Is Phantom Worth Picking Up?

3.12 Was a major patch for Smite, having the largest amount of changes and additions since the Season 3 patch. One of the more interesting changes was the reimagining of Ghostwalk. Ghostwalk was known for being the passive of the physical defense item Spectral Armor. It was very clunky and inefficient to use as you had to use a relic in order to have the passive process. In this patch Spectral Armor replaced its passive and as such Ghostwalk was changed.

Ghostwalk was reimagined as the Relic Phantom. Phantom has the same passive as before where it is possible to walk through players and player made obstacles, however it also has an addition where it now removes the auto attack penalty as long as it remains active, akin to the Hastened Fatalis passive.

This may remind a few players of Season one's Sprint three, which allowed players to get a speed buff and remove the auto attack penalty, this relic was often dubbed the "gas pedal" for ADC's since it made these characters hard to hit due to their speed and allowed them to easily hit their attacks. However Phantom does not give players a speed increase, so in order to get the gas pedal effect a player will also need to use the relic Sprint.

So now that we know the basic mechanics of Phantom, we can now delve into strategies and scenarios where this active may be useful.

Solo -

Solo lane has been known the past few seasons to be heavily reliant on the relic Teleport. There have been a few instances competitively where Teleport wasn't picked up first, however in those cases, Teleport was always the second relic. Will that change with the introduction of Phantom? No, even with the recent nerf to Teleport it is still too important for a Solo laner to forego. Phantom instead will be seeing some uses if the enemy team has a Cabrakan and Odin since a Solo laner may need Phantom to escape gank attempts which would otherwise cost them their lives. Outside of the movement passive, the only solo laner that may actually think of picking up Phantom over utilitarian actives would be the newly released god Erlang Shen, since his kit relies on Auto Attacks quite heavily.

Jungle -

Let's move on to the Jungle, since there were many changes to Relics and the introduction of Ritual Dagger, the jungle has many more options now for their Actives. However Phantom will most likely be used in a similar scenario as the Solo lane and considering many popular junglers right now have leaps, they do not need Phantom to get out of player obstacles. This makes it so Relic will be used for the most part as a counter to gods like Odin if the god they are playing is something like a Ne Zha or Nemesis. However this doesn't mean that Phantom is useless in the jungle, its auto attack passive makes gods like Bakasura much more viable since they can stick to their targets easier, especially if such gods were to use Purification and Phantom together, the only way to stop them would be to kill them. In most cases however, Phantom with more than likely be passed for more team centered Relics.

Mid Lane -

Now we have Mid lane, our most popular Mid laners are Raijin and Scylla, who both have escapes so they will not need Phantom and would much rather have something like a Sanctuary for protection. But Phantom may be more useful for many gods without escapes. Since healers are incredibly strong right now the need for anti heal grows as well, so Odin will be seeing more play and many mages have no way to escape Odin's cage; Phantom is the answer that these mages need, gods like Hel or Agni can now escape the Odin ultimate rather than die on cooldown. We will most likely see mid laners without escapes look to pick up this relic if there is an Odin in the game, but gods like Thor will probably not force the use of this Relic.

Support -

Support is a very special role, especially when it comes to relics. The Support has the most responsibility to build team centered Relics, so the use of Phantom will never be seen in any scenario outside of a support being killed on cooldown to Odin or Cabrakan ultimates. The only support that may end up picking up Phantom may be Guan Yu if the enemy team has Walls due to his ultimate. Most likely, supports are going to be picking up more Sprints so that their ADC can instead pick up a Phantom and unleash the Season one gas pedal.

ADC -

ADC is the role most likely to pick up Phantom outside of the counterplay to user made walls. The potential to have the gas pedal from Season one can make ADC's late game monstrous so it is very effective on gods like Artemis, if you didn't play during Season one I want you to imagine a hunter with Sprint and Hastened Fatalis every sixty seconds. The one issue with the gas pedal strategy is the long cooldown of Sprint, which makes the combo much harder to pull off and less effective overall, so in most cases Phantom will be underperforming compared to other Relics. So while this active allows for more freedom in the ADC role in terms of boxing, it can limit what an ADC does outside of laning phase if the enemy team doesn't have Walls. ADC's will most likely pick up this relic if they are not pressured into buying Sanctuary to counter burst since they are not required to build actives for more utility.

Overall the Relic Phantom will probably be used as a counter for player obstacles and will most likely only be seen for its counterplay, though there may be some strategies that involve an auto attacker using Phantom to get through a team and get to the backline easily. I wish you happy hunting for new strategies with Phantom.

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