Episode: 3733
Title: HPR3733: Smite
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3733/hpr3733.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:47:06

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3733 for Wednesday the 23rd of November 2022.
Today's show is entitled Smite.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet and is about 29 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is The Battleground of the Gods.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm your host, some guy on the internet.
Today I want to start by talking to you about our call for shows.
The queue is getting a little bit low and we have a lot of holes out there listening to
having contributed a show.
If you would like to do a show with me and we can align our schedules,
I'd love to meet with you in a mumble or discord or whatever and then we can record a show together.
Maybe you're just a little bit nervous, don't know what to say,
need somebody to help you out, you know, a little bit of training wheels on it.
That's fine, I'm willing to work with you.
It's super fun, super easy, and you know, again, if our schedules line up because I do
understand that some of us are in different parts of the world, I'll be able to help you out.
I live on the internet, so I'll probably have a schedule that can work with yours.
If not, we'll figure it out.
Or check with some of the other holes.
Today I'm also recording with my daughter in the room, so you might hear her in the background,
she's got her tablet and her headphones and she's having a good time watching,
I don't know, Coco Mellon or SpongeBob or something, so you might hear her in the background
and you may remember her from a few other shows I've done like the HPR News show.
I remember hearing other holes talk about video games that they've played,
and I wanted to talk about one of the games that I play often.
It's called Smite.
Now if you go to the website called SmiteGame.com, you'll be able to see a little bit more about the game.
This isn't going to be a tutorial or in-depth explanation of how to play the game,
just why I like the game and why I play it.
So to give you that 50,000 foot view of it,
Smite is the game about battling as different gods in a battleground.
Now there's different game modes and there are different gods that you play as,
so there's like different gods from Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, Roman, Greek,
you name it, there's just a lot of different gods and you pick the one that you want to play
and then you learn their abilities and each god has four abilities.
The fourth ability of every god is considered the ultimate,
and some gods don't necessarily have a damaged dealing ultimate,
but it's still considered an ultimate ability even though it doesn't deal damage.
So say for instance, there's a god called Hell.
She has a fourth ability that is not deal damage.
What it does is it allows her to change between a light and dark stance.
The light stance allows Hell to heal other players,
and the dark stance is the one that does damage.
So offensive and defensive, she can interchange between the stances
using her fourth ability, which is normally the ultimate damage ability for other gods.
So whenever you pick a god and you like the abilities of the god,
you then jump into a game, you can go into a practice,
you can go into a practice or whatever and learn how to play with them.
You'll notice that there are six slots at the bottom.
Those are icon slots.
And what you do is as you earn money for killing minions and defeating other players,
you gain money and that money is used by items.
The items provide things like damage increase,
damage mitigation so you can buy armor or power ups or whatever,
and then build your god out.
Now you only get six slots so you have to choose wisely.
You can respect, you know, sell an item and then buy a new one.
But when you sell an item, you get like only like maybe 70% of the item was originally,
you know, cost or whatever.
So be careful which ones you're buying and selling or whatever.
Make sure you know what the items do.
You can just look at the items read up on them because each item has like a passive.
So a certain item may give you like passive health generation,
as well as, you know, armor or something like that.
So just read up on it, learn what it does.
And you buy items based on your style of play.
What a lot of players do is they go online.
They look up different builds online that other people have demonstrated in YouTube videos
and things of that nature.
And then they try to play with those builds that may work for you, especially if you don't,
you know, if you get overwhelmed by the amount of items and the amount of gods that are in
the game, because I think it's like over 50 something gods in the game.
So you might get a little overwhelmed and you just need, you know, a little something to help you
get started.
So you could check out player builds and things like that.
But I believe the best practice memorized what the items do and learn how to play,
you know, learn how to build your character, your god out based on your play style.
So like if you're like a really aggressive player, then you're probably going to want to put a little
bit of defense on because you're jumping into the free and then build some damage after that.
Or, or, you know, when, when appropriate, put, but definitely put a little bit of defense on
because you're going to be hitting hit a lot.
So let's talk about the damage.
So in the game, there is a physical damage.
There is a magical damage and then there's true damage.
So physical damage is just that it's like physical.
The warriors, the warrior class gods, the assassin class gods and the hunter class gods
will all do deal physical damage.
The magical damage is done by mages and guardians.
One of the things that new players get confused with is they'll see a magical god wielding a sword
and fighting you with the sword, like, you know, physically hitting you with the sword.
And they'll build physical damage thinking that that must be, you know, a physical attack.
No, that's a magical god.
That's a mage and just because that god is using a sword to hit you doesn't
mean that the damage coming through as physical is still magical damage.
