SMITE Season 4 Item Guide: How to Build Hunters

Are your basic attacks falling a little short this Season? Do your shots feel like they’re coming from a nerf gun? If you weren’t keeping a close eye on the item and balance changes that Season 4 has brought to SMITE, you might’ve swapped your weapons for water pistols in the shuffle.

Never fear, though, If you’ve been here before for our God guides — or our best picks for mid lane, solo, ADC, and jungle — you know that whatever you need, we have. These builds won’t jam, lock, or misfire. There are Grade A weapon systems at your disposal if you know where to look. So follow us to the back, and we’ll show you some real Hunter-approved firepower. 

How to Build a Hunter in SMITE

Sustained, consistent damage and pressure are what you should be after in your Hunter builds. As a Hunter, your job isn’t to instantly delete targets (though occasionally you can). That task will usually fall to your Mages and Assassins. You’re there to keep damage steady and pressure constant during their downtime, whittling away at the enemy team with the steady thwap, thwap, thwap of your left-clicks.

This also means you tend to prize lifesteal a little more highly than most, since you need to stay in the fight more consistently. So we’ll start off with an easy one:

Hunter Standard Build

Who Wants It: Most mid-to-late game Hunters can pull this off, and the flexibility of the two open slots keeps you adaptable to your evolving role in the game.

Gods It’s Good For: Rama, Apollo

Main items: 

• Warrior Tabi
• Devourer’s Gauntlet
• Qin’s Sais
• Hastened Fatalis

Starter Items:

• Bluestone Pendant (if aggressively dueling or poor early waveclear),
• Death’s Toll (if passively farming or good early waveclear)

Lifesteal, raw damage, a little bit of attack speed, and some mobility boosts make this an effective core build for most Hunters in most games. With emphasis on overall quality and two free flex slots, the Standard item core gives any Hunter a shot at major objectives or PvP duels.

Finish this build out with Brawler’s Beatstick and Titan’s Bane against healers or heavy tank line-ups. Pick up Wind Demon and Deathbringer against other unarmored targets, or Asi and Frostbound Hammer if you find yourself on the back foot a little too often against enemy Warriors or Assassins.

Hunter Early Pressure Build

Who Wants It: Early game Hunters looking for a boxing match.

Gods It’s Good For: Anhur, Cupid

Main Items:

• Warrior’s Tabi
• Ichaival
• Asi
• Hastened Fatalis
• Wind Demon
• Deathbringer

Starter items:

• Bluestone Pendant (if aggressively dueling or necessary for waveclear)
• Vampiric Shroud (if under pressure)

Attack speed, move speed, a little bit of lifesteal and some RNG burst with Crit — this build has a lot of what you’re looking for as role based around positioning well and staying alive while shooting. Though it’s a little weaker in the late-game, where other builds have power items like Executioner and Bloodforge to our Ichaival and Asi, this build still has solid core stats and one major advantage:

It’s cheap as shit. 

Ichaival, Asi, and Fatalis are well below the price range of those more powerful options, allowing you to come online much earlier and turn boxing matches in your favor. By the time you have Ichaival, your enemy is probably still sitting on a Tier 2 Balanced Blade. By the time they’ve finished Qins Sai, you’re almost done with Asi, which puts you nearly a full Tier 3 item ahead. 

Perfect for early game bullies or aggressive Hunters, the Early Pressure build seeks to win the lane early, and snowball the match out of control before the enemy’s more expensive builds come online.

Hunter Transcendence Build

Who wants it: Hunters that function more like Mages, relying on their skills first and their left-clicks second. 

Gods It’s Good For: Hou Yi, Neith, Ah Muzen Cab

Main Items:

• Warrior’s Tabi
• Transcendence
• Qin’s Sais
• Asi
• Brawler’s Beatstick
• Titan’s Bane

Starter item: 

• Charged Morningstar

Some Hunters exist in the game which function more like Physical Mages or Ranged Assassins. While sustained left-click damage is the calling card of their class, these Hunters need Power and Mana, and they need it now. 

A bit slow to get going (and weak until Transcendence comes online), this build is for those who lean heavily on their abilities — those that left-click mostly when their skills are down, but tend to dominate the midgame. The Power and MP5 of Transcendence matches well with the physical penetration of Brawler’s Beatstick and Titan’s Bane — as does the raw damage passive of Qin’s Sais, which helps your basic attacks stay dangerous. Asi rounds out the build with some much-needed lifesteal and an emergency passive in case you’re caught in a duel with your skills down, as well as some additional penetration. 

While not quite as powerful as some of the more left-click based builds in the ultra-late game, you’re not far behind as long as your skills land. And as a bonus, this build is fantastic at wrecking towers — so if you can’t win a boxing match, you can always just break the enemy base.

As a word of warning, though — while these builds are rock solid, they are overarching outlines for character archetypes, and should be treated as such. Our item guides are good standards to hold your itemization to, but each character is just a little different — and those last few steps towards mastery are ones only you can take by adapting to circumstances that change in every game you play.

Starting out, though, these builds pack more than enough power for all your firefights on the Battleground. So while you’ll sometimes be outnumbered, you’ll never be outgunned.

Now go forth and Conquer.