How to move up and out of Bronze league....

This is for all the folks out there that feel that they are stuck in Bronze league and that it is everyone else's fault that they can't get promoted out of Bronze league.  Guess what?  You are probably wrong, and it is probably, at least in part, your fault that you are stuck in Bronze league.  There are many things that you can do that affect the outcome of a match that have absolutely nothing to do with pushing buttons at the right time.

So let's start with the first list of Do's and Don't's.  This list is things you need to do before going into league.

Do:

1. Pick two roles that you enjoy and have a 3rd ready just in case, one of these 3 should be support, someone will always get "stuck" as support and have no idea how to do it.
2. Pick two gods for each role and practice them in casual until you get them to at least mastery III.  If you aren't sure which gods are your best you can look up your win rate per god in casual or league here:  http://smite.guru/
3. Understand each of your chosen six gods abilities and passives.  Passives are extremely important and will affect how you play the god!
4. Have a build ready for each of your six chosen gods complete with optional items for situational use.
5. Have an understanding of your roles responsibilities, mid needs to rotate, adc/solo need to farm lane, support needs to ward, jungle needs to drop buffs then gank, etc.
6. Install curse, set up keybinding for push to talk, test with friends to make sure you aren't too quiet or loud.
7. Make sure your computer is clean of viruses using free tools like AVG Antivirus and Malwarebytes.  If your internet cuts out on you regularly reset your modem/router before beginning a play session.  Make sure that no one on the network is running torrents or if they are they have the max connections/upload speed set appropriately.

Don't:

1. Join league queue when you know your internet/computer is unstable.
2. Join league queue without Curse, a microphone is not necessary, but it is helpful.
3. Join league queue if you know you will be interrupted by real world concerns or you don't have an hour to devote to a game.
4. Assume you will always get to play your favorite role.
5. Join league queue if you don't work well with others. ;)

Here's a list of Do's and Don'ts for the Lobby:

Do:

1. Say hi to your new teammates.
2. Declare your two favorite roles and god preferences, "Mid/Supp pref, Janus/Ymir"
3. Be willing to work with others that may only have one role they can play.  Putting someone in a position to fail will not increase your win rate.
4. Realize that the further towards the top of the pick order you are, gives you more choice, the closer to the bottom you are the more you have to work with others to figure out roles.
5. Realize that there will be trolls, practice patience.

Don't:

1. Rage/troll/bm when you don't get your favorite role.
2. Confuse people by trolling.  This can be amusing but can also lead to double adc's or double supports by accident.
3. Insult people.
4. Rage at people you recognize from previous losses.  Each game is different and sometimes a bad start in a game will just snowball and make someone seem much worse of a player than they actually are.

List of in-game Do's and Don't's:

Do:  

1. Call missing over VGS or Curse.
2. Do call movements, especially if you see a jungle or support in your lane.
3. Call for help if you are being focused.
4. Call when you are invading buffs so that your team can back you up.
5. Share XP with support and jungle at every opportunity.
6. Get wards and use them.  No role is immune to getting wards, you should never leave base without at least 1 ward in your inventory.
7. Be willing to cover for other people.
8. Call for retreat if you feel your teammates are overextended.
9. Call for Gold Fury/Fire Giant/Tower Rush if you feel you have a numbers advantage.
10. Pay attention the the map, and the health/mana bars of your teammates.

Don't;

1. Feed the other team.
2. Rage at your team.
3. Tell people how to play their characters in the heat of the moment.  You can certainly offer advise or discuss during farming phases.
4. Surrender.  This is league, grow a pair.
5. Wander looking for fights, this is league, players are just obstacles in the way of objectives, not targets.  If they aren't in your way, you shouldn't be chasing.
6. Hate.  You can certainly dislike someone, but try to keep it to yourselves, letting them know you don't like them will not increase your win rate, at all, ever.
7. Rage back at ragers.  It just gets ugly, and you'll just have to wash the spit off your monitor later.

You may have read all of this and been, "This has almost nothing to do with playing the game."  Very true, a lot of it is just tricks to working with others, optimizing your computer/attitude for success, focusing your talents on a small god pool, and mitigating the damage bad players will do.  The more people that you can work with, the more stable your computer, the more less experienced players that you can help, the more wins you will get and the faster you will be out of Bronze league.

Good luck and don't feed!

General Build Guide for a Mage in Mid Lane

So you want to be a wizard...