So you got to, you got to know the gods that are in the game.
The type of damage they deal and build accordingly.
The game does have some restrictions.
So like, if you have a magical god, you can't go by physical items.
Now, some items are crossed between gods, like, say, defensive items armor.
Yeah, armor, you, no matter whether you're physical or magical,
most armor is universal, either or can wear different armor types.
But the damage dealing items are, most of them are specified to the different classes.
So you're not going to find like a rod of Tahiti or a rod of isolation for a physical god.
It's only going to be a magical god item.
And then there's true damage.
That's not forget about true damage.
That's a rare one.
There's these things in a game called Chaos Towers.
If you get hit by a tower, it is true damage.
Now, what true damage is it's unmitigated damage.
So if you get hit for 100 points of damage,
your armor will not mitigate any of that.
You will take all 100 points of damage.
There are some gods in the game that have buffs that allow them to do true damage.
And you need to be careful of that.
Because you might tank up real good,
thinking like, say, if you go up against Bakusura, I believe he's a Hindu god.
He has an ability called Butcher Blades.
He's an assassin class god.
So he deals physical damage.
Sure, physical armor will work against his normal attacks.
But if he enables his Butcher Blades,
he's now dealing physical damage and true damage.
So you need to be careful of that.
You know, you're sure you're mitigating some,
but that true damage will tear you up quick.
One of the gods I like to play is called Bastet.
She's a physical god and assassin.
I like to play her because of a certain skin that she has.
This game is great for the skins.
I mean, the skins totally transform the gods.
They have like a teenage mutant into turtle skins
and all kinds of stuff that completely change
the actual image, the character model of the god to look like a different thing.
And it's not a mod or anything like that.
Like, these are just skins that they sell.
The game's free to play.
But if you want some of the cool skins and stuff,
you're probably going to spend some money.
Or if you play every day for like a full week,
they give you free gems.
And the gems is like the in-game premium currency
that she used to buy the good stuff.
I've been playing the game for a few years now.
So I just save up all my gems and like say,
after about two months or so,
I'll have a lot of gems and I'll just wait
and the gods that are really like playing,
I'll just probably wait for a cool skin to be,
you know, sold.
And then if it goes on sale or something,
then I'll use the gems to buy it.
So I don't have to spend any money.
But if you're willing to spend some money,
yeah, you can buy some cool skins too.
Now with Bastet,
her skin that I love to play with her is the,
it's called Kauai Pop.
It's like the word Hawaii,
but it's spelled with a K because it's like K-pop Hawaii.
So it's Kauai Pop.
She normally makes a lot of cat noises
because she has a cat or like a humanoid cat thing or whatever.
But you know,
in a way she makes a lot of fun cat noises.
And when you use the Kauai Pop skin,
it changes the voice pack and everything.
It's really nice.
Well, if you have the voice pack
because they sell the voice pack separate from the skin.
So it's not like you need a voice pack per skin.
It's just one voice pack for the character.
You can either say you don't want the voice pack,
which the character will use the generic voice in the game,
which is kind of cartoony and fun.
But if you want the character voice pack,
you can get that separately.
And then each time you change skins,
it'll automatically adapt the voice for that skin.
Once you have the voice pack for the character.
One of the things I want to mention before going further,
you can't buy any sort of special power-ups
or anything that makes you super OP in the game.
They don't sell stuff like that.
They only sell just visual accessories and voice packs.
So if you want to personalize your character or something like that,
you really can't do that so much like,
but a lot of skins are super cool.
And I just enjoy playing the game in general.
It's a fun game to play once you learn how.
And I also need to, you need this right up front.
I should have said this at the beginning,
but the game's community is incredibly toxic.
They will not hesitate to tell you
that you should uninstall the game and go soak your head and water
or whatever because you suck and all of this.
And you will be bombarded with insults on the regular.
There are trolls, people who just throw the game.
That's called intentionally feeding, by the way,
whenever they just run, you have a member of your team
just run into an entire enemy.
The entire enemy team, so they'll 1v5,
repeatedly dying over and over and over again.
And each time you die in this game,
you give the enemy money.
So they're just feeding the enemy money,
which the enemy uses that money to buy items
and now they're super overpowered early game.
So yeah, it kind of, the game can get kind of rough at times.
All right, back to best step.
I like playing her because her build,
she can build pretty easily with her.
And as an assassin, there's a certain skill
that you have to have, right?
You can be super aggressive if you want to.
Don't get me wrong.
That's possible, but I personally don't like to play that way.
I like to wait for the mages or the hunters
to take a little bit of damage
and then they try to back off a bit.
