I will be honest with you. I entirely came to read these Smite patch notes because they showed a character skin which turns a scarab beetle into a lobster. I stayed because who even is Erlang Shen and what’s his deal and OH! HE HAS A PET DOG?
RIGHT.
The dates for the Smite World Championship have been announced for 2017: 5-8 January. This time around it will be taking place alongside a Paladins Invitational as well as the existing Xbox version of the professional Smite [official site] scene.
In fact, all the accompanying bells and whistles mean developers Hi-Rez are referring to the Atlantan shindig as the Hi-Rex Expo rather than the Smite World Championships nowadays.
Smite’s [official site] pantheon of playable gods continues to expand apace with the addition of Susano, God Of The Summer Storm. He’s from Japanese mythology and is the brother of an earlier addition, Amaterasu.
In terms of sibling rivalry, they seem like quite the handful. One account I’m looking at describes the fallout from an argument about who wins a creation challenge. Apparently Susano destroys Amaterasu’s rice paddies, smears poop on her palace walls and “throws a flayed pony through the roof of her weaving shed”. I think the pony was sacred to Amaterasu so the gesture is even more provocative, although I’m just going to put it out there that if my brother chucked a flayed ANYTHING into my weaving shed I’d be pretty narked.
Jing Wei, The Oathkeeper is the latest god to join the pantheons of Smite [official site]. I’m now trying to find out where I put the Smite public test realm on my hard drive. Wait – it’s live on the actual servers! WELL. While I update the client I am watching videos to learn more about Jing Wei and her oaths…
“Gonna wash that man right out of my hair.”
This is both a fantastically useful response to a) a failed relationship and b) to being a long-suffering treant in Smite who has spent their entire time having to carry an elderly god in your branches and have now decided it’s time to go it alone in Hi-Rez’s FPS game, Paladins [official site].
[Translation: A Smite character’s mount is joining the Paladins roster as a standalone hero.]
Smite [official site] developers, Hi-Rez, have been teasing their Japanese pantheon for a while now but they’ve been keeping tight-lipped over which deities they were working on. All president, Stew Chisam, would tell me a few months back was that we could expect a goddess.
Amaterasu, a sun (and universe) deity from the Shinto religion, was a common guess and today’s announcement officially confirmed her as the seventy-second addition to the Smite roster. Reading an article in the official Smite magazine, it also seems like the Japanese pantheon in general will be mostly Shinto deities but with scope for some other figures from Japanese mythology. But who is Amaterasu for a Smite player, how does she work and what the heck does Guan Yu have to do with her ultimate?
Read on:
New year, new esports event coverage! And by that, I mean let’s have a look at the Smite World Championship 2016 [official site].
Here’s what you need to know about Hi-Rez’s annual Smite-a-thon from the teams to the $1m prize pool:
New year, new esports event coverage! And by that, I mean let’s have a look at the Smite World Championship 2016 [official site].
Here’s what you need to know about Hi-Rez’s annual Smite-a-thon from the teams to the $1m prize pool:
When is a ban not a ban? That’s a question which cropped up twice this weekend as League of Legends team Jin Air Green Wings and Smite team EnVyUs each passed up an opportunity to ban a character from a competitive match.
No-bans or skipped bans happen in the phase before the main game starts. At this point the teams are working out which characters their team will play and which to remove from play. Choosing NOT to remove something is vary rare but it does happen. It’s well worth trying to understand what’s going on in those scenarios, whether it’s to unpick the strategic thought behind them or to nod sagely over the capacity for humans to make terrible blunders on the global stage. So let’s take a closer look at no-bans, what they are and how you can use them to your advantage:
“FUCKING END THE GAME!” Jeppe ‘Trixtank’ Gylling was roaring as his team, Paradigm, bore down on the opponent’s titan the beefy glowing final objective you need to destroy to win a game of Smite [official site].
It was the European and North American LAN event known as Super Regionals and on the line for Paradigm and their foes was a place at the Smite World Championships in January. Five teams would be making it through to the competition: two from North America, two from Europe and the winner of a match between the NA and EU third placed teams.
Spoilers after the jump if you haven’t seen Sunday’s finals:>