In the months since season four started, we’ve been dealing with an extremely volatile meta game where things drop in and out at a moment’s notice. Hercules is strong, Hercules is weak. Triple tank comps are viable, triple tanks don’t work. Izanami is overpowered, Izanami is barely viable. Most perplexingly is that all these meta shifts happen with very little in game changes. But from the looks of things, starting with this patch, the meta will be much more clearly defined.

First of all, Poseidon’s default skin is getting a visual overhaul, along with all his ability effects, his recolour skin and his card art. Hirez also updated his mastery skins and his London Conspiracy skin. The only thing they’re keeping the same is his voice and the skins not mentioned.

In addition to this, a new event is starting in Smite called the Celestial Voyage. In it music packs, loading backgrounds, and loading frames. These can be won through solving riddles with Hieroglyphs. These will be earned through completing in game quests. These will have five exclusive skins that can only be obtained through the event. These all follow the same theme and are for Anhur, Bastet, Thoth, Khepri and Neith.

Other than that for skins, Bastet’s mastery skins have been updated.

For achievements, they’ve added two for Cernunnos. There are also some misc changes, but nothing significant.

To start off with the rebalancing, flickering ritual has had a  tooltip update. Hydra’s Lament has had a price increase to 1,200 from 1,000. Mantle of discord received a buff and a nerf. Its cooldown reduction has been reduced by five percent and its gold cost has been reduced by 200. Masamune has received a small buff to its passive. It will now give seven bonus protections per stack of its passive as opposed to the five it gave before. Rod of Asclepius/Rod of Healing have been changed so that their passives don’t stack. I don’t foresee any of these adjustments changing much in the meta.

Next for Mark of the Vanguard has received a pretty large nerf, reducing its health given from 150 to 100. This will hurt the early game to the triple tank compositions pretty bad.

Enchanted spear’s price has been lowered by 50 putting it down to 1,400. Hirez hopes this makes it an appealing enough option to start as you can now buy two potions instead of one at the start.

Spear of desolation has seen almost no play since it was reworked, so the cost has been lowered by 200 down to 2,600. It likely still won’t beat other options for penetration items, but it might retake its spot as a luxury item.

Relics used to stack so that only one person on a team had to buy the upgrade for everyone. That won’t happen anymore starting in Patch 4.5. This was a largely unknown bug that wasn’t utilized. So no meta changes there.

Next you have Soul Trap which has had a 200 gold price reduction bringing it down to 1,400. This will make building Book of Thoth much more appealing and help out the rough early games of more mana hungry mages.

Spear of the Magus has received a large buff to its passive. It used to only stack its protection debuff three times, but with this new passive it’ll go up to five. This will be good for any mage with multi-hit abilities like Kukulkan or more significantly Poseidon. Poseidon is a very strong mage right now, and this item change gives him a bigger advantage over straight burst mages such as Janus. Who knows? Maybe this in combination with his recent buffs to his kit, will push Zhong Kui out of obscurity and into viability.

Finally it’s time for god rebalances. First of all, they buffed Ares’s wave clear by buffing his shackles when they hit minions. Though this likely won’t change much.

Cernunnos had his base power reduced by three and they removed the slow on hi wave clear. Cernunnos has been really strong since his release, but these changes will likely make him more on par with other ADCs.

Hercules has had his heal cooldown lengthened from 15 seconds to 17 seconds making his sustain a little bit worse.

Jing Wei’s base health and base movement speed have been buffed slightly, and the cooldown on her explosive bolts has been reduced. Jing Wei has fallen hard out of the meta since the end of season three, but these buffs might see her return to the meta.

With these changes, Poseidon will inevitably become the strongest mid due to these changes. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the of the meta develops around this.