The Classic Problem

I hear a lot of people always vouching for old Nox, but I genuinely think it is rose-tinted glasses. Nox was first introduced on October 29th, 2014. She was meant to fill the niche of anti-magic mage with some poke and a very reactionary/snappy playstyle. For those of you who tried her day one, like myself, you know she was absolute garbage. The problem wasn't necessarily the intent, but the execution was just numerically weak and her abilities contradicted themselves; for example, both of her damaging abilities Siphon Darkness and Nightfall Raven had an abysmal 80/90/100/110/120 damage scalar. And her defensive ability, Shadow Barrier didn't even negate a full spell and had a 20 second cooldown.

Then next patch these numbers were substantially buffed, which later was somewhat dialed back with later patches. Okay so her numbers were improved, but her abilities were still a mess. Her shield was useless against mages for the most part, but completely shutdown autoattack based gods. Her ultimate required enemies to cast spells to get value, but her raven silenced people. None of her abilities flowed well and I recall the designer at the time saying this was the first kit he had worked on and it was rushed between the previous release and the Ao Kuang rework.

The Rework Problem

Instead of committing to a creative solution that explored a new avenue or a new way of conveying anti-magic, Hi-Rez opted for the safe, quick solution: turn her into a 1+2 burst mage and call it a day. This bandaid, lazy fix resulted in an inferior Scylla copy— and I don't mean inferior lightly. After her failure of a rework, Nox was buffed 8 patches without a single nerf to compensate; and after all 8 patches she still wasn't meta outside of a toxic playstyle in Arena.

The tough pill to swallow is that Nox is one-dimensional to play as and against and should never be meta. She has little to no skill expression, which is not to say those who main her are bad, it is just a consequence of having such a 1-note playstyle. If you mess up your Siphon Darkness + Shadow Lock combo you just twiddle your thumbs. If you land it, the enemy loses any and all agency unless they have a cleanse.

All of this said and I haven't even addressed how her rework is aesthetically a failure. Ah yes, the primordial goddess of the night— the mother of basically half the Roman pantheon. I wonder how her kit represents the night?! Well, her first ability is generic purple stringy magic, her two is generic purple magic on the ground, her ultimate is a big ball of purple magic. Admittedly her three is the most unique aspect about her, but that isn't saying much. There is so much potential in her depiction because artistically she is beautiful; I especially love the candelabra.

My Suggestion

I am not gonna offer some crazy, fantastical rework because I am not a designer nor do I even know how to make games— buuuut I genuinely think her passive has so much more potential. As an example: since she is also known as the Roman goddess of domain, perhaps integrate some sort of aura into her passive and candelabra that gives her a better presence in controlling a given space. Perhaps she gains a permanent aura that hinders enemies, and each time a candle is lit that aura expands. When no candles are lit, she is invisible. Not only could something like this integrate that night veil concept, but takes into consideration domain.

I would love to see the Goddess of Night actually draw more from night rather than Marvel Superhero purple magic. She isn't Agatha Harkness— she is the mother deity of the night. Nox's original design was rushed, her rework was rushed, and now her port feels rushed too. She deserves something better and more creative, and the Arena player base does not deserve the horrors of current Nox.

I genuinely want to see SMITE 2 grow, but sometimes I wonder if it’s even possible at this point. I mostly play ranked, and it feels like our player pool keeps getting smaller. Makes me wonder if I’m wasting my time on a game that might never break 10k players, or if SMITE is just always going to be a smaller niche game.

SMITE 2 has averaged around 5k concurrent players on Steam recently, while Deadlock has peaked at over 275k despite still being in development.

I know they’re different games, but what is Deadlock doing differently? Is it gameplay, marketing, the devs, or something else?

I want SMITE to succeed, but it’s hard not to wonder what went wrong and whether it can still turn things around.

Our Cupid started to crash out and call us straight slurs, you know the less jolly and silly words for African American, LGBT member, less intelligent individual, and like 5 others I didn't really hear because honestly I was laughing too hard at the fact the guy was this upset over casual conquest while trying to still play.

Casual queue players truly never fail to disappoint lol.

Nox's 1 and 2 are core to her identity but also the source of other players frustration playing against her.