And with best step, she has a leap ability
where you can like jump over the fray
and try to catch that backline mage
who's trying to bomb the fray.
You know, he's just hanging back and nuking the fight.
I'll just jump over where everybody's fighting
and attack the mage and with her, with her leap ability.
If you hit the leap ability a second time
within five seconds of activating it,
you'll leap backward to your original position.
So what you can do is hide behind a pillar,
leap forward over the pillar out toward the enemy,
run in and attack him and then leap back to the safe position.
So that way it gives you a really good poke.
That's a term used in a game, by the way.
It did call it a poke when you just go,
either you jump in and deal damage
or you throw some sort of long range ability
that deals damage.
And sure, it's not a ton of damage,
but if the enemy doesn't respond
or if they can't get away from it,
you can chip away at him for two or three turns,
or not turns, but two or three times.
And then eventually your team just rushes in
and try to quickly kill him before he can get away.
So one of the things I like to do with best step,
especially when new players are in the game,
oh my god, matchmaking can do you dirty sometimes.
If you're a new player, sometimes they throw you
in the game with people like us
that are like extremely knowledgeable.
It didn't mean that we're super good at the game,
but we understand a bit more.
So we're gonna be harder to defeat.
And there's another skill in the game
that is not monitored, but very experienced players
know how to do it.
It's called baiting.
And what you do is if you get injured, right?
So if your player takes a lot of damage,
the health pool is pretty low.
Rather than returning to the base
to go refill your health pool and your mana pool,
you just sort of hang out on the sidelines.
And for new players, they see that.
They think, oh my god, that guy's super low.
I can kill him super easy even though I'm new.
This will be a sandwich.
I'll just run over there, blast him one or two times
and that's an easy kill.
What they don't know is that's an experienced player
baiting them out of their safe position over to the sideline.
And once they get close enough with best step,
remember that leap ability I told you about?
Once they get close enough, leap on them, rip them the shreds,
she has this ability called Razer Whip.
And what it does is she'll slash you with this whip
that has barbs on it.
It does a lot of bleed and it also slows the enemy.
So then you keep attacking them.
And if they try to run away, if you time this next ability,
just right, I mean, it just really ruins their day.
She throws a cat at you.
So she throws a cat at you and what the cat will do
is if it hits you directly, it will root you in place.
So as you're trying to use an ability that allows you
to dash away because you're in danger.
If she hits you in the middle of that dash,
it will freeze you in place.
It rather you dash or not.
But most of the time people try to dash or a leap out of the way.
Now with the leap, it won't work.
But if they try to dash, then you can freeze them.
You can root them in place with the dash.
I should explain very quickly that there's different escape methods.
So there's a leap where you jump over things.
You physically leave the ground to leap.
So it's kind of hard to root somebody
who's not actually on the ground.
And a root is something where your legs can't move,
but you can still attack.
A stun is where your legs can't move.
And you also cannot attack.
So you're stunned.
And there's different levels of stun.
There's like a level one stun where if you're hit after being stunned,
so say for instance, if you're stunned for three seconds, right?
If somebody hits you one second into that stun,
the stun will be broken.
You will no longer be stunned.
And now you can move and attack again.
Then there's like a level two stun
where if you're stunned for three seconds,
even if they're hitting you, you're still stunned.
You cannot move or attack.
So those are things that new players are going to learn the hard way.
And every stun looks differently.
So like Yamir, he does a level two stun
with his freeze.
He blows ice breath on you and it will freeze you in place.
So you will be inside like a block of ice.
And then people can just come and just beat your brains out.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
So you got to use, now they don't all last for three seconds.
Each one of them have different timers on them and stuff like that.
So it's all different things you'll have to learn when playing the game.
Now back to best stat.
So you get that new guy.
You bait him over to the sidelines.
You jump on him, slash him with the razor whip.
And her leap, by the way, when she leaps onto you,
that also deals damage.
So she'll leap onto you, dealing damage.
She does her basic attacks, which deals more damage.
She can raise her whip you, which deals a ton of damage,
plus damage over time due to the bleed effect from the razor whip.
And then her ultimate ability,
she throws an even bigger cat at you.
It's like a little spirit ball she throws at you.
And then it has a sort of a wind up timer on it.
So you got to be careful when you're using it.
It doesn't just fire off immediately.
You got to be prepared for and know the direction
your enemy's running.
So if they try to get away from you,
you throw this thing at them.
And when it hits them, a massive like a tiger or something
just pops up, picks that enemy up and brings them back to you.
So even though they tried to run away, this big cat
picks you them up by the back of the neck.
You know how like a mother cat picks up a kitten
and brings, you know, by the nape of the neck or whatever.
