Chasing and Managing Your Aggression

Every aggressive action in Smite is a risk; no matter how experienced, precise, and dedicated you are, sometimes things just don’t go how they’re supposed to. Chasing, or pursuing a beaten enemy player after a fight, is one of the biggest opportunities for things to unexpectedly go wrong, as conditions change, reinforcements arrive, and players go head to head in a test of skill and coordination. Many casual players, however, make chasing more difficult than it needs to be; they pursue recklessly, and without analyzing the situation. If you keep four major factors in mind before tracking down a low-health enemy, you can minimize your risk and maximize your chances of walking away with a kill.

Can you kill them?

While this may seem like a simple question, it’s one that’s easy to forget in the heat of combat. Many players develop tunnel vision when pursuing, focusing only on killing their target and not how they’re going to do it. One key concern that becomes easy to ignore is mana and cooldowns: if you’ve been roaming around in the jungle for minutes on end, or boxing in lane without backing, will your abilities be up and available in time to kill your opponent? Consider the god you’re currently playing, and where their damage and mobility comes from. Countless times, I’ve found myself dashing or leaping to an opponent with a quarter of a health bar, only to realize I have nothing to actually finish them off with.

Other factors should also enter into your decision-making process, like damage output; if you’re playing a Guardian in the solo lane, even if the enemy Warrior is at 1/6th health, you may not have the burst to kill them. Also consider the difference in mobility; it doesn’t matter how low Susano is, if he has mana Sylvanus is not going to catch him. The same also applies to characters with CC problems. If you’re playing a character that doesn’t have any hard CC, how are you going to pin down your target once you catch up? Before you initiate a chase or a dive, make sure that you have the tools to track and lock down your opponent, and kill them when you catch up.

Can they kill you?

Even as you’re doing the calculations in your head and figuring out your kill potential, your opponent is doing the same to you. If you’re about to initiate a chase, dive, or aggressive play, you probably have some kind of positioning or resource advantage, but this doesn’t make you immune – far from it. Many gods have abilities or even passives that are excellent at turning fights around, or winning in disadvantageous situations. Once again, this comes down to matchup analysis: you need to know what your opponent is capable of before you try and take them on.

There are a few qualities that are particularly strong when it comes to counter-aggression. Characters with healing can be very unpredictable, especially strong scaling healers like Hel, Ra, or even Hercules, whose low health bar can be particularly deceptive due to his damage-scaling Strength through Pain. Gods with extensive CC chains are also good at reversing the course of a fight. Many highlight reel plays come from overconfident solo laners diving into tower against a Sobek or Tyr. Towers are another element to be wary of; a low-health opponent turtling under tower shouldn’t prevent you from engaging, but think of the tower as a timer: with every shot, the damage increases and your chance of winning the fight decreases.

Are they about to get help?

The next thing to be aware of, and the easiest thing to forget, is the map. Even supposing that you can kill the other player, and they can’t kill you, will their teammates get there in time to prevent it? As your opponent is dashing and dodging away, odds are that their nearby teammates are already on the way to try and bail them out. While you may think that you can still chase down your low-health target, even with the addition of one to four more enemy combatants, this usually isn’t the case. If you don’t have an overwhelming chase tool like Colossal Fury, even a single slow will probably be enough to halt your pursuit.

Vision control should influence your decision as well; if the opposing team controls the map, you likely won’t see a rotation coming until it’s too late. Even if your wards are comprehensive and you know there are no enemies in the area apart from your target, consider your enemy’s team composition before you fully engage. A meta tri-global composition like Athena, Janus, and Thor/Ratatoskr can swing a fight by three or four members in a matter of seconds, and brutally punish any overextension.

Kill Value

In questionable chase situations, it’s also worth asking yourself what your team stands to gain from the kill. Is it really worth dumping 30 seconds, all your mobility, and an ultimate on a quarter-health underleveled support? A kill is almost always going to be a net benefit to your team, but don’t let that blind you to the situations where there’s something more important. If your team is peeling off to do the Fire Giant, and a single opponent is limping away with no health or mana, it might be better to just regroup with your team and focus on the objective.

Conclusion

None of these factors should stop you from being aggressive; as I said at the beginning, every attack is a gamble, and sometimes it’s worth playing the odds for the potential of big success. And while it may seem complicated to weigh all of these various factors before making a split-second decision, every one of these ideas is related to a fundamental gameplay skill that you should be developing over time anyway. Watching your mana and cooldowns, knowing your enemy’s capabilities, warding, watching the minimap, and analyzing the enemy team composition are all good, even essential habits to be in. As your Smite knowledge grows and paying attention to these game elements becomes more intuitive, you won’t even have to stop and think before you chase; you’ll be so aware of your surroundings that you’ll be able to make the right call without hesitation. And that is the mark of a great player.

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