As with every new god released, the newest god in SMITE, Susano, is already being called broken and overpowered by the community, demanding that he receive nerfs in the next patch. But the question is, is Susano really as broken as people say or does he simply have the advantage of being out for so little time, that no one understands exactly how to counter him? There are quite a number of things that actually point to him being very in-line with many of the games other assassins, he simply has the advantage of insanely high mobility to dump his damage and get out in a heartbeat. After playing 38 games with Susano, I can safely say that he snowballs incredibly hard because of his crazy mobility, but overpowered is a huge stretch. All he needs is some adjustments on his mobility, such as removing the cooldown reduction on his third ability, Jet Stream, when you teleport to an enemy.

To compare his damage to that of other assassins, I took Thor, Loki, and Fenrir and compared the damage of each of their combos with the maximum amount of damage and put them up against Susano with each god having a nice rounded number of 150 physical power, except for Thor, who will have 160 because of his passive, Warrior's Madness. The first god for comparison will be the god that everyone loves to hate: Loki

Loki

Loki’s Vanish at level 20 will do a total of 360 damage plus 100% of your physical power. With 150 power, that means hitting Vanish will do 510 damage. Combine the 510 damage from Vanish with the 370 damage from Aimed Strike (220+100% scaling) gives Loki’s 2 ability combo 880 damage, but because both of those abilities need Loki to land an auto to proc the damage, you need to add another 236 damage for an auto attack that doesn’t hit the targets back and 283 for a target that does hit the targets back (due to Loki passive). That brings Loki’s grand total for a 2 ability combo to 1116 for a hit anywhere but the back and 1163 for a hit on the back. If you decide to use Loki’s ultimate, that will add another 630 damage for a total of 1793 damage (this accounts for hitting the back only, as his ultimate will teleport you there).

Thor

Next is Thor and his combo. Mjolnir’s Attunement, if it hits a god twice, will do 630 base damage plus 90% scaling. At 160 power (which, again, will be used only for Thor) that will hit someone for 774 damage while also allowing you to teleport to the hammer to close the distance. Berserker Barrage will hit you for a whopping 500 base plus 225% scaling for a massive 860. With those numbers, hitting Thor’s combo means you will hit for 1634 damage without the ultimate, and with Anvil of Dawn (350+120% scaling), you will slam them for 2164.

Fenrir

Now it’s Fenrir’s turn. Fenrir’s Unchained (335+80% scaling) will deal 455 damage with 150 power. If Fenrir deals all the damage from his Brutalize, it will do 960 damage (165 base plus 50% scaling four times). That brings Fenrir’s damage to 1415 with just Unchained and Brutalize combo. Add the damage from his ultimate, Ragnarok, he will do 2095 damage. The one thing Fenrir has over each of these other gods is that his second ability, Seething Howl, adds a massive amount of damage. With his passive fully stacked, Seething howl will add an additional 105 power so Unchained will do 539 damage and Brutalize will deal 1110. Combined, that’s 1649 damage and 2419, without and with his ultimate respectively.

Susano

Finally, the damage of the God of the Summer Storm, Susano. His first ability, Storm Kata, will deal 210 base damage plus 90% scaling two times. With 150 power, that would be 690 damage. Assuming you are able to hit an enemy with Jet Stream, that ability will deal a total of 540 damage (80 base plus 30% scaling four times). That brings his combo to 1230 damage, 380 damage difference between Susano and Thor and 185 damage between Susano and Fenrir. Adding in Suanso’s ultimate, Typhoon, brings it up to 1815, 325 less than Thor and 280 less than Fenrir (this is without including the extra damage from Seething Howl).

After seeing these numbers side by side, why is it then that people believe that Susano is so much more overpowered than other assassins? The true issue with Susano isn’t that his damage is too high, it’s actually rather consistent with other assassins and as HiRezCapsLock says in the following picture, he would need physical power that is impossible to get just to do more damage than other assassins.

This is in no means a defense of Susano though, after playing so many matches with him, I can certainly see where he needs to be nerfed, but it has to be in the right place or he becomes unusably bad. The places they need to hit him the most are his Jet Stream and his dash at the end of Storm Kata. First, the cooldown on Jet Stream is far too low. With 40% Cooldown reduction, Jet Stream has a cooldown of 7.8 seconds and in the early game, if you hit any enemy, be it a god or an enemy minion, the Cooldown is reduced to 6 seconds if you teleport to the Jet Stream. That means it effectively has the same Cooldown the entire match no matter what.

By increasing the Cooldown of the ability and removing reduction to 6 seconds for teleporting to an enemy, you have taken away most of his early game power and slowed down his late game a bit. Storm Kata’s biggest problem is that, unless you’re an Ares or Nox, locking down Susano long enough for the 3 seconds he has to dash is incredibly difficult as only a single god has a CC that lasts long enough for Susano’s dash to expire (the longest disable is Ne Zha’s Wind Fire Wheels that takes a god out of play for 4 seconds and the longest hard CC is Ymir’s Frost Breath), so Susano can get out of danger no matter what. If the time he had to dash was reduced by even a second, which would make a huge impact. Should both of these nerf happen, he will fall well within the normal bounds of most assassins.