterred since there are many outspoken Assault players whenever anything gets changed for this mode.
• Balance Point for God Releases - While they traditionally prefer to release new Gods slightly on the stronger side, most of the ports of this year have been a little weaker after their experience in playtests. Bastet has been an outlier since she was perceived as weak on PTS and they overbuffed her for her release on live.
• Having Map Bosses as Gods - Aren’t against having Apophis as a potential new God since they’ve already done the same for Surtr and Fire Giant.
• Multiple Aspects for Gods - Could be something they support later down the line where each God has access to 2 or 3 but definitely isn’t feasible in the current state.
• No New ADC-oriented Aspects Since Discordia - The direction they go with for Aspects is based on what they feel would make sense for a given God, and there haven’t been many recently ported Gods that they feel an attack damage-based Aspect would make sense for. They’ve gone for an enchanter-based Aspect for Ix Chel since her kit already seems to align with that type of playstyle.
• More +1’s for Existing Gods - Early on, +1’s were geared for Gods whose base kit from S1 didn’t seem to fit as well with the standards for S2 as to what all a God can do with their abilities, so they aren’t intending on giving more +1’s to God kits that already have a lot going on, like Xing Tian.
• Balancing Based on Win Rates - A lot more is taken into account over just God or item win rates, and they deliberately avoid nerfing items with high win rates if community perception is that the items are weak. There are many cases they run into where performance doesn’t align with perception and they often look at opinions from players at higher skill levels, but they try to take into account feedback from all players regardless.
• Voice Chat Improvements - While they won’t get around to it anytime soon, they’d like to make some drastic changes or rework voice chat to resolve a lot of the issues tied to it.
• Auditions for Voice Roles in SMITE - They work with an external studio based in New York called 3Beep that handles a lot of the casting calls where people record their 30 second auditions of a given voice pack before the devs pick the closest one that works best for a skin to record the rest of the lines. They had previously worked with Okratron 5000 for a lot of S1’s voice roles, who are responsible for series such as Dragon Ball.

https://www.smite2.com/news/open-beta-40-update-notes/

The latest God Roadmap was showcased for today’s Titan Talk, going over the next 2 updates. This roadmap is on the smaller side as it coincides with being in-between major Saga events, and the next roadmap is already lined up for 2 weeks from now on August 3rd.

Link to YouTube VOD

Update 40 | July 28

• New God: Cu Chulainn, The Hound of Ulster
  • One of Top-Requested Traditional “Solo Warriors” on Player Surveys
  • +1:
    • Use your 2 at Level 0!
  • Aspect:
    • Big.
• Design Focus: Carry Itemization
  • New Attack Pen Option: Dominance Returns!
  • New Attack Anti-Heal Option: A Toxic Blade-like item!
  • AND MORE!
• Lots of UI Features!
  • View Teammate & Enemy Stats (Prots, HP, STR, & etc.) in-match!
    • And your own stats while in the Item Shop!
  • View enemy health bars on Portraits when your team has vision
  • Friends List: View Queue type and Time In-Match, AND MORE!
• Summer Fun! Standalone Cosmetic Event
  • New Skins for Da Ji, Atlas, and Odin, and Supporter Store Items
• Race to Exalted: Odin
  • Starts Tuesday, August 4th!

Update 41 | August 11

• New God: Ix Chel, The Light Weaver
  • Will be available in early preview on PTS, July 22nd
  • +1s:
    • Slight heal scaling on A02
    • ULT can now Echo, conditionally
  • Aspect:
    • Enchanter.
• Design Focus: Echo Itemization
  • Echo “Payoff Items”
• New Saga Event: Grim Pact
  • Collect to unlock Rewards, or Buy All for Event Contents
  • Featuring a new Saga for Neith: Grim Pact
  • Also launching with a new Ah Puch skin
• Race to Exalted: Neith
  • Starts Tuesday, August 18th!
• And More!