My suggestion is make the 2 silence only if she roots someone in it. This solves a few problems:

- It allows players to react to her combo without having to use beads

- She can no longer instant cancel chaneled abilities with a very safe and low cd ability

- It ties her most frustrating aspect(large aoe silence) to a skill shot.

- She can no longer just drop her 2 at her feet while running away for extremely easy self peel.

It still keeps her core identity but provides the enemy with more counter play options.

I feel like this is not highlighted and stressed enough but NOX IS BEING ADDED DEAD TO THE GAME and it really to be brought with her original combo identity otherwise she would never feel as she used to be in Smite 1.

Sharing one more post about Nox to voice our concerns as Nox mains and that we are furious with how you guys did her SO DIRTY

Playing Nike feels awful. Her leap doesn’t work as intended. You have to jump at least 1.5 seconds before an enemy uses a CC ability or deals damage to you, because literally anything can interrupt her jump startup. She can also take damage and get CC’d while already in the air, even when the ability technically didn’t hit her before she jumped. Please fix her.

In the reaction to this post by the lead designer Quigley https://www.reddit.com/r/Smite/comments/1x6tln0/an_update_on_noxs_port/

I revised my proposed rework of Nox from almost a year ago. I am interested in the feedback, why would my changes wouldnt work in game? I think it would reduce the frustration from the silence on her 2 but keep her identity as a god with stronger CC and frequent silence in the kit. Also her combo would eventually stay the same withot massive changes.

Main change: Remove silence on 2 and add it to the skillshot 1 that requires a good skill to land. Then some other bonus changes (lets say +1s) and a suggestion for a minor rework of her passive.

Passive: 3% Magical power for every spell you use up to 12% (4 lit candles). Candles no longer decay after taking damage but the bonus is comsumed when you use a spell at 4 lit candles, giving your ability additional 10% Int scaling. Then you start again with 0 candles lit.

(1) Shadow lock: Silences + root-cripple, main CC output. It deals 60% of the damage on hit, the rest 40% is done in 2s every 0.33s The silence in her 1 will allow Nox to retain the crowd control but reduce the frustration from her original 2. Also people usually clear this ability, so it drains her hard CC at once. Also when enemy cleansed her 1 in S1 (happened a lot), she barely did any damage with this spell. Thats why I would add the initial hit + faster ticks (was 0.5s now 0.33s).

(2) Syphon Darkness - main AoE damage, slow: No longer silences but causes 15% slow in the bubble area for its duration (2s), if you are hit by the ability, you will be shrouded in darkness for another 2s and have applied 25% slow for that duration.

(3) Shadow step +1: since you transform into a cloud of darkness, now the dash cannot be stopped by other dashes/pushes (e.g. Hercules' dash that would cancel it if you went against it).

(4) Night terror +1: Lights all candles for the highest passive bonus on your next ability cast.

Side note:
Overall, I think there is a huge potential in her abilities to work together well in some kind of combo. Lets say you are marked by 2 explosion, if I hit you with my 1, you are rooted-crippled and additionally silenced - if the silence+root-cripple I suggested would be too strong. Also, her passive can be played around of these ideas, what happens when all 4 candles are lit? I expect some kind of bonus, new effect or whatever.

I personally believe the teleporters need to go.

They wanted initially wanted smite 2 to be this “new player friendly” experience and added those to stop people rage quitting from dying early and getting punished for it.

Thats like keeping the stabilisers on a bike rather than teaching how to actually ride it.

If you want to cater to new players by the time the game comes out in full release, you need to have DETAILED videos and tutorials on how conquest works, that Neith tutorial does not show you how to play support, or what team buffs do.

There needs to be an easy way to showcase community videos on how to play a role that’s accessible from the menus. Or at LEAST have a tab for it. New players are going in blind and will just stop playing the game before they decide to go on YouTube to learn the “real” basics.

You HAVE to bring back the VGS minigame as it’s the primary communication method in the game.

You can’t grow the game by dumbing it down and holding players hands, you gotta give them the information to get up to speed faster. How do people know something is wrong if the consequences aren’t severe enough for them to acknowledge how bad it is?

And I should be rewarded as a laner for killing people, teleporters are mitigating it.

What other QoL suggestions do you guys have?

