I died six times in my first real Smite match.
Not because I was terrible at playing MOBAs. I’ve played League of Legends in the past. I have a basic understanding of what you should expect. Last hit minions. Don’t overextend. Ward objectives. Play your role.
I died because Smite’s tutorial taught me almost nothing about how to actually play the game.
What the tutorial told me
Smite’s tutorial lets you practice against one god. That’s Ra, an Egyptian mage who shoots laser beams. You fight him a few times in a controlled environment. The game explains basic movement, attacking, or the abilities you can use. Then it deems you ready for real matches.
You’re not ready. Not even close.
The tutorial never explained Neith’s kit beyond a surface level description. I knew she was a hunter. I knew she dealt physical damage from range. I knew the game classified her as “easy” difficulty. That was the extent of my preparation.
During my first Arena match, I had no idea what any of Neith’s abilities actually did. I didn’t know her passive or how to trigger it. Or what her damage combos are. I had zero clue on which skills I should level first or what items to build.
The game defaulted to auto-leveling and auto-purchasing. It made those decisions for me because it assumed I didn’t know better. It was right.
What actually happened in that match
Our team composition was a disaster. Too much magical damage, minimal crowd control. Thor was our only frontline. I didn’t recognize this at the time because I didn’t know how to build a decent team in Smite.
The enemy team knew exactly what they were doing. They spawn camped us from minute three. Every time we tried to push out to reach the minion waves, multiple enemies collapsed on us. We got cut off from experience and gold. The level gap grew and we couldn’t fight back. We couldn’t do anything except die repeatedly and hope the match would end quickly.
I tried to focus on what I knew. Stay back. Use range advantage. Kill minions. Don’t engage enemy players unless I had backup. Basic stuff that works in any MOBA.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t realize Neith was so fragile in early levels. I didn’t know which enemy abilities to watch for. I couldn’t recognize the warning signs that I was about to get ganked. I walked into area-of-effect abilities I couldn’t see coming. I got stunned and couldn’t escape. I died.
The “An ally has been slain” voice line repeated so often it became the soundtrack to the match. My teammates were dying even more than me. The final score was 4 kills, 6 deaths, 1 assist for me. My teammates went 2-9, 1-10, 1-10. We lost by a crushing margin.
I earned more gold per minute than my teammates. My kill-death ratio was the best on our team. I was the strongest player on a team that got absolutely destroyed. That’s how outmatched we were.
Why this isn’t just a skill issue
Everyone starts somewhere. Every MOBA player has matches where they don’t know what’s happening. That’s normal.
This was different. This wasn’t a close game where better players edged out a win. This was organized, experienced players dismantling newbies who had no business being in the same match as them.
The enemy team knew how to block us into our spawn. They understood minion wave management. They coordinated crowd control chains. These aren’t beginner tactics. These are intermediate-to-advanced strategies that take dozens of hours to learn.
Our team had just completed the tutorial. We were running around confused, dying to mechanics we didn’t understand. We all struggled with the third-person camera perspective that made map awareness harder than in traditional MOBAs.
The matchmaking system failed, but so did the tutorial. It sent us into that match unprepared.
What I needed but didn’t get
What I needed was a practice space to test Neith’s abilities without worrying about dying. Fire off her Spirit Arrow and see how the projectile travels. Use her Back Flip to understand its range and cooldown. Experiment with her ultimate to learn its range and targeting.
I needed to practice against different enemy god types. Understand how to position against melee assassins versus ranged mages. Learn what abilities look dangerous so I can react appropriately.
Having some guidance on builds would be nice. No auto-purchases, but an actual explanation of why certain items work on hunters. It would also be nice to learn how to adapt builds based on enemy team composition.
I needed to play against other newbies.
There should also be bot matches with adjustable difficulty. Start against easy bots to learn mechanics. Gradually increase the difficulty as I improved.
League of Legends has all of this. Dota 2 has all of this. Smite has none of these things.
Issues with rewards
Here’s the worst part. Smite doesn’t reward you for completing tutorials. You earn zero Favor, which is the in-game currency for unlocking new gods and purchasing items.
The only way to earn Favor is to play real matches. This creates a vicious cycle. New players need practice, but the tutorial doesn’t teach them anything meaningful. So they’re incentivized to skip learning and jump straight into real matches where they’ll get destroyed.
I wanted to go back and practice more after that disastrous first game. I also wanted to unlock new gods. The game’s reward structure pushed me toward more real matches even though I wasn’t ready for them.
This is a terrible design that punishes players for being thorough. It encourages rushing through practice to get to the “real” game. Then it pairs under-prepared players against experienced opponents, creating a miserable experience for everyone involved.
What Neith taught me
I kept playing Smite after that first disastrous Neith match. I wanted to give the game a fair chance. The third-person perspective intrigued me enough to push through my frustration.
By my third match as Neith, I was starting to understand her kit. Her passive marks enemies when she uses abilities, and those marks make her basic attacks root targets. Her Spirit Arrow is a skillshot that explodes on marked targets. Her Back Flip is both an escape tool and damage ability that also leaves a mark. Her ultimate is a global snipe that roots the target.
She’s actually a decent hunter once you understand the mark system. Her kit synergizes well. She has built-in crowd control, decent escape options, and strong poke damage. The “easy” difficulty rating makes sense.
I learned all of this through trial and error in real matches. I learned by dying repeatedly, frustrating my teammates who had to carry my dead weight.
By match ten, I was starting to enjoy myself. I understood god abilities better. I’d learned map layouts. I could anticipate enemy movements and react appropriately.
I almost didn’t make it to match ten. That first experience was so brutal that I considered uninstalling the game. If I’d been someone who wasn’t interested in learning how the game works, I would have quit.
This is the biggest issue Smite has. It’s a good game buried under a terrible tutorial system. It has innovative features that could attract players tired of traditional MOBAs. Yet it refuses to teach those features to newcomers.
My six deaths as Neith were the result of bad game design. I got past it, but most players won’t. Until Hi-Rez Studios fixes this, Smite will remain a niche game that could have been something more.
📌 Changelog
- December 7, 2025: Changed the formatting and re-wrote the article to improve the flow and add more details of my experience.
- August 26, 2013: Date article was originally published.