Q&A Section

• Enchanter Item Pass - No firm target update for when they’ll get around to this, but is certainly on their to-do list for design focuses.
• Shifter’s Shield Hotfix - There aren’t any plans to ship a hotfix, as despite the item’s prominence, it isn’t as problematic as the pen items that necessitated a swift balance hotfix.
• Mage Bruiser Items - The main item they’d like to have following Ethereal Staff is Warlock’s Staff. Tablet of Destinies seems more oriented towards other roles due to the way it is statted, and may not be as prioritized.
• No Hot Male Summer Skins - The summer skins lined up for this year were locked in for the schedule prior to a lot of community discourse surrounding what players want to see. They aren’t avoiding adding skins in this nature and can certainly have them in the future.
• Next Twitch Drop Skin - Should be scheduled for next patch with Cu Chulainn’s launch.
• Movement System Update - Something they’re currently working on fixing is how dashes interact when players collide with one another and while they won’t be able to resolve every issue tied to them, it should improve things.
• Flavor Text in Item Descriptions - killgoon pitched this to the team a year prior and it wasn’t favored much due to it adding too much from already long item descriptions and detracting from what’s more necessary to read.
• Pon Pon’s Rod of Tahuti Pass - Is not an immediate priority since design direction has changed but it would look a lot like the recent protection item pass if they were to implement it.
• Pass on Auto-Builds - Will have one eventually, it was never their intention to frequently update them since they aren’t used much and would prefer for players to learn to build on their own or adopt community builds.
• High-Cost / Luxury Items - Has been something they favor and would like to push but it’s difficult to do so when players are mostly accustomed to being able to reach full build every game.
• Ix Chel God Lead - Their newest designer is taking point for Ix Chel and will be on for her show to showcase it.
• Martichoras’ Popularity - Was one of the lower Gods when they last did their community surveys and isn’t favorably viewed by most of the community.
• Outlook for S2 - Overall, new player retention has gone up over time and while player counts are more seasonal due to other game releases or holidays, they have bigger increases than they’d expect for some months.

https://www.smite2.com/news/open-beta-39-update-notes/

https://www.smite2.com/news/open-beta-38-update-notes/

Since there wasn’t a Titan Talk yesterday and they’ll be out on Friday, I’ll probably skip the 2LDR for this week and’ll just run down the usual patch week announcements here: (maybe it’ll help prevent my posts from getting automodded 💀)

• The Race to Radiant event for Chronos will be live once the patch drops and will run until July 7th.
• The previously announced Race to Exalted event for Scylla will be delayed to next patch with Xing Tian’s release.
• Chronos’ Aspect will be releasing a day early on July 2nd.
• There will be a 2x Worshipper weekend event starting on July 3rd and running until July 6th.
• Twitch Drop campaign for Crimson King Gilgamesh will be available starting July 4th until the campaign ends on July 18th.

Weekly Roundup

• June 22nd Titan Talk - YouTube VOD
• Open Beta 38 Patch Preview
• June 24th Titan Talk - YouTube VOD
• Open Beta 38 Balance Overview
• June 26th Titan Talk - Twitch VOD

June 22nd Titan Talk - Solo Q&A w/ killgoon

Titan Talk on Monday was a solo Q&A session prior to coverage for OB38. There was a server-side hotfix on Saturday morning to fix rare cases of Bastet Aspect ULT pulling enemies into walls.