I’m not a Nox player. But personally I think removing her silence is rough

Maybe it could be something that takes more skill

First option : there’s 2 areas in the A02, the big circle and a bullseye in the middle. If you hit the person in the middle area. You have the silence

Second option : You still have 2 circles. But the silence expands till the timer ends. So you could silence someone for the entirety of your A02, or you could clip someone on the edge and silence them for 0.3 seconds for example

If no options apply. At that point I think we should just fully rework her imo

Regresen al diseño de habilidades de nox antes del rework (con la ulti nueva)
Su combo 2,3 era divertido, ahora sería 1,2, siento que podría ser un mago divertido y dejar su kit actual de smite 1 como aspect

I seriously don't understand the current vision for Nox, why pick Nox when Scylla is around?
Since Nox is so hated, was the design angle to just make her even more garbage tier than she was on Smite1 already? Was the fix for her really just killing her whole identity and viability completely, so no one talks about her anymore?

Scylla can root/cripple multiple close targets and early detonate her circle for morbillions of damage and one of, if not the best poly user in the game with Eset. Nox circle no longer silences, and can't be detonated early. Her 1 roots but becomes a cripple only if you land the ult before rooting. Her ult now have the silence. Her new kit feels terrible and is a downgraded Scylla 2.0.

Seriously, her current kit is DOA, and a masterclass on how not to rework a god.
Her whole combo is near impossible to confirm now. People can just jump away from the root of her 1, and the bubble is useless. Forcing the Nox player to kit dump and always initiate with her ult to get value out of the 1, and even then you can only cripple 1 god affected by the silence. Her damage is underwhelming for how rare you will confirm the 2-1 combo, most other mages have an easier time confirming their damage and will always be better picks than her for that reason. (I won't even talk about the beyond garbage passive that is still useless to this day)

You can tell this rework was made with the fear to not upset the vocal majority of people that hated being silenced by Nox in S1, but somehow don't care about Ganesh that does the exact same thing but better and with even less skill involved, since he is an assisted walking silence nightmare that follows you around the map and doesn't let you play the game.

I'm Quigley, the designer handling Nox's Smite 2 port. With all the posts, concern, speculation about Nox's kit changes from PTS, I thought it was best to send out a post on Reddit, X, and Discord talking about the current kit for base + aspect, known issues on PTS, and the design decisions that are both fixed and still up for change in the next 2 weeks.

Feel free to leave feedback and concerns here, on X, on the Smite Discord, or bring them to Titan Talk live tomorrow (10/16) where I will be for live Q&A. I'll be checking in throughout the next day or so and responding.

Nox Base TLDR

Passive

• Unchanged from Smite 1 outside of QOL +1 that gates loosing multiple candles at once

Shadow Lock

• Unchanged from Smite 1, Root + Cripple unaffected by diminishing returns

Siphon Darkness

• No longer Silences
• Applies a Scaled version of Night Terrors weakening debuff
• Cancels channeled abilities on cast

Shadow Step

• Unchanged from Smite 1 outside of now granting Damage Immunity while inside an ally

Night Terror

• No Longer weakens enemies
• Now applies a Silence to all enemies Hit in the blast

Nox Aspect TLDR

Passive

• No longer gives intelligence, instead gives a Max HP magic shield at 5 candles

Shadow Lock

• Unchanged

Siphon Darkness

• Silences as it does in Smite 1
• No longer does damage

Shadow Step

• No longer does damage when exiting an ally, instead fears
• Gives a Magical Protections magic shield to Nox and the ally she enters

Night Terror

• Has less Intelligence Scaling and gains Magical Protections Scaling
• No Longer Silences or does damage overtime
• Leaves a blinding "night dome" on end that weakens all enemies inside
  • will have another debuff/cc effect but that's still up in the air
• Can be recast to stop the projectile early

On Nox's Siphon Darkness Silence and Identity:

When coming into Nox, the frustration around her silence into burst combo was the main pain point to tackle. Especially going down to 1 relic, the silence in it's current form couldn't stay. Overall the goal is to make sure Nox feels good as a great pick/setup mage with consistent damage + cc but not crazy kill pressure while alone.

On Nox's 2 + 1 Combo:

How straight forward Nox's combo was one of the key things people enjoy about her and something we want to preserve in the port (with the understanding that the silence can't stay as it is). I'm hearing the concerns around her combo now being in the range of hard to hit to useless and am focused on addressing it. Additionally we want to make sure that as needed Night Terror can be subbed in sequence with the Siphon Darkness so you can still silence into root if need be.

