There are plenty of ways to lose in Smite. Perhaps your team just gets bullied out of lane, or give up an early gold fury and get snowballed, or miscommunicate and lose three members in an ill-advised gank attempt. None of this compares, however, to the worst feeling in all of Smite: You’ve won your lane. You’ve taken three straight Gold Furies. The enemy team is limping along, two levels down across the board…but still, you just can’t seem to close out the game. It should be simple at this point, but somehow your team just can’t seem to make the enemy titan fall.

The truth is that closing out a game of Smite is much harder than it looks, especially as the clock ticks on, all players hit level 20, and item slots begin to max out. Winning a game of Smite doesn’t take a miracle, though; it takes careful planning, timing, and most of all, exploiting your advantages.

Advantage

Advantage is easy enough to grasp in the laning phase, when opponents can be pushed under towers or scared away from minion waves; it’s a little harder to measure in the later game, although recognizing it is just as key. Late-game advantage comes in many forms: the most obvious is in the form of a dead enemy player. The difference between a 5v5 and a 4v5 cannot be overestimated. Less obvious leads come in the form of superior late-game gods on your side, opponents who back for health and mana, and wasted enemy ultimates. And let’s not discount the mighty Fire Giant buff itself.

The real key to success is to find every advantage that your team has, and use them to their full potential. Does the enemy team have a member down? Group up and push down an objective, at the very least; even if you’re at slightly lower health overall, five characters are still stronger than four, and your opponents will either have to give up a valuable piece of map control, or risk engaging a losing fight. Has the enemy ADC just taken a heavy hit, and backed out of the fight? Don’t reset and wait for another twenty seconds to start another fight; if you’re still in good health and mana, initiate and attack the enemy team while they’re a member down.

Look for subtler ways to exploit advantage as well. Let’s say your team’s midlaner is Isis, laning against Raijin; both have powerful, burst-oriented ultimates that are ideal for securing the Fire Giant or Gold Fury. If the enemy Raijin uses his ultimate to escape or put out some poke damage in an inconclusive fight, don’t ignore that! You now have the superior objective control, and you should use it while Raijin’s ultimate is down! Bait out the Fire Giant and use Isis’s ultimate to secure while Raijin is still hovering impotently in the background.

Priority

With these examples in mind, evaluate your advantages critically and figure out how much superiority they give you over the other team, and what kind of priority each objective holds for your team. Let’s say that the Fire Giant buff is sitting snugly around your waists; you forced the enemy team to all back simultaneously, and none of them could get back to the FG pit in time to stop you. There’s two towers left in the duo lane, none in mid, and one in solo; the Gold Fury is also up. Instead of blindly attacking the thing closest to you, or splitting up, stay together and carefully consider what objective is the most valuable at this moment in the game.

Objective priority can be thought of in rough terms of distance; a phoenix is more valuable than a tower, for example, and late in the game a tower is more valuable than the Gold Fury. In the case listed above, if your team has good initiation and is still full on health after the fight with the Fire Giant, the middle phoenix should be attacked, as the highest priority target. Waves of fire minions put enormous pressure on a team to keep the waves cleared out or be forced to back constantly to protect their vulnerable titan. When you have a big advantage, don’t hesitate to go after big, high-priority targets; to do otherwise would be to waste what you’ve gained, prolong the game, and give the enemy team a chance at a comeback.

If your advantage is somewhat less, however (if you are low on health and mana after killing the Fire Giant and your ultimates are down, for example) you should consider snatching up an easier objective before backing; the closest easy target would be the Tier Two tower of the solo lane, in this case, and could be taken quickly before backing to avoid being picked off. As a general rule, if you’re concerned about the strength of the enemy team relative to your own, you can attack from the outside in. Use your small advantages to go after low-priority, low-threat targets first to snap up some quick gold and map control before moving on to harder targets.

So How Do I Apply This?

Now, let’s bring both of these concepts together. The truth is that I can’t possibly cover every scenario or every piece of late-game wisdom in an article this short, so I’m trying to teach a mindset, not specifics. If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: Never be idle. Never wander around in the jungle looking for an errant pick or idly clear your back camps because you have nothing better to do; if you have even a scrap of advantage, evaluate what it will allow you to do, and then do it. Don’t hang around or back lazily after you win a fight; back fast, heal up, and push that power play as far as you safely can. Don’t even think about wasting a second of the Fire Giant buff; even if you take an enemy phoenix and don’t feel that you can push any further, double back through the enemy jungle and clear out their camps with your increased power. Always be saying to yourself, “is there something valuable we could be pressuring, or a fight we could be winning right now?” If the answer is yes, and you’re not doing it, fix the problem. In the late-game, passivity is an even greater killer than Kali.

Get your own AKRacing Chair here and support our players, all profit goes towards the teams!