Each god is designed with very specific goals in mind. Sometimes this is tied to their theme or art style and sometimes it’s tied to mechanics or gameplay roles. These things are usually very unique to the god so we strive to preserve them throughout the balance process.



The most recent example of this is Artio’s Cripple. Artio was specifically designed to be a close ranged goddess who can fight in long duration skirmishes. A key aspect of this is her cripple. This keeps gods in range so she can attack them. Mobility is very powerful in SMITE and the best way to counter that is more consistent cripples on support gods like Guardians.

Artio might be strong, but she has many other numbers that could be adjusted before we weaken her cripple, as her cripple is key to her primary design goals. She deals decent damage as a guardian, has some self healing, and has mobility herself. All of those have been nerfed in recent patches instead of the cripple. If she continues to overperform she will continue to be nerfed in ways that do not affect her cripple, or adjust it very slightly.

Now this question and this answer both have a degree of subjectivity to them. You may be thinking: Artio can still keep enemies close if the cripple was nerfed by a second or two, and she would be more fun to play against. This rule isn’t absolute. There are many ways we can nerf a unique part of a kit without killing that part. There’s plenty of gray area in between when dealing with the types of numbers we have in SMITE. The balance teams relies on lots of feedback and statistics to help us navigate these gray areas.

Specifically for Artio’s cripple: we know from internal testing that if the cripple is too short then it becomes completely useless. There might be a middle ground between the two cases, but we would make very small adjustments and try to preserve the concept of a “long duration cripple” even after nerfs.

There is always a deeper level to balance and design. In this case it was specific design goals backed up by testing. Its possible that other gods in the same scenarios might avoid certain nerfs because of a special artistic goals backed up by stats, or many other reasons.

If we aren’t adjusting a specific part of a god kit its generally because that part is especially unique or serves a specific purpose.