And then brings them back to you.
And then you can finish killing them.
That's her ultimate ability.
Now, this ultimate is incredibly vicious
because it can go through walls.
And what makes it super dangerous is,
let's say a friend says that enemy's attacking me
and I'm baiting them.
And this is, I'm, there's going to be a term I'm going to use.
I'm going to have to label this episode as explicit
because it is, but it, I mean, it's just a term.
All right, so just, you know, prepare for it.
But when you become a master baiter,
you then can perform specialized combo attacks and things
and with her, her ultimate ability,
when you're baiting them with that, say for instance,
I get beaten up really bad and I'm baiting an enemy over.
And he's chasing me back to the base.
He's trying to kill me before I jump into my base
because once I'm inside my base,
I automatically start regenerating health and mana.
So what he's trying to do is stop me
from making it there and kill me.
He doesn't know I'm actually leading him to the base
and I'm going to leap over the wall
to be safe in the base, throw my ultimate through the wall,
which will then grab him, pick him up,
bring him into the base with me.
Now, this is super dangerous because the base will heal me
but damage him with true damage.
So he's getting damaged by the cat that just picked him up.
He's getting damaged by me
and he's getting damaged with true damage from the base.
Once the cat brings him inside the base
and it will bring him through the wall.
So it's a lot of skill that goes into these different abilities
and if you don't really know how to play with him,
I mean, if you're a new player, you can get wrecked
and you won't even know what's going on
because some of the times the characters,
especially with these skins,
you won't even know who the character is some of the times, right?
So like you can be fighting Michelangelo
under the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
and that'll actually be Loki.
He's just using the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles skin
so you won't know that it's actually Loki
unless you look at the game card.
If you're a new player that has most experienced players
already know all the skins and everything like that,
so we identify characters pretty quickly.
And even if you don't, you can hit tab on the keyboard
because I play on PC
and then identify the characters that way.
So the game's very, very fun of the communities,
very, very toxic and it has lots of game modes as well.
The game mode I play the most is arena.
Every arena match lasts between 14 to 20 minutes.
So I normally play arena conquest is the longest game mode
that can take like almost like,
I say 45 minutes to hour and a half,
depending on how good the team is
they're fighting against.
And when you want to play competitively,
it's almost always going to be in conquest.
Joust is another good mode that people like to play.
There's a few others.
I just do arena because it's quick and easy.
It's the quickest of the game modes
and you don't have to do anything like capture points
and run through the jungle and all of that.
You just basically put in an arena like the gladiators
used to be in except you're fighting with gods
and all the different abilities of the gods.
So they have healers, the tanks are called guardians.
They're, you need to be careful with the term tank
because some people use it differently.
So what I mean by tank is you need to be playing as a guardian.
There are other people who just call anything a tank
as long as they put some defense on them.
So they'll pick a warrior
and then put like one or two items of defense
and go, okay, now I'm tank.
No, that's not a tank.
Tank guardians are built to be tanks
because they have a lot of something called CC.
CC stands for crowd control.
Crowd control are those things that I was talking about
the roots, you know, root prevents you from moving your feet
but you can still attack and a stun
prevents you from attacking or moving.
There's other forms of CC like slows
so you can hit a person with an ability
that will slow their movement.
There's other CC that does like disorienting abilities
like Baucus, his ultimate will make you drunk
so you can't move the same way for like five seconds
or something like you'll basically be drunk
in a game your character just moving all over the place.
So you'll be missing your shots and things of that nature.
So there's different levels of CC
that you can encounter and guardians,
they're the best with CC.
They're made to basically guard.
When your guys are, you know, up 5v5 trying to find proper angle
to attack each other and get a kill.
A guardian can jump in and initiate the fight
by stunning the enemy team
or stunning a member of the enemy team
allowing your guys to then focus the stunned member
and just dump everything they got on.
I'm trying to kill it.
Now there are other items in a game called Relics.
One relic that most people get is called purifying beads.
And what that does is for one and a half seconds
it will purify all negative effects.
So if you get stunned you can use your purification beads.
Now the beads are, they're active for, you know,
like a second and a half or something
and they will, they will go and cool down.
So your cool down might last like maybe three minutes
or something like that.
So you can't use them again until like three minutes have passed
which means you need to be careful when you use them.
And there's all sorts of other CC abilities like pulls
and pushes as well.
So like there's a guard car Aries, the God of War.
He has this ability where he normally what you do
is you wait for the enemy to be close together, grouped up.
You use a blink relic which will allow you to teleport
into that group of enemies and then you launch your ultimate.
Your ultimate will send chains out
which will attach to all the enemies within a certain radius
or diameter of the player.
