SMITE Version 5.18.5022.1

# 5.18 - Change & Choices | October 1, 2018

## New God Skins

* **Oni Chernobog**
Exclusive - Hera's Odyssey
* **Mystic Enchantress Nu Wa**
Exclusive - Hera's Odyssey
* **Revenge Tech Nemesis**
Exclusive - Hera's Odyssey
* **Battleworn Achilles**
Exclusive - Hera's Odyssey
* **Pixel Lancer Skadi**
Exclusive - Pixel Chest
* **Headless Norseman Loki**
Exclusive - Headless Bundle

## New Voice Packs

* Oni Chernobog
* Mystic Enchantress Nu Wa
* Revenge Tech Nemesis
* Pixel Lancer Skadi
* Headless Norseman Loki

## Project Olympus

### Random Loadouts – Favorite Items

* Players can now choose which items are a “favorite” for each type of customization item.
* Using Random Loadouts will select favorited items.

* Allows you to filter out certain items from your random loadouts.

### Console – Queue Pop Redesign

* Queue Accept menu has updated art and controls.
* Players will now need to use the control stick to move over to accept or decline a queue, then confirm it.

* This will prevent players from accidentally declining queues.

### Console – God Selection UI Update

* Updated art for the god selection screen.

## Misc.

### Awesome Chest

* New additions to the Awesome Chest

* Primal Storm Susano

### Fantasy Points Store

* New additions to the Fantasy Points Store

* Child's Play Scylla
* Skaliwag Kali
* Volcanic Agni

## Bug Fixes

### General

* Players should no longer see “Reconnect” screens before logging in.

* Was launched before 5.18 in a hotfix.

* Fixed issues where players in Parties would not be able to use lobby chat or role calling.
* Adjusted PTS matchmaking parameters to increase player's chances of getting into a match on PTS only.
* Player settings and Keybinds should no longer be reset on patch update.
* Players should now receive more Commendation Points for longer matches.

* Reminder – Commendation Rewards reset every month (2 patches).

### Items

* Heartseeker

* This item is now available for purchase on Assault.

### Gods

* Anubis

* Lowered the volume on Plague of Locusts on Cosmic Power Anubis.
* Raised the volume for one of the jokes for Cosmic Power Anubis.

* Aphrodite

* Fixed crash issue with Venus skin and have re-enabled the skin.

* Apollo

* Fixed issues with the animations on Winner's Circle Apollo.

* Baron Samedi

* Fixed an issue where he could do unintended amounts of damage if Khepri revived him while firing Life of the Party.

* Cerberus

* Paralyzing Spit

* Fixed an issue where the Mana cost of this ability was not matching the description.

* Ganesha

* Players should no longer get stuck on top of Ganesha pillars.

* Kumbhakarna

* Lowered the volume on Throw Back for General Nosseris.

* Vulcan

* Fixed Chef Vulcan intro audio continuing to play while muted.

## Item Balance

###   Berserker's Shield

“*Berserker's Shield is seeing a smaller nerf in 5.18. While we have seen players utilize its effect to do some more “cheesy” strats, we feel most of these have limited applications that players have opportunities to counter. Erlang Shen was the exception to this, but he is seeing a more specific adjustment to this. Looking at its power in the laning phase and during trades, it is overperforming but only slightly. We are bringing down its Attack Speed slightly and will continue to monitor its overall performance as players better learn it as an item and its possible counters.*”

* Decreased Attack Speed from 15% to 10%.

###  Messenger's Mask

“*Bumba's Mask really lets players have a major positional advantage, granting a major amount of speed. Players should be utilizing this speed to minimize its downsides, but the Cooldown Reduction of this item allowed players to not feel the loss in damage while using the major cooldown reduction to use movement skills to escape damage. We are reducing the Cooldown Reduction to bring its upside versus downside more into line.*”

* Decreased Magical Power from 30 to 20.

###  Bumba's Mask

* Decreased Cooldown Reduction from 20% to 10%.

###   Heartseeker

“*Heartseeker is seeing a fix that will also help it perform better in more situations. We implemented better tech for Heartseeker to identify the lowest health target in instant AoE attacks (such as Susano's Storm Kata) and hit them with the Heartseeker proc. In the future we can bring this improvement to other items that have similar effects.*”

* If an instant aoe ability hits multiple targets, this effect will now trigger on the lowest health target in the area.

###  Mage's Blessing

“*Blessings as a whole have been a major success. Not only are they in a healthy place, they fit our design goals of allowing for classes to flex into new roles and serving as a soft teaching tool for players. Mage's Blessing is the only item where we feel these goals were not being fully realized. Ability Based Mages much preferred raw Magical Power, and forgoing those stats could really put players at a disadvantage in the mid role. We are lowering the bonus damage on abilities but giving it raw Magical and Physical Power, letter it better work of god's natural scaling and being competitive with other Mage starts.*”

* Decreased Bonus Ability Damage from 25 to 10.
* Added 20 Magical Power.
* Added 10 Physical Power.

## God Balance

###  Baron Samedi

“*This god just will not stop partying. Baron is high priority in pro league and his performance statistics in normal and ranked modes is still top of the line. To bring him down a bit further we are increasing the cooldown of Wrap it up. This ability enables all his others and provides high combo potential, so this change should have a measurable effect.*”

* **Wrap It Up**

* Increased Cooldown from 12s to 14s.

