The Game Changers
Pegon’s Susano
Pegon with the Jade Dragons during a regular season match. Courtesy of Hi-Rez Strudios.
Over the course of SMITE’s competitive history, storied god-player combinations have pushed the limits of what we thought was possible, sometimes even completely changing the game with their mastery of a single god. This series looks back on the players who were so good at one character that they single-handedly influenced the meta.
Longtime and casual fans alike might have found themselves confused when watching phase 3 of the season 9 SMITE Pro League. For nearly all of SMITE’s history, mages have dominated the middle lane, with the occasional guest appearance from hunters if the meta dictated it. However, on a given weekend in phase 3, fans could expect to see the likes of Set, Ne Zha, Pele, and, of course, even Susano in the mid lane a few times, with hunters making up the majority of the other picks alongside a sliver of top mages such as The Morrigan, Vulcan, and Yu Huang. Mages’ ownership of the mid-lane meta had been reduced to its smallest share. What happened?
The appeal of double hunter combinations is easy to see on the surface. Hunters shred towers and objectives better than mages and also pair nicely with team-wide stims like Fafnir’s coerce or a frenzy. Mages also struggle to clear red buff on their own due to their low tankiness and sustained damage. That is one reason why, in the first match of phase 3, the Leviathans tried to move their mage to the duo lane, and put a hunter in mid-lane. The experiment didn’t work, but hunters in mid-lane would become a mainstay of phase 3 because they out-pressured most mages and could farm on their own. Hunters also stood up better than mages to the solo kill potential of assassins due to better mobility, sustained damage, and availability of life steal.
Right—assassins in mid. For many of the same reasons as hunters, assassins found their own niche in the mid-lane, being able to exploit matchups and exert pressure in the form of kill potential. In teamfights, assassins offer similar perks as The Morrigan—the team can usually play a 4-1 style, with a four-man dive and a single backliner. During the laning phase, assassins offer extreme mobility, being able to vanish into the jungle between waves, threatening ganks, invades, and even objectives more regularly than traditional mages. Whereas the jungler has multiple farming obligations that stretch him across the map, the mid laner farms in a much narrower portion of the map, which frees them up to rotate from their central position and dictate pressure on one side of the map—a second jungler.
In a lot of ways, this was the story of season 9. The first assassin played in mid happened at the kickoff tournament by a rookie in his second game. Piloting Susano, Pegon quickly demonstrated mechanical mastery of the character as well as a keen sense of how to abuse the weaknesses of mages using the quick get-in-get-out burst typical of assassins. Five minutes into game 2, with the Dragons trailing the Bolts 1-0 in the set, Pegon did this:
Recognizing that Venenu’s ult was down from a prior engagement, and his resources depleted from clearing the red buff, Pegon exploits the vulnerability without hesitation, using Jet Stream to close the gap and weaving in auto attacks with the Storm Kata to maximize damage. PolarBearMike blinks in for insurance, but Venenu is dead before anyone registers the attack. Watch it again; the window of opportunity Pegon seizes is as small as any. Venenu had finished clearing red buff, but he is still full health, which means he had help with the camp. But Venenu rotates high into mid-lane alone, which means his help—in this case, AwesomeJake—was rotating away from him and would not be able to respond fast enough. Pegon pulls the trigger, and Venenu dies in a matter of seconds.
These mid-lane solo kills would become a mainstay for Pegon’s Susano. Later in phase 1, facing SMITE’s defending world champions, Pegon found a surprising solo kill against Sheento:
Again, Pegon demonstrates an unparalleled feel for locating these opportunities, creating kills seemingly out of thin air. Here, Pegon recognizes that Sheento steps up a half step too far to clear the wave, which opens up a window for aggression. Watch how he delays the threat using Jet Stream. Sheento’s only chance is to stun Pegon to create some distance and halt DPS, so once the Deadly Aspects is primed from Sheento, Pegon backpedals to offset Sheento’s timing, refiring Jet Stream to reengage at the edge of the tower and pump in the last bit of damage. This is pure 1v1 vision that is rarely on display in mid-lane matchups. Pegon recognizes not only a sliver’s chance for an attack, but also perfectly manipulates Sheento into misplaying his resources. The back step delays the tail end of the attack long enough to upset Sheento’s timing and stop any opportunity for self-peel, enabling one more auto attack, and Sheento dies from a bluestone tick.
