Smite Is Dramatically Changing Active Items and Login Bonuses

With season three of Smite coming up, Hi-Rez Studios has announced some of the big changes in store for players, the most significant of which involves active items.

Currently, players are able to purchase various active items--that is, items that need to be activated and have a very specific effect, like teleporting or escaping a stun. These are extremely important, but as they are something you have to buy, they do come at the expense of buying items that, say, make you do more damage. As noted in the season three overview video above, the "majority" of players don't currently buy active items.

As a result, Hi-Rez is throwing them out. In their place, there are now relics, which are essentially active items that you get for free. You'll get to choose one at level 1 and another at 12, and they'll immediately be at their maximum usefulness--there's no more purchasing upgrades. Accordingly, this will make relics more powerful than low-level active items early in the game, but in some cases there will be some dropoff later in a game as compared with third tier active items.

Hi-Rez says this system will make the "choice between certain relics ... much more game-defining" at high-level play. It should also come as a real boon for more casual players, who find themselves on teams with players who otherwise ignore these critical items.

Coinciding with this change, Hi-Rez is making it easier to tell when you've been debuffed. As it stands, there are countless icons to indicate when you've been stunned, silenced, and so on, depending on which character inflicted the status upon you. Starting with season three, each debuff will have a single icon, making it easier to understand what's happening to you.

Another change of note involves daily login bonuses--they're gone. In their place, Smite will now have daily quests, which Hi-Rez had mentioned previously. You'll earn favor by completing these and can work your way toward earning gems. While it remains to be seen how this system compares with the current one in terms of how much you can earn, it does remove the need to log in every single day in order to avoid losing out on potential rewards. Gems (the more desirable currency) are currently awarded on the sixth and seventh days of consecutive log ins; if you're for whatever reason unable to get online one day, that progress resets. It's frustrating.

In terms of quests, it looks as if things will be fairly simple, like playing a certain number of games as a certain class of character or one from a particular pantheon. Hi-Rez won't be including things like playing a certain game mode, as it doesn't want players to find themselves in a position where they have conflicting quests with friends that prevent them from playing together. It's also avoiding quests that impact gameplay directly.

Finally, Hi-Rez again confirmed that the 3-on-3 mode, Joust, is getting a ranked mode. There will also be a soft reset in League mode, and players will need to requalify for the new season. More details are still to come on changes coming to matchmaking and ranked play.