SMITE 2’s strength and intelligence are two brand-new stats that are crucial to understanding how builds work in this MOBA. They do a similar job as the ‘power’ mechanic in the first game, but are far from a direct translation. Their introduction allows for far more flexibility when building any given god, such that you can build them into a wider range of roles rather than being shoehorned into just one or two, but this also means builds get more complex. While our top SMITE 2 tips touch loosely on stats and damage types - amid other essential pieces of advice we'd strongly recommend reading - this guide exists to break down strength and intelligence as clearly as possible.

So without further ado, here's a complete guide to strength and intelligence, along with covering magical and physical damage since the two go hand in hand, plus hybrid items, how attacks scale with damage, and more.

Physical vs magical damage explained

In SMITE 2, each god can only deal physical or magical damage, but that damage can scale - get bigger, to put it simply - with either strength, intelligence, or a mixture of both. 

As NiteDark explains, this is key to understanding the purpose and value of strength and intelligence as stats. In the first game, gods could deal a mixture of physical and magical damage, but SMITE 2 has simplified things by limiting each god to one type of damage, but introducing strength and intelligence as different stats to drive that damage (and other aspects of their kit, as we shall see) in different ways, enabling greater diversity in god builds.

If you're unsure which type of damage your chosen god deals, Inpunktion says you should simply head to the gods’ menu, select any god, and it will list either physical or magical. Next to this information you can also find out whether the god has melee or ranged attacks, along with details on whether they scale with strength, intelligence, or a hybrid of the two - more on that shortly.

How damage scaling works

StewBeef has an excellent description of damage scaling: "how a champion, item, or ability gets stronger or more effective as the match progresses."

When it comes to basic attacks, all gods - except for one, as our SMITE 2 Mordred guide explains - scale with 100% intelligence and 20% strength. However, every other ability in the game has a unique damage scaling ratio, which you can discover by looking in the ability description. You can see at a glance whether a god’s primary stat should be strength or intelligence based on the aforementioned god tag next to the attack and damage type when inspecting the god, but for the specifics, you'll need to look at each individual ability.

StewBeef has provided some examples:

• “Anhur is a ranged physical damage god. He is primarily played in the ADC role, but can branch out into other areas such as mid and jungle if needed. His kit is strictly strength based and as a result, has no need for intelligence whatsoever.

• “Sol is a ranged magical damage god. She is primarily played in the ADC or mid role, which gives her options as a burst mage or building her to empower her autos and utilise her passive. Her kit primarily scales off intelligence while her second ability includes additional scaling from strength. This means she can be built in multiple different ways: a complete intelligence build maximises her effectiveness with her overall kit, while a strength-focused build helps maximise her crit.”

Inpunktion adds a third illustration of this point:

• "Neith's first ability, Spirit Arrow, scales off 100% strength and 50% intelligence. Her second ability however, Unravel, scales with 85% intelligence, along with healing based on intelligence too." Not to mention her third and fourth abilities, Back Flip and World Weaver, which have 70% intelligence, then 100% strength and 100% intelligence respectively.

But a mix of stat scaling within damage-dealing abilities isn’t the only way in which a god might benefit from both stats. As Dadnaya urges you to remember, healing and utility are each also affected by intelligence. So while a god may deal damage based solely on strength, they may benefit from intelligence for other important functions. Two examples are Cernunnos, whose healing scales off intelligence, and Amaterasu, whose mitigations from her second ability also scale from intelligence.

What’s the upshot of all this? Look through your chosen god’s ability kit and notice which abilities scale based on strength, which on intelligence, and in which ratio if they’re mixed. If, say, healing and crowd control abilities scale on intelligence, but burst damage and assassination abilities scale on strength, your god can be built to fulfil two different, distinct roles: support and jungler. And so we can see how the simple change in driving your gods’ abilities with two stats enables Titan Forge Games to give you way more choice in how you build and use those gods. When you understand this, you can start manually building your gods in each game.

Filtering the item shop for strength and intelligence

When it comes to items, StewBeef has a helpful tip: don't forget to filter when looking in the shop. "Remember you have to deselect one category and then select the other to see them in the current iteration of the shop. You can also build both strength and intelligence with any type of item, and at the time of writing, there are three items that utilise both: Triton's Conch, Bragi's Harp, and Death Metal."

Physical = AD, magical = AP

Finally, we'd like to highlight NotAValveGame's short-but-sweet video that effectively summarises the strength vs intelligence conundrum, including a helpful analogy for SMITE 2 players that have arrived from other MOBAs: "Think of physical damage as AD and magical damage as AP." He also stresses that "building strength does not equal physical damage, and the same goes for intelligence and magical damage."

That's the long and short of understanding strength and intelligence in SMITE 2. If you played the first game, this system has essentially replaced the previous ‘power’ mechanic, but it isn't a direct translation as many users, including DiscoFerry, Empen, and raccoonbro all pointed out.  Good luck, deities - and make sure you check out our guide to the best SMITE 2 Ares builds while you're at it, as he's another example of a hybrid scaling god. 

Some text has been edited for brevity, clarity, or spelling, punctuation, and grammar. You can find the original wording here. Image credit: Titan Forge Games