Fans will remember Pegon’s excellent performance against the Bolts from spring masters where he soloed Venenu every game. Playing Susano in game four, Pegon once again found a kill opportunity that seemingly shouldn’t exist:
Pegon makes masterful use of the mobility enabled by his blink relic to find a dazzling solo kill on Venenu. Facing a 2v1, with sam4soccer2’s distant rotation lagging behind, Pegon plays back in the lane. Such posturing hides the threat and also yields space to the Bolts’ mid-jungle combination. But Pegon has them on a string. Once they step up in the lane, Pegon recognizes that the Thoth-Nemesis combination has no tools to peel the Susano’s aggression. Without thinking twice, he blinks in with an auto attack immediately into the Jet Stream, marking Venenu for death. The sudden damage causes Venenu to dash backward toward his tower. Pegon then re-fires the Jet Stream, chasing Venenu into the tower and using the last two swings of Storm Kata to finish the kill and dash back to safety. Then watch Pegon’s escape. With sam4soccer2’s rotation into the lane, Pegon weaves around his jungler to put another body between him and the Nemesis, neutralizing LASBRA’s threat. Then it’s taunts for good measure.
Pegon is a master of understanding nuances of god matchups. When facing characters without the tools to respond to his aggression, Pegon is quick to exploit those limitations for kills and wins on the map. For instance, consider this invade from the same game:
Invading the red buff by himself, Pegon baits the best form of peel, the silence from AwesomeJake’s Siphon Darkness, then immediately engages on Venenu, who was rotating toward the buff on the mid-lane side. With Jake behind him, Pegon uses the Jet Stream to engage onto Venenu, recognizing that it also creates separation between him and Jake. Jake is able to apply the cripple from Shadow Lock to stop Pegon’s chase, but the Typhoon has the range and Venenu is toast. On the surface, this is a fairly straightforward solo kill: an assassin with a 2-level lead kills a mage. But in competitive play, rotations such as Jake’s are meant to deter aggression and protect from invades. The mistake is that Jake plays this with intent to save the red buff. The use of Siphon Darkness at the top of the fight shows that Jake intends to force Pegon off of the buff so it can be secured for his team. Once the Siphon Darkness is on cooldown, Pegon recognizes that Jake’s positioning is insufficient to peel for the Thoth, a window that he seizes without hesitation for an easy kill.
Part of what makes Pegon’s assassins so deadly is his use of their strong rotational capabilities to generate threats on the map. Consider this play, also from the kick-off LAN:
Immediately after clearing the wave, Pegon looks for rotations in the jungle toward the spawning red buff. Having successfully invaded the previous red buff, Pegon rotates up into the left-side jungle to threaten the red buff again while Venenu is clearing the wave. However, Pegon is a few seconds early to the buff camp, so he immediately looks for the next threat. Waiting in the jungle, he spots two things under the Bolts’ tower as they clear the wave: Jake rotating up through the lane away from the red buff, and Venenu rotating back into left jungle to contest the red. Only, Pegon is not on the red. Recognizing the chance to take an advantageous 1v1, Pegon waits for Venenu to step slightly out of position into the jungle, and it’s another easy solo kill for Pegon.
Pegon is elite at understanding when the positioning of his opponents generates windows of opportunity. From the same game:
Jake initiates what seems like a favorable 3v2 in the jungle, only Pegon and PolarBearMike are a few steps too far away for Venenu and LASBRA to immediately follow the threat. While Jake channels the Watery Grave, Pegon uses Jet Stream to quickly disengage. When he does so, watch how LASBRA and Venenu react. They peel off of the chase and look toward the mid camp. After teleporting away, rather than running to his tower, Pegon turns back toward the threat and looks for chances to counter-engage. When Watery Grave finishes, Pegon uses the Wind Siphon to pull Jake back into danger, recognizing that his Bolts teammates are too far away to follow up. Jake gets a last-minute push onto Pegon back toward his team, but an auto attack easily finishes the kill.
In a lot of these side-jungle skirmishes, Pegon acts like little more than a second jungler. But he understands how to use the kinds of pressure enabled by a jungler transplanted to a different role on the map in order to generate new plays for his team: more frequent red buff invades, duo-side map pressure, mid camps, etc. His pattern of clearing waves and rotating into the jungle, springing traps on unsuspecting enemies is the epitome of assassin gameplay. Paired with his intimate knowledge of 1v1 mechanics and the nuances of specific, often obscure matchups, Pegon was able to use Susano to turn the mid lane into a center of gravity for the Jade Dragons, one he could orbit dangerously and sling off into other areas of the map looking for quick plays while the opposing mid laner was stuck in a black hole of catch-up farming and uncomfortable invade contests.
If needed, Pegon could also play traditional mages and hunters; in the 5th game of the summer masters finals, Pegon turned in a legendary performance on Yu Huang to give the Dragons their first tournament win in over a year. It is this versatility Pegon brings that ultimately transformed the middle lane. SMITE’s premier mid laners have to be warier of 1v1 matchups and invade pressure than ever before, sometimes even holding their pick until later in the draft to avoid exploitable mismatches. Mid laners now need a wider repertoire of not only gods but play styles that can be applied in different situations. Pegon and other mid laners such as Paul now look more often toward Set to offer an assassin toolkit in the middle lane, but it was Pegon’s Susano that first demonstrated the possibilities of assassins in mid, and it started in just his second game in the SMITE Pro League.
