Many players tend to take for granted some of the little elements of Smite that could improve their game. Be it casuals or league, players should always be practicing strategies and techniques that can help them get better. In this article, I’m going to talk about one of these things, the minimap.

The minimap is just what it sounds like, a mini map at the corner of the screen. So you’re probably thinking, “What’s so special about it?” The minimap shows the locations of wards, objectives, teammates, and enemies that are in the sight of allies or over wards. You can use it to see where you, your teammates, or your enemies are going. If you’ve heard of map awareness, but never knew what people meant by this, it means you need to pay attention to your minimap. This may be to view where an enemy is going or so that you can set up an ambush. If minions see an enemy, they can also appear on the minimap along with enemy minions. By having good map awareness, you can effectively know where your enemies are, where they’re heading, and if they’re trying to backdoor.

Now you know what the minimap is used for and some terminology that’s associated with the minimap. So now the question is, does this actually work and come in handy? Let’s say that you’re trying to bait a fight at the fire giant with all your phoenixes up because you know that you can win a team fight. You start the fire giant and the other team shows up, except that they only have four people with them. You continue to fight for the fire giant when you suddenly realize you have no phoenix in the left lane and you’re left wondering what happened. That’s what’s known as a backdoor. It can be very effective for destroying towers and phoenixes and can possibly turn a loss into a win. The reason backdoors happen is because of a lack of map awareness.

If the players in this scenario payed attention to their minimap, then they would still have their phoenix in the left lane. They would have seen that someone was attacking the minions in the left lane and then their phoenix. They would have disengaged, sent someone back to defend, and still had a phoenix while being able to defend the fire giant. Another thing you can do on the minimap is called pinging. This is where you click on the minimap (you make your mouse appear based on your controls, for me I hold alt) and you will see a small circle appear on the map. Players that ping will also have their god icon flash so that players know who’s pinging. This can be used to direct players, point out something happening (like an objective being attacked), or to signal an area an enemy went into the jungle. This can be very useful for when you have an ally that isn’t using the voice chat and you want them to go somewhere.

Let’s use another scenario where not everyone is in the voice chat. If you see an enemy heading towards the middle lane and the mid laner isn’t in the voice chat, then you should definitely ping in the direction the enemy is moving so that the mid laner knows he’s about to get ganked. Players don’t need to have the best map awareness to know when someone pings since it makes a sound, although they still do need some map awareness. Maybe you’re the one not in voice chat and you know that the enemies are going for gold fury. You can ping the gold fury to let your teammates know that the enemies are there and they will defend.

There are more scenarios where this could come in handy, but this is just to get you thinking of how you can effectively use map awareness. Try to have better map awareness in your next game and see how it goes. It does take a lot of practice to play like you normally would while being able to watch the map, so if you don’t succeed at first, keep trying. I guarantee you’ll see better game play.

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