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Smite picks up another Roman god: green-fingered tree-chap Sylvanus

Smite: green-fingered.

Traditionally, welcoming a new god has been a messy business – necessitating a whole load of smashed icons and charred priests. But a glance at our Smite beginner’s guide will reveal that the game subscribes to the room-for-one-more approach to religion – squeezing the latest deity into their existing god-roster with all the rest.

This week’s patch introduces Sylvanus, Keeper of the Wild. Turns out you can do a bit of damage with a thick, thorny branch or two.

The (really, really) cool thing about Smite lore is that it was all written centuries ago. Sylvanus was the laid-back guardian of shepherds, farmers and wildlife the Romans wrote about.

He began life as a child who literally died of sympathy – for a deer he’d allowed to be hunted by wolves. In the aeons since, he’s become an omnipresent nature deity with a philosophical attitude to the passage of time.

“He is slow to anger and slow to act,” say Hi-Rez. “Which is why his presence on the battlefield is so strange.”

Now here, however, Sylvanus won’t hesitate to make use of nature’s arsenal: lobbing seeds to damage enemies on impact, or growing flowers to assist teammates. His ultimate is Wrath of Terra, in which he smacks his largest trunks into the ground, pushing thorny roots out of the earth around him. Enemies in its radius are knocked up and take damage.

Do any of you lot play Hi-Rez’s third-person MOBA? What do you like about it?