So in order of build diversity from most standard to least standard you have:  Adc, Support, Jungle, Mage, and then finally Solo.  Solo is the most diverse because you can play it as a warrior, assassin, and mage.  So if you had to pick a build for mid, not knowing which mage you would be playing and not knowing either team's comp, what would it be?  You need a little bit of survivability and whole lot of magic power with a little pen on your 2nd to last or last item.  Hence:

• Vampiric Shroud, Bancroft's Talon (1st tier to start then skip upgrading until later) CDR Boots, Warlock Sash, Book of Thoth, Bancroft's Talon (Finish), Obsidian Shard, Rod of Tahuti

This is a high damage build for just about any mage.  Warlock Sash gives you some health, and you will do a ton of damage.  If you are new to league and need a little more "wiggle room" you can go with Hide of the Urchin or Magi's Blessing instead of Book of Thoth.  This will however greatly reduce your damage during midgame and slightly reduce it at the end, but has the added advantage of you not feeding the enemy team.  Some times playing mid is just not dying and saving your jungler/solo from your opponent's mid's rotations.

Before I get into alternate builds or items for situations, let's take a look at the viable mid mages.  We have, in no particular order:  Kukulkan, Poseidon, Janus, Chronos, Scylla, Isis, He Bo, Agne, Ra, and Nu Wa.  These gods in particular, as opposed to other mages, all have one thing in common, some manner of speed boost, teleport, or lunge.  Mobility is key in mid as you need to rotate around to the mid harpies and to help the jungle with back harpies as well as potentially helping with speed and damage buffs, not to mention rotating to either duo or solo lanes occasionally.  The mobility also helps when the jungle and or support suddenly crash your lane to gank every 3 minutes when the harpies come up.  The other advantage many of these gods have are the area denial abilities.  These are persistent fields that can be put down that essentially box the enemy into an area.  Kukulkan has the tornado, Poseidon the whirlpool, Janus the speed bump, Scylla the red glowy circle, He Bo the wet paper, Agne the oil slick/bombs/dash fire, and Nu Wa the fog.  Many of these gods also have roots or slows, which can then be countered by Isis's wing gusts and Chronos speed booster.

So which ogds will you get yelled at for picking in mid and why?  Anubis, Aphrodite, Chang'e, Freya, Hel, Vulcan, Zeus, and Zhong Kui are all poor mid's because they have no or next to no mobility abilities.  Anubis, Vulcan, and Zeus are somewhat viable due to still having zoning abilities.  Aphro, Hel, Chang'e,Ahong Kui and Freya are all decent solo's duo to their sustain but their lack of mobility and zoning make them poor mid's.  I want to point out that Vulcan has made a resurgence of late, people still don't like seeing him, but he does have a very high win percentage with a decent play rate.  He defies the general mid strategy of mobility but you can't really argue with his burst.  One of his main drawbacks was that his ult was hard to hit, but the resurgence of Ymir, the new Nu Wa, and the bug fixed Serqet, the combo potential has really made the ult much easier to hit.

Let's take a look at items, as this is a build guide, that are commonly found in the mid lane:  Vampiric Shroud, Bancroft's Talon, Chronos Pendent, Warlock Sash, Book of Thoth, Obsidian Shard, Rod of Tahuti and either the Pen or CDR boots.  Then you have items that are situational to certain gods or certain situations.  Demonic Grip on more in hand based gods like Chronos.  Spear of the Magus on gods with high ability uptime like Isis, He Bo, and Poseidon.  Polynomicon and Soul Reaver on burst mages like Scylla, Janus, Agne and Poseidon.  Some situational items are Breastplate of Valor which would replace a Chronos Pendant and is good if you keep getting ganked by a Loki or Serqet and is best when teamed with a Book of Thoth.  Magi's blessing if you have a high amount of cc coming at you like Khumba, Ymir, Artemis.

So a CDR rush build looks like:

Vampiric Shroud, Lost Artifact (Chronos Pendant 1), CDR boots, Chronos Pendant (Finish) Warlock Sash, Obsidian Shard, Rod of Tahuti, Polynomicon.

A more defensive CDR rush will leave Lost Artifact until its time to build Rod of Tahuti and instead get Breastplate of Valor before Warlock Sash.  This delays stacking the Sash for a bit but well worth it if you have a Loki jumping down your throat.  Also you can start with Tiny trinket instead of Lost Artifact for a 5 magical power increase in initial laning phase and just leave it at rank 1 until its time to build Poly.  Poly works well with CDR for obvious reasons.

You never want to go too tanky in mid as your team will absolutely need your damage the longer the game goes on.  The most you would want to do, if you are really getting hurt in mid is to get Sash, Breastplate and either Magi's Blessing or Hide of the Urchin.  If you try to build any more defense than that then you become pretty much useless to your team.

