Weekly Roundup

• May 4th Titan Talk - YouTube VOD
• Open Beta 34 Patch Notes
• May 6th Titan Talk - Twitch VOD
• SMITE Prime Petals and Palettes Art Contest
• May 8th Titan Talk - Twitch VOD

May 4th Titan Talk - Open Beta 34 Patch Notes w/ killgoon

First show of the week was a solo patch notes review with killgoon going into Open Beta 34.

Q&A Section

• Omnipotence & MOTD - Will eventually happen at some point, their current focus is to support the main game modes and branching out to work on Omnipotence would take more resources and could potentially split the playerbase more.
• Forgoing Golden Blade Changes - Although Bumba’s Golden Dagger and Golden Blade have somewhat similar effects, they elected to forego making the change to Golden Blade where its bonus damage wouldn’t affect the main target, as the two items are intended to have different use cases and Golden Blade would probably be too weak if this change was applied. Bumba’s Golden Dagger has been prevalent for a while now and has been used more outside of the jungle role, so they wanted to make a more drastic nerf to push it out of the meta for a bit.
• Enchanter Support Items - They have heard the repeated feedback of players missing healer-centric items such as Lotus Crown and Fae-Blessed Hoops and are open to building out that section of the item store in the future.
• Locking Starters Behind Roles Again - With the current state of starters, there is a lot more freedom in item choice and enables various playstyles for a given God. There will always be a top option that dominates the meta for starter choices at any point in the game’s life and they ultimately just have to balance things to the best of their abilities.
• Random God Button on God Select - Probably not something they’ll end up doing due to it encouraging potentially toxic play.
• Releasing Gods Very Strong vs. Weak - Usually, they would like to release Gods a little on the stronger side, but it’s always difficult to fully assess player reactions on new releases when they vary so much. The last couple of ports were overperforming in their playtests and they probably nerfed them more than they would have liked.
• TTK in Current Meta - It’s difficult to parse feedback currently since there is a lot of disagreement amongst the community on whether TTK is too fast or too slow. TTK will be tackled to some degree with their planned pass on pen but it’s hard to say what extent it will have on damage.
• Agility Relic for New Players - While it’s not particularly strong in its current state, it’s serving its purpose in making the game more accessible. killgoon agrees that they could do more with basic tutorials in-game and will eventually get around to adding Quick Play Conquest, but really don’t want to overbear the NPE with too many tutorials.
• Payoff for High Skill Floor Gods - Generally, if a God’s kit is harder to execute, then the payoff should be higher compared to low skill floor Gods, but the problem they often run into and have to balance around is the God being less difficult to pilot than intended and dealing high damage regardless of player skill.

May 6th Titan Talk - Open Beta 34 Community Q&A w/ Hinduman & killgoon

OB34 went live later than usual, so Wednesday’s Titan Talk had less to cover in terms of addressing known issues or hotfixes in the work, but still went through Q&A.

Recent Patch Delay

• This is the first day one of their patches has slipped even a day after multiple years.
• On Monday, killgoon mentioned that they may have to release the patch a little late due to a last minute certification issue with Sony.
• This was quickly resolved a little bit after Titan Talk but they ran into another certification issue with Microsoft that was mostly the dev teams’ fault.
• They missed a validation file that needs to be authorized by Microsoft every few months and had to take half a day to make a new build with it due to it expiring at the last minute.

Q&A Section

• Atlas Data - It’s easier for them to wait 24 hours before pulling data, with the database they usually run analysis on automatically updates based off their live database on a daily basis.
• Rank X Speedrun - They are interested in having mini-events to celebrate the first few players to reach Rank X on a new God but would need to take the time to implement something in-game.
• New Item Art - They were able to get in new art for Alchemist Coat and Doublet of Binding thanks to one of their artists, Erice. (not to be confused with Erez…)
• Revisiting Base Stats - There are a few outliers that they’d like to go back and adjust, but generally speaking, the base stat pass did make a difference but probably not as much as people are thinking. Certain archetypes, such as solo lane brawlers, are ones they are likely to address due to them being overshadowed by things like ranged solos.
• Horus on the Release Calendar - Gods are usually evaluated based on if they fulfill a necessary design hole or are more feasible with the time allotted. His place on the port schedule made sense for the team due to them having the proper amount of time to work on more technical things like his ULT.
• God Leads on Upcoming Ports - Ah Puch is being led by Caps, Austin is taking point for Horus, and the tech side for Bastet is mostly being worked on by Jarod, one of their returning designers.
• Killcams in S2 - The most benefit these would bring is to show how someone died, which probably doesn’t have as much value as being able to watch the remainder of a teamfight from the grey screen. In other games, cosmetics pertaining to killcams are frequently monetized and from their experience with Paladins, it would often lead to many bugs and be desynced.
• Community God Polls - Polls run by creators or on Reddit are often skewed by their communities and usually aren’t indicative of what the team’s data show, with Fafnir as an example of someone that is voted for more compared to his S1 play rate.
• Bastet ULT - They’re experimenting with a couple of ideas at the moment and during playtests and will have more to share when they get around to her.
• He Bo’s Port - Their biggest challenge when considering this God is evaluating how many people prefer the camera angle and animations on He Bro over his base model, and the best way to handle that would be.
• God Design Touchups Based on Lore - For the most part, their intent isn’t to update each God model with their most known depiction in media and are known to take artistic liberties with their designs in order to end up with a more unique addition to the roster.
• Target Bracket Highlighting - This was initially implemented in S2 with designer temp art but it gave the impression to new players that the game was utilizing lock-on or tab targeting, so they ended up doing away with it.
• Item Store in Jungle Pitch - They found this idea interesting and have talked about the cons of a potential additional shop, in which it would devalue Chang’e passive, is most useful during the laning phase, and is less necessary due to having lane teleporters.