###  Chernobog

“*Chernobog continues to be the 1st pick 1st ban in the pro league. He has a huge amount of mobility and utility which pro players can leverage in many ways. Chernobog's ultimate does so many things, so we feel it is safe for him to sacrifice one of those. Chernobog will no longer trigger his passive on every basic attack while his ultimate is active. Even without this, he should still be able to stay true to his initial design goals of being able to hunt down and gank a single god from anywhere on the map, but he will have a harder time winning while outnumbered.*”

* **Living Nightmare**

* This ability no longer triggers his passive on every basic attack. His passive will now continue to function normally during the effects of this ability.

###  Erlang Shen

“*With the introduction of Berserker's Shield, Erlang Shen was able to heavily abuse this item and skyrocket in performance. While interesting, the interaction with his dog has become increasingly complicated. Not only does it has special rules surrounding it, those rules cause issues with bringing in items to help Basic Attack Warriors and with existing items like Odyssey Bow. The Passive is being reworked to a more consistent effect that will allow us to create unique items for both him and other Auto Attack characters without needing special rules with each new item.*”

* **Howling Celestial Dog**

* Erlang Shen's dog no longer trigger on hit item passives or a portion of Erlang Shen's damage.
* Each time Erlang Shen's dog hits a target they will take 2% of the Maximum HP as damage.

###  Freya

“*Freya has received many significant adjustments since her rework, and we overall feel she is in a good spot. One thing we did was to improve on was the overall feedback of her new abilities. Northern Lights and Aurora Blade now have new FX to better let players know what is currently active.*”

* **Northern Lights**

* Updated the visual FX to show when her next ability will detonate.

* **Aurora Blade**

* Updated the visual FX that show when her ability is toggled on.

###  Ganesha

“*Ganesha's Dharmic Pillars allow for Ganesha to lock in enemies and give them a choice. Cross the barrier and be in trouble, but free from the area or try to wait it out and have their movement restricted. We want to amplify that choice and put more emphasis on that initial choice to cross over the threshold, rather than each instant being the same. The first time crossing will really pack a punch, but each subsequent time will deal slightly less damage.*”

* **Dharmic Pillars**

* Now deals an extra 60% increased damage on the first time a target passes over the threshold.
* Decreased damage per tick from 95/135/175/215/255 to 90/130/170/210/250.

###  Nemesis

“*Nemesis was a dominant jungler in early Season 5, but her abilities had little counter play at that power level. Some heavy adjustments were made to her damage output to remedy this, but now she feels a bit lacking. We are increasing the amount of healing her shield can do, to reward players for using this ability at the right time and to move Nemesis in a different direction. The design team thinks she will be much healthier as a goddess that fights for longer durations, poking over time, as opposed to her all-in style from earlier this year.*”

* **Retribution**

* Increased Shield Healing from 60/70/80/90/100% of damage received to 80/85/90/95/100%.

###  Pele

“*Pele is heating up on the battleground, but she suffers from a few clarity issues. Her current ultimate replaces her basic attacks with abilities that can cause confusion and make items or crowd control have unintuitive effects. We are fixing this by changing her ultimate self buff to be a basic attack with an additional bonus cone damage added on successful hits. This will cause the ability to work more like expected, but also add a considerable amount of damage to the hits.*

*As the goddess is performing at a rather balanced position already, we are adjusting some other parts of her kit to even out the change to Volcanic Lightning. Pyroclast and Eruption are seeing early game damage decreases, one in the form of cooldown changes. Pele was often described as a goddess who felt overwhelming at the start of a match but dropped off hard. The combination of the ultimate change and these early game tweaks should make her power curve feel more normal.*”

* **Pyroclast**

* Cooldown increased from 13s to 14s.

* **Eruption**

* Decreased Inner Damage from 85/130/175/220/265 to 80/125/170/215/260.
* Decreased Outer Damage from 80/120/160/200/240 to 60/100/140/180/220.

* **Volcanic Lightning**

* The ability damage from cone attacks now proc off of basic attacks.

* This means that if Pele is disarmed, she cannot get the cone attacks off. If an enemy has block stacks, the basic attacks get blocked but the cones do not.

* Pele's Basic Attack Damage is reduced by 50% while under the effect of this ability.

###  Sobek

“*Sobek is a powerful force in the Solo lane, and more specifically serves as an ever present counterpick that really stifles potential god diversity in that lane. While some gods should have inherent advantages against others, his were too one sided. We are increasing the cooldown on his main interrupt, Tail Whip. Players facing him will be able to trade better with him and have larger windows to use their channeled abilities.*”

* **Tail Whip**

* Increased Cooldown from 12s to 14s.

###  Thor

“*The Norse God of Thunder gains new strength in this patch. One of Thor's unique aspects as an Assassin his his ability to set up kills for himself or his team with the ranged stun of tectonic rift. As he has dropped in performance, we are bringing more focus to this part of his kit, allowing him to more easily follow up on his stun without spending too many points on the ability.*”

* **Tectonic Rift**

* Increased Stun Duration from .8/1/1.2/1.4/1.6 to 1/1.15/1.3/1.45/1.6s.

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