What's locked and what's open to change:

At this stage of production, the shape and visuals of the abilities are largely locked. Early in production we experimented with fully swapping back some of the abilities but we landed largely keeping the same kit. No matter what we want to make sure we're addressing the frustration around Nox's one-shot potential along with the enemies ability to respond while preserving he ability to deliver a silence when needed. How that is applied, especially around the effects coming out from Siphon Darkness and Night Terror, is still open for discussion as long as it doesn't require unique SFX/VFX (ie a root vs a slow is an easy add/swap out).

Known PTS Issues

• Shadow Lock cripple not applying or ending early
• Aspect Siphon Darkness not applying the silence
• Aspect Night Terror applying the silence and having full scaling

I don't really understand what makes nox different enough from horus to where he gets +1s that make him more frustrating to play against (faster landing in ult) while nox has her identity stripped from her and has all of her power put into an ultimate. The changes they made to base nox are really boring and uninspired too. I'd have liked it if she had a similar playstyle to old nox where she was a poke mage with a low cd 2 and a different raven. But what we have on pts is just nox but bland. Not even a blind or anything is crazy.

Horus can cc you to death just like nox can/could do, and he even has a knockup while doing so, which is the strongest form of cc.

This just makes me wonder why nox isn't allowed to exist but horus is? And why she gets TWO of her ccs taken away? In my opinion they share the same level of annoynace and frustration.

I love The Morrigan. And now that aphro is all of a sudden everyone’s favorite God I’m abusing her. 😂

It took me a little while to determine a rough metric to compare all the defensive stats but as they fluctuate throughout the game my data best shows the items in early to mid periods of games as for example plating and dampening will become more beneficial then.

What I roughly found was

100 prots= 1000health = 34 dampening = 4.2 plating = 11.67 hps

This aspect is really fun!

However that added lifesteal doesn't seem much, but it really adds a lot of health over the course of a game.

The ability is essentially Sanguin Lash with an added bonus of having 3 easy to hit ranged poke that helps insanely well with clear, proxy, poke, pressure and do great damage overall.

There should be a real tradeoff in tankyness for gettin an ability that gives so much (and that also scales with building tanky allready) in my opinion.

As the title says, im very new (4 and a half hours on smite 2) the games an absolute blast and ive found gods i find very fun. The game feels engaging and fun especially when i get kills but I have yet to have a single conquest match without a toxic leaver. They surrender after 10 minutes and just leave. I want to keep playing but its genuinely almost impossible for me to get a full game bc everyone quits, is it like this for everyone or is this a new player thing only?

Could we get faster Fafnir auto animations so the 3 of us that auto cancel with him can do it better? 👉👈

Just a couple recent clips, quite amazing how you can deal so much damage in .5 seconds.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Smite/comments/xm2c5s/celestial_father_kuzenbo_skin_concept/

I just watched Samdadude's video on Kuzenbo aspect and it's pitifully bad.

It's like Xing aspect once again but instead of being a problematic ult, its just Kuzenbo's passive. It costs no mana to spawn the blue nenes and you can't counter them. It's like they took the worst part of the 2 worst reworked abilities (aspect Xing and Bastet's new ult) and thought it would be great to slap them on Kuzenbo!!! And as a mana-free passive that is always active!!! Like wtf are we doing in Hi-Rez?

Stop with the aspect shenanigans and give us a new map!!! Without teleporters, bring back real ass buffs like cdr on blue buff or green buff!

Or just don't rush the aspects so much. The 2 can be a normal ass ability. Just press 2 and the 3 blue nenes appear to spin during X amount of seconds or to be thrown, having an according mana cost.

Any clue why they disabled my GOAT ? Just saw as I got online tonight. 8:22 pm CT

Just wondering because I have a friend who despises Poseidon, and was wondering what gods you hate going up against or playing as

Getting tired of having to find a small red dot inbetween every character, just to unlock 10 Gems

I just played a game, attempted to pick Bellona support with aspect. I figured that the healing from her 3 or block stacks from her 1 would trigger the devotion stack consumption described in the reworked Eros's bow, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Is this a bug?

I imagine it should be similar to Vital Amp, which Bellona's 3 healing stacks. Pretty disappointed, it seemed like it would be cool.