Thursday Hotfixes

• Fixed a bug where Gold Fury could reach maximum attack speed
• Fixed an issue where Chaac ULT could sometimes put enemies in a broken state
• Fixed a bug that allowed for multiple Typhon's Fang pets
• Fixed Doublet of Binding to properly reduce damage taken by allies
• Fixed a bug that could cause "infinite falling"
• Updated audio for Ishtar's ultimate
• Added the name of the new Aphrodite skin (Burning Passion)
• Atlas passive attack no longer stuns towers
• Atlas now has builds for Quickplay
• Atlas' Astrolabe can no longer get stuck in Aladdin's lamp; Aladdin has been reenabled
• Atlas Aspect now has reduced health and protections, as intended
• Auto-build on Atlas has been fixed
• Fixed an issue where Gravity Pull had a bad interaction with Purification Beads
• Fixed an issue with Gravity Pull putting you in a broken state
• Fixed an issue where item stacks where providing passive stacks for Atlas
• Fixed an issue where Gravity Pull throw and launch strength were inconsistent at times

May 8th Titan Talk - Open Beta 34 Feedback + Q&A w/ Hinduman & killgoon

Final Titan Talk of the week went over hotfixes that have gone live since OB34’s launch.

End of the Week Announcements

• Atlas Aspect is now live!
• The Flurry Ratatoskr Twitch Drop campaign starts tomorrow and will run for 2 weeks.
• Voting for the SMITE Prime Petals and Palettes Art contest is now open, running until next Friday where they’ll showcase the winners on Titan Talk with Ben.

Q&A Section

• State of Junglers - Overall, they are much more satisfied with how junglers are performing compared to where they were a few weeks ago. Their next balance patch will probably focus on buffing underplayed Gods or items now that most of the worst case offenders have been reined in.
• Next 2x Worshipper Weekend - Next one is planned for Memorial Day weekend around the end of the month.
• Rod of Tahuti & Pen - Their intended passes on both of these bullet points are largely intertwined due to the way the stats behind these interweave with each other. They’re slowly working away at resolving the most pressing balance issues that cropped up in the past month and will get around to tackling this topic once things have settled down more.
• Solo Lane Tanks - They’ve heard the feedback on what people want to be stronger in solo, and they can certainly pursue this in ways such as buffing what they itemize towards or adjusting base stats as they’ve mentioned before.
• Bakasura’s Port - Generally, they’re trying to balance the workload of all their departments and considering ported Gods’ popularity. killgoon can’t recall the specifics but nothing indicates that he’s risen much in the latter regard and does require some minion AI to be worked on for his ULT.
• Moonlight Phase in Other Modes - Adding things that disrupt the general flow of non-conquest modes has historically been negatively received. There’s a risk of over-complicated things in gameplay that people don’t come to the game mode for.
• More Travelers for Non-Bundled Prisms - A Traveler for Thanatoast was planned to be sold a few patches ago but has been pushed back on the schedule due to them wanting to get The Reaping Buy All out first.
• Work on Pet AI - Rather than honing in on one big set of tech, the programming team usually focuses on the most necessary projects while working on larger arcs of work in the background, as is the case with Gods with pet AI.
• Bob Ross Sylvanus - Any licensed skins in this vein aren’t likely to be brought over 1:1 due to the monetization terms within their licensing agreements when going from one game to another.
• Reflection on New Stats - These were added at a time where the game’s balance was very poor and they think this has some effect on player perception on the new stats. Adding echo brought to light some of the underlying issues pertaining to multiplicative damage multipliers that gave them time to properly address them. Since then, all of the stats have mostly settled in and are serving their intended purposes. There are a few issues related to plating and dampening that they intend on resolving, such as them not impacting item passive damage and them not counting towards passives or abilities that count item protections.
• Next UI Prioritization - Given how much needs to be worked on for each patch, the UI team is mostly focusing on cleaning up things and improving game presentation, with bigger UI tasks being worked on in the background and more likely to come in the following patches.
• Jungle Practice In Queue - Has been a long time request and is something they’d like to do eventually, their biggest hold up is sorting out the edge cases in transitioning from being in-game to a match lobby or getting lost at some point throughout the process whenever the queue pops.