And if you get all five enemies in one spot
you can chain all five of them, right?
And what happens after the chains are attached to them
no matter how far they try to run away.
After about, I'd say like two seconds
or something like that from the time they were chained
Aries will pull them all in to him.
And when they get pulled they take damage
and they're stunned at his position.
Now why this is dangerous is is what the enemy team does
or let's just say my team say I'm Aries
and my team's waiting for me to use my ult.
I blink and I use my ult on enemy team.
They all get chained, the chain draws them all into me
and stuns them at my position.
My team within time all their abilities
to dump on my position so they're just gonna nuke right
where I am and hit all the enemies at once
killing one or more of them and damaging
the other ones really badly.
So what you can do to try and avoid being pulled
if your purification beads are able to be used
meaning you didn't use them before
or they're not on cooldown, I should say
you can use your purification beads
just before he's about to pull you and that's key.
All right, it has to be used right
when the right before the pull is about to happen
and you only learn that by playing the game, right?
So if you knew you might think oh my god, the chain is on me
you pop your beads early.
Well, their beads is only gonna cover you for like a second
and a half, the pull doesn't happen for two seconds later
you get what I'm saying.
So you're not gonna be covered during the time
that the pull happens, you only cover during the time
that the chain attached to you.
So there's also it's a little timing and things like that
that you're gonna get used to and techniques and stuff
like that, but as you become a more experienced player
you learn how to bait, which is a very good skill.
I'm telling you, I maximize my KD vibrating
just but you gotta be careful.
You gotta be very skilled with it
because if you get a long range like a hunter
or something like a Ho-yee
who can ricochet shots off of a wall,
he doesn't even have to get close to you
he can bounce the shot off a wall
and that'll hit you and kill you.
So you gotta know who you're trying to bait.
So it's a lot of skill that goes into it
and it's very fun, it's like playing chess
but with gods and an arena, right?
Making sure you buy the right items,
know the gods, their skills,
the timing of their abilities,
the cooldowns of their ability.
So when a god uses an ability
it goes on cooldown for a little while
and then if you recognize, like if you've played that god
before so you recognize or he can't use that ability again
for like another 10 seconds
and that's his most powerful ability.
Now I'm gonna jump them
and then there's other things you wanna look out for
like which gods are glass cannons?
The glass cannon terms use for a god that has low health,
low defense, but tons of damage, right?
So you don't want him to hit you
but if you hit him he's gonna crumble real easy.
That kinda thing.
All right, I think I've rambled on enough about the game
called Smite, I'll leave a link down below.
There's not gonna be a whole lot of show notes for this
because I mean it's just a single game
and if you wanna check it out
I'll post a few things down so you can read up on it
but the best information is to go to the site.
You can go to the site and review all the different gods,
their abilities, the items, the patch notes
like the games often, they patch the game a lot
because every time they release a new god
one of the things they do is they release the god really OP
so that people will want to play with him
and that way they can learn how to balance the god better.
The more people play with him,
the more people complain
then they learn how to balance and tweak him
because there were certain gods that they released man.
They were so OP people just refused to play the game
just because of that everybody wanted to play
the super OP gods
so then they had to release like a day one patch
to then nerf the god
because he was just crazy OP
and there's stuff like that that happens
so be careful when new gods get released.
That's one of the techniques that high res
who are the developers of the game Smite.
One of the things that they do sometimes
they haven't done it lately.
The last couple gods they've released have been reasonable
but back in the battle days,
they used to release some ridiculously OP gods.
Then they nerf from like two months
down the road or something, right?
After everybody's just,
you'll see every single match.
People are just fighting over that god.
People set up macros and things
to quickly pick that god before anybody else does,
say using auto hotkey or python
or whatever to quickly move the mouse cursor
to the proper spot on the screen
and then click so that they get the god before anybody else
that kind of thing.
So I hope I have picked your interest with the game.
Just be careful of the community.
I can't stress that enough the community is super toxic
so don't say I didn't warn you.
When people start telling you to do things
to harm yourself or whatever like that, yeah.
And the game used to have,
well, it still does have voice chat
but they, one patch like maybe a year ago
so they enabled voice chat by default
for a little while and they quickly reversed that
because if you thought the text chat
with all the toxic things they were being saying was bad,
when people could verbally say it
or it was 10 times worse, oh my goodness.
So they still have voice chat,
it's just not owned by default.
So yeah, that's it from me.
I'm some guy on the internet
and talking to you about the game's mic.
That's my daughter in the background listening to her,
whatever she's listening to,
probably SpongeBob or something.
And I'll see you guys in the next episode.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio
at HackerPublicRadio.org.
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