SMITE is approaching its fifth anniversary this coming March, and with its fresh release on the Nintendo Switch, the game can expect a new surge of players to revitalize the SMITE community. With an influx of new players, there are bound to be more sightings of some of the most basic mistakes you can make in the game.

Whether you’ve been playing SMITE since launch or just recently started, odds are you’ve caught yourself making some of these mistakes at one time or another. Some of you may have clicked on this blog post just to make sure you haven’t been making these mistakes without realizing it.

So, without further ado, let’s look at the top 5 SMITE noob mistakes we should all avoid as we try to get better at the game.

Top 5 SMITE Noob Mistakes

Let’s be honest, there are more than just five noob mistakes in SMITE, but there are some that are more telling of your skill level than others. While the true list of SMITE noob mistakes is seemingly endless, these are the ones you should avoid at all costs.

5. 1v5ing

Unless you’re an Assassin like Loki or Ao Kuang and you’re pulling off some sweet drive-by kills, you really have no business engaging in 1v5 fights. Heck, there’s a lot of Assassin players that won’t attempt drive-bys if all 5 members of the enemy team are tightly clustered together.

Don’t just wander into the entire enemy team and expect to get a positive trade on kills for deaths. Odds are at least one member of the enemy team will see you coming. If they see you coming, they’ll probably tell their allies before you even reach them.

Even with a stealth ability, a 1v5 teamfight is a risky bet for trying to pick off one of the squishier enemies. With five enemies walking together, you can be almost certain at least one of them heard you enter stealth and is telling their allies about it.

Pick your fights. None of the Gods/Goddesses in SMITE can withstand punishment from five enemies at once for more than two or three seconds. Know when the odds are in your favor or when you’re presented with an opportunity, but don’t run headlong into the enemy team by yourself and expect the fight to go well.

4. Overextending

Overextension happens in nearly every SMITE game, regardless of game mode, and it tends to be the cause of a lot of unnecessary deaths. The moment you overextend, you are giving your enemies a chance to punish you. If you’re going up against a somewhat competent player, you had better believe they’re going to pounce on you as soon as they see you out of position.

Get a feel for your preferred lane. Figure out how far back you should stay when you’re farming your lane. Learn who can stun, slow, and cripple you. Listen to your allies when they tell you to retreat; at the very least consider why they are telling you to get back.

If you’re constantly getting caught outside the safety of your towers and allies, you can expect your team to get annoyed and call you out for it.

3. Auto-Locking Your Role

People who auto-lock are often perceived as one-tricks and show that they’re only in the match for themselves. You shouldn’t be doing this in any game mode, whether it’s ranked or unranked. Even though ranked matches have a pick-ban phase, the option is still there for you to lock in your character as soon as it’s your pick, but that doesn’t mean you have to take it.

There’s a timer on picks and bans for a reason. Take the time to figure out your team’s strengths and weaknesses in the lobby. Use that knowledge to form an optimal team. Everybody wants to have fun and play their favorite Gods/Goddesses whenever they can, but part of being a team is compromising with your allies. You’d probably be surprised how much you’d learn about the game if you’d leave your comfort picks every once in a while.

It’s okay to pick your preferred God/Goddess and show them on your nameplate in the lobby. Doing so is probably the quickest way to voice your opinion on the role you want to play. Just don’t lock in your pick until you’ve confirmed with your team that it makes the most sense for you to be in that role; otherwise, you might find yourself spending the next half hour with a pretty salty team that doesn’t want to work with you.

2. Refusing to Communicate

MOBAs are games of communication. There’s a reason you’re fighting on a team, so you all need to work together and act like a unit. While good communication doesn’t always guarantee a win, when two teams of similar skill levels are paired against each other, the team with better communication has the odds tipped in their favor.

However, just communicating isn’t good enough. You need to pay attention to your tone and attitude as you try to work with others. This isn’t something you should just keep in mind for SMITE, but for every team-based game. The same can be said for Overwatch, League of Legends, Dota 2, and more!

Nobody wants to put their all into anything they don’t enjoy when they don’t have to. If they aren’t enjoying the match, how can you expect them to care about it? How can you expect them to care enough to help you when you’re constantly telling them how bad they are? Simply put, you can’t.

Communicate as necessary and try to keep it positive.

1. Using Abilities for Only One Purpose

In my eyes, this is what truly separates noobs and experienced players. You are going about SMITE all wrong if you think your abilities only have a single purpose or a single viable situation. Let me emphasize this with a scenario.

Let’s say you’re playing Loki. You’re chasing an enemy Thoth through the jungle, and you can assume you’re free to continue chasing because of other enemy player positions on the map. All of Thoth’s abilities are on cooldown, and all your abilities are on cooldown aside from Decoy, which places a Decoy down that forces NPC monsters to attack it but has no effect on player-controlled enemies.

It seems like you have no way to catch up to the enemy until your other abilities are off their cooldowns, right? Wrong.

In case you never noticed before, the central part of the Decoy (where the floating fake Loki is) has collision enabled on it. That means you can use it as a blocker.

You drop your Decoy in front of the enemy Thoth just as he presses up against the scenery to make a turn, cutting off his turn and forcing him to move around your Decoy. You buy yourself another half a second of time as you chase him toward the middle lane and back to his tower.

Your Vanish ability comes off cooldown, and you use it. With the extra movement speed from Vanish, you can catch up to Thoth just after he crosses the line of his tower’s range. You land a few auto-attacks, kill him, and manage to escape from the tower’s range with only one more tower hit to spare before it would kill you.

Do you remember that half of a second you bought yourself earlier when you blocked him with your decoy? It didn’t seem like it did much initially, but it turned out that was your saving grace. That maneuver saved half a second on your chase and meant you spent half a second less under the enemy tower, which was just enough time to avoid the tower’s fatal shot.

If you didn’t know you could use your Decoy to block someone from running away, even to buy yourself just a split-second of time, the Thoth might have gotten away once his dash came off cooldown, or at the very least you would have had to trade kills with him from the extra tower shot you took.

Take the time to think about the little things your abilities can do and use them to your advantage. Causing collisions, slowing enemies down, and providing utility to your allies at opportune moments can help you break free of noob status and push you to become an experienced player.

Noob or Not?

Both new and experienced players have something to take from these tips. If you’re a new player, you now know what to avoid as you fight your way through the Battleground of the Gods. If you’re an experienced player, let these serve as a reminder of the things we all should avoid.

We often don’t realize when we’ve formed a bad habit, so it wouldn’t hurt to make sure you haven’t been making these mistakes.

Hopefully, you learned at least one thing from this list of SMITE noob mistakes. If you didn’t, at least you can appreciate how far you’ve come in the game!

Good luck and have fun!