Q&A Section

• Development on Xing Tian - His port is coming along, but his postfires are feeling a little longer than necessary when coming from S1 1:1, so they are considering smoothing these out and making him feel more fluid. Any previous bugs, such as him being able to leap more than 2 times, should be resolved since they pretty much have to build his kit from the ground up.
• More Enchanter Mage Items - Has been something they’ve discussed, though their next focus is more mage bruiser options. Their goal with any item additions are to enable or support playstyles that are lacking with what is currently available.
• Movement System Overhaul - There are bits of it that their lead programmer and the rest of the team are steadily working on but haven’t been shipped yet that they still need to fine tune, specifically to avoid movement over-correction for abilities heavier on movement or ones that interact or push into other players. A lot of the groundwork on this is already done and they’re somewhere around 70% done with the overhaul.
• Pet AI for Gods - There’s better tooling and groundwork for pet tech that has helped for already ported Gods with pets. Rather than solely focusing on a pet God as the next port priority, they’re working on the tech in the background to help for these ports in the future. 
• Aspect Atlas Performance - Is at a ~40% win rate in casual Conquest and is even lower in Ranked, which aligns with their expectations post-changes and would be something they can buff accordingly instead.
• Doodle Ra Skin - Is potentially on the table due to its popularity and was initially forewent since it involves a bit more tech work for its FX.
• Reworking Bake Kujira - His kit has been very polarizing and it’s hard to tell what direction to go since the majority of his identity is his AA’s. They’re likely to preserve that aspect as well as his push, but his ULT may be changed to something more fitting, such as him making a giant splash as a whale.
• Players That Say S2 is Worse than S1 - Most people that hold this opinion say so since the game is missing their favorite Gods or modes and other features that the team isn’t able to get around to. When evaluating this objectively, they try to parse feedback that is actionable to find ways that they can improve the game with what they can realistically accomplish.
• Adjusting Role Passives - For the most part, they don’t want to risk adding overly transformative effects to a given role passive since they want to avoid encouraging people swapping roles in lobbies just for the most optimal benefit.

June 26th Titan Talk - Open Beta 38 Balance Preview w/ Hinduman, killgoon & Caps

Last show for this week went over all the details for next patch’s balance. Specific numbers for the base HP changes are a bit much to show here but you can find them all on the SMITE Prime page.

God Balance

• Bastet
  • Cat Call (4)
    • Cat Dash damage reduced from 60/95/130/165/200 + 50% Strength to 40/65/90/115/140 + 50% Strength
    • Cat Dash slow reduced from 20/25/30/35/40% to 12/14/16/18/20%
• Base Stat Changes
  • All Gods level 1 basic attack damage has been reduced by 20%, across the board. This brings base basic attack damage more in-line with SMITE 1. It still scales as it did before.
  • Base Health has been adjusted to have a bigger gap between Gods associated with different traditional roles. Additionally some Gods had some Protections adjusted.
• Health Increased
  • Artemis (Base & Per Level HP)
  • Danzaburou (Base HP)
  • Hua Mulan (Base & Per Level HP)
  • Nemesis (Base HP)
• Protections Increased
  • Chaac (Per Level Prots)
  • Guan Yu (Base & Per Level Prots)
• Health Reduced
  • Agni (Base & Per Level HP)
  • Ah Puch (Base & Per Level HP)
  • Anhur (Base HP)
  • Anubis (Per Level HP)
  • Aphrodite (Per Level HP)
  • Apollo (Per Level HP)
  • Artio (Base HP)
  • Cernunnos (Base HP)
  • Discordia (Base & Per Level HP)
  • Eset (Base HP)
  • Fenrir (Base & Per Level HP)
  • Ishtar (Base HP)
  • Janus (Base HP)
  • Jing Wei (Per Level HP)
  • Kali (Base HP)
  • Loki (Base & Per Level HP)
  • Merlin (Base HP)
  • Mordred (Base HP)
  • Morgan Le Fay (Base & Per Level HP)
  • Ne Zha (Base HP)
  • Pele (Base HP)
  • Poseidon (Base HP)
  • Ratatoskr (Base HP)
  • Scylla (Base HP)
  • Sol (Base HP)
  • Thor (Base HP)
  • Tsukuyomi (Base HP)
  • Ullr (Base HP)
• Protections Reduced
  • Aladdin (Base & Per Level Prots)
  • Thor (Base Prots)
  • Ullr (Base Prots)

