Learning new games, particularly MOBAs, can be increasingly difficult and daunting. MOBAs such as Smite, League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of the Storm are jam packed with features and trying to learn all of them at once is an incredibly overwhelming task. Once players fully understand the mechanics they often struggle to find where or how to improve their own gameplay and using the following steps I hope to aid players in achieving greatness.

A) God Selection

It’s extremely important to keep up to date on the meta and god tier lists and understand what makes a god strong or weak. Picking higher classed gods will inherently give you an advantage over weaker gods, and can often be all that’s necessary to improve your play.

Above is dmbrandon’s most recent tier list along with a link to his SmiteGame forum post discussing why he assigned each god in the manner he did. All credit goes to dmbrandon. I strongly suggest each person to study this tier list and use it to their advantage as dmbrandon is a caster for Smite eSports as well as one of the more prominent players, and his tier list is a collection of hard and analytical work to provide the entire community with very accurate information.

B) Managing Your Mood

It’s a fact that players are often affected by their moods. If you are really in the zone, you will often tend to play better and achieve more victories. However on the other side of the spectrum it’s often easy to start going on a downward spiral into a bad mood, especially after a few bad games in a row. Players often call this going on tilt, and it should be avoided at all costs. If you begin to get in a bad mood, you often make more mistakes and throw games easier, and some players even give up much faster. This can severely hurt your gameplay and your win loss record.

If you’re going on tilt my biggest recommendation is to stop playing. Take a break from the game, go socialize with friends or family, read a book or watch a movie. Do something to relax yourself and take your mind off of the game, and come back when you’ve calmed down. Playing on tilt only causes you to play worse, and go even further on tilt and will bring nothing good to your gameplay. At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that stuff will always happen and nothing is entirely in your control, and you will eventually learn to shrug off bad games and move forward without letting it effect you.

C) Watch Twitch

Twitch.tv is a website that allows players to stream their gameplay to viewers in real time. Many professional players including Team Dignitas’ own professional Smite team streams gameplay on a daily basis and you can almost always learn something from watching. From small tricks to major gameplay decisions, players on Twitch often talk about what they are doing and show their viewers how to perform better each match. Finding a streamer that works well for you is key to success here, so make sure to check out as many streams as you can until you find your favorite. If you wish to get better at specific roles, I definitely recommend watching professional players from each team in that specific role as every player has different lessons to give to you!

D) Confidence

One of the biggest ways to quickly improve your skill is to have confidence in yourself. By believing in your own abilities, you will often find yourself making plays and winning more often than not. Whenever a player doubts themselves, they often back off from situations that were easily in their own favor, and can cost their team a sure victory. By having confidence you enable yourself to step up to your role and start making plays for your team.

E) Analyzing Your Games

Lastly, analyzing your matches will play a strong role in allowing you to get better. Watch the matches back through the in-game replay client and try to figure out what went wrong, and how you could play better. By critiquing your own play after the match has ended, you can find where your own shortcomings are and enable yourself to play better. Remember that improving your play is an active effort that you must put energy into, and one of the best ways is to analyze and critique yourself. Take notes on builds and try various things, you cannot get better without getting out of your comfort zone!

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day what will improve your gameplay most varies from player to player. While I aim to help you the best of my ability, you have to find what works best for you in order to improve your own gameplay. Practice will always be beneficial, however make sure when you play games to truly look at what you and other players are doing. Simply spamming games for the sake of playing the game will often not aid to the same kind of performance increase as truly striving for and working towards greatness will.

Best of luck, and Happy Smiting!

Make sure to follow Smite on twitter @SmiteGame and dmbrandon @juicediem. You can find me @CasayanHD as well! Thanks for reading!