Alright lets talk about actives.  Its pretty straightforward here as most of the time you will want beads and aegis.  If you are on Ra you can swap one for heavenly agility.  If you are on Nu Wa you can swap one for Girdle of Inner Strenth and combine with damage buff to do a lot of damage during Ult.  Pretty simple really.  For consumables, some mana pots early and then just get wards and sentries.  Its ok if that sentry just stays in your inventory all game, its better to have it, and never need it, than to need it, and no one has one.

So, as I've said before there is a lot of options for mid lane mages and these are only two very general builds.  There are a lot of custom build guides created around specific gods and as you find the 2 or 3 gods you want to specialize in, it is worthwhile to look at those guides  Also, it is really dependent on how much cc the other team has, how much spike damage the other team has, how mobile is the other team, which god are you laning against, which god are you using, and finally are you going to need to function as a hyper carry in end game given your team comp.  I've outlined some of the major things to think about when you are buiding, so good luck!

Changes to the Meta, popular gods.

So for the last week, I've been keeping an eye on a little site called SmiteRepo.com.  It doesn't seem to be maintained any longer, however, it doesn't really need to be.  All it does is pull data directly from HiRez's API and parse it into neat charts.  One of these charts shows the data for the last 1000 matches of the top 500 players in league, which comes out to about the last 12 hours.  You can even sort by most wins, by god, and click right on the gods to see the builds that are popular.

Using that I've modified my first meta list with the following update based on this site and the win ratio of the most played gods:

First pick supports: Geb, Athena

First pick junglers:  Loki, Arachne
First pick adcs:  Apollo, Rama
First pick mids:  Janus, Nu Wa, Vulcan, Ra
First pick solos:  Nu Wa, Zhong Kui, Ra

First pick Multi Role: Freya (Jungle, Solo, ADC)

Second pick supports:  Odin, Ares
Second pick junglers:  Thor, Mercury, Nemesis, Thanatos
Second pick adcs:  Ullr, Neith, An hur, Loki
Second pick mids:  Poseidon, Scylla, Kukulkan
Second pick solos:  Hercules, Vamana, He Bo, Chaac, Guan Yu

So let's take a look at the changes from our last list and why each god seems to be becoming meta. With the nerf to mercury, Loki is being played more in the adc and solo land as well as jungle.  He is the king of burst and retreat and his kit really says it all.  You build him full glass and never engage in the middle of a team fight.  Patience is key with this god.

Arachne has come back strong after her re-kit.  I actually haven't seen her much in league as she has been banned out consistently.  The few times I have seen her, her ultimate was really scary.  She's the new hotness and people don't know the counter picks and plays yet so she will be strong probably through to the next patch.

Rama.  Rama has great lane clear, and great boxing potential with the slow, and he can kill secure with his ultimate.  Nothing not to love here.  Works well against Apollo which is by far the winningest god.

Vulcan.  I must confess to being confused as to why this god has such a high win rate.  He's usually found in mid and of all the mid laners, he's the least mobile.  My thought is here that he combos well off of Ymir, Ares, Thor, and Thanatos.  It could also be that he's been out of the meta so long that people aren't that familiar with the counter picks and plays.  That and the mini raid-boss turret.

Odin has been found to be strong after his rebuild.  Most of the downsides to his ring ultimate were removed and generally is being used in the support role, and he just barely edges out Ymir in plays and win percentage.

Ares is seeing a resurgence as he and his chains are strong against Apollo, Rama and Athena, all top picks.  An Ares pick also forces beads as the second item for your opponents.  He also is the top damage guardian besides Hades, which is usually found in the solo lane building for damage.

Thanatos has also made it to the list with the heavy hammer build.  With the nerf to heavy hammer, people are still playing Thanatos as he can be dominating in the beginning, but it is important to understand that his damage does fall off in late game.

An hur is strong versus Apollo as his knockback negates the aggressive dash, and Apollo is see a high amount of play.

He Bo is seeing a resurgence due to a lot of play in the SPL, but his win ratio really doesn't support him being used.  I think his win ratio is only bad because some are trying to use him in mid and he's really a solo god.

Guan Yu is seeing more play with his buffs and some good showings in SPL but he also belongs in solo lane, not the support role.  Again I believe this is bringing down his win ratio.

So, to finish up.  This is my interpretation of the data from SmiteRepo which I've been watching intently since the patch.  I would love to see some longer periods or a little more granular control on the periods that you want to look at, but already I've found a few things that were really surprising, A few things are the really high win ratio of Freya and Ares and the cementing of Apollo as the first pick hunter by a large margin.

Thanks for reading, I'm still working on the mid mage guide, but I keep getting distracted.

Remember, don't feed!