Item Balance

• Avatar’s Parashu
  • Strength reduced from 100 to 90
  • 10% Penetration added
• Book of Thoth
  • Evolved Intelligence reduced from 20 to 0
  • 10 Evolved Penetration added
• The Cosmic Horror
  • Intelligence reduced from 75 to 65
  • 15 Penetration added
• Doom Orb
  • Intelligence reduced from 90 to 80
  • 10 Penetration added
• Dreamer’s Idol
  • Intelligence decreased from 140 to 130
  • 10% Penetration added
• Gilded Arrow
  • Attack Damage reduced from 25 to 20
• Gluttonous Grimoire
  • 10% Penetration added
• Heartseeker
  • Strength reduced from 55 to 45
  • 10% Penetration added
• Jotunn’s Revenge
  • Strength reduced from 40 to 35
  • 5 Penetration added
• New Item: Spear of the Magus
  • 95 Intelligence
  • 10% Penetration
  • Ability Hit on God: That God is marked for 8s. Marked Gods take 5% increased damage from all sources.
  • Builds from Evil Eye and Void Shard
  • 2700 gold
• Obsidian Shard
  • Intelligence increased from 60 to 90
  • Penetration decreased from 35% to 20%
• Oath-Sworn Spear
  • Updated Passive effect
  • Ability Hit: Reduces target’s Physical Protection by 5 for 4s. Each God kill or assist increases this by 1, stacking up to 10 times.
• Pendulum Blade
  • Strength reduced from 35 to 30
  • 10% Penetration added
• Riptalon
  • Attack Damage reduced from 25 to 20
  • 10% Penetration added
• Rod of Tahuti
  • Intelligence decreased from 85 to 80
  • 10% Penetration added
• Soul Gem
  • 10 Penetration added
• Spear of Desolation
  • Intelligence reduced from 100 to 85
  • 15 Penetration added
• Tekko-Kagi
  • Strength reduced from 45 to 35
  • 10 Penetration added
• The Crusher
  • Strength reduced from 50 to 45
  • 10 Penetration added
• The Reaper
  • Strength reduced from 55 to 45
  • 10 Penetration added
• Titan’s Bane
  • Strength increased from 40 to 60
  • Penetration reduced from 35% to 20%
• Totem of Death
  • Will be disabled starting this update
• Transcendence
  • Evolved Strength reduced from 15 to 0
  • 10 Evolved Penetration added
• World Stone
  • Intelligence reduced from 80 to 70
  • 10 Penetration added

Q&A Section

• Tanks Post-Changes - Power curve should feel smoother now with there no longer being a spike just from one pen item, so tanks will be able to fight into mages better during the mid-game but will feel rougher going into late-game scenarios.
• Aspect Base Stats - Aspect versions use the same base stats of the God as a basis and any modifiers work off of the changes shown today. 
• STR Damage Anti-Heal Option - Is still on the radar for a build path they could fulfill later down the line.
• Rod of Tahuti Changes - Their intentions were to add % pen to it first as a preliminary step in this pass and make some changes to it in following patches as they see how the item plays out.
• Pen on Gluttonous Grimoire - They didn’t want to add pen to Bancroft’s for traditional lifesteal builds so placing it on Grimoire felt more logical with that item’s intended build direction.
• Changing Supporter Starter Upgrade Level - Are still in favor of keeping it the same level as the other roles and has been something they’ve heavily discussed, but aren’t privy to adjusting role passives by much. 
• Healing & Anti-Heal on Abilities - They previously added anti-heal to God abilities but done as much for new ports outside of obvious cases like Ah Puch since it isn’t as necessary with where healing is right now. It’s highly unlikely they outright buff the amount of healing reduced by anti-heal without buffing healing game-wide proportionally, which is a balance space they don’t want to return to.
• Future Item Design Directions - Following the upcoming mage bruiser item pass, they’re interested in possibly tackling starter items again in a patch later down the line. Caps is also potentially considering more enchanter support-style items for the future.
• Support Green Buff - As shared previously, they’re hesitant to implement a full-on green buff since historically their effects were just abused and taken by other roles and this would probably happen more with jungle buffs stacking.