Tsukuyomi is an interesting assassin in Smite that you can choose to dominate your team’s jungle. He’s capable of choking off critical portions of the jungle with its abilities and silencing select enemies to prevent them from tossing out their abilities. While Tsukuyomi is normally played as the jungler, some players have enough confidence and talent to turn him loose in the solo lane. We recommend practicing with him in the jungle and working your way up to the solo lane.
We’ll be focusing on crafting Tsukuyomi’s build as a jungler.
Best relics for Tsukuyomi
For junglers, more aggressive players typically start the game with the blink rune. You’ll be able to teleport a short distance to quickly ambush an enemy in the middle of their lane and unleash a series of abilities against them. Alternatively, we recommend starting with purification beads, allowing you to remove any crowd control effects on Tsukuyomi. It keeps him mobile in a fight and prevents a foe from locking him down to escape. Both are good options and will vary on the enemy team and how confident you are playing with your teammates.
We recommend going with something to increase your movement speed, slowing down an enemy, or making you invulnerable for the second relic. When you need more movement speed, go with heavenly wings. If you need to slow down enemies, you want to go with horrific emblem, also reducing their attack speed. The last item, the aegis amulet, makes you invulnerable for a few seconds.
Best starter item for Tsukuyomi
With Tsukuyomi in the jungle, you want to focus on using one of the three recommended jungle starter items. You can choose to go with Bumba’s dagger, Eye of the jungle, or Manikin scepter. Of the three choices, Bumba’s dagger yields the best benefits. It’s the starter item that whenever you defeat a jungle minion, you receive a boost of health and mana. It’s the closest to the previous items from Season 7, with the added benefit of inflicting true damage with your abilities to jungle minions, which Tsusuyomi excels at doing.
When you evolve it at level 20, we recommend going with Bumba’s hammer, giving you a health and mana boost, 10% physical penetration, and 20% cooldown reduction. Whenever you cast an ability, your next basic attack does 80 true damage, and your active cooldowns go down by 1 second, healing you for 5% of your maximum health.
Best boots for Tsukuyomi
Tsukuyomi is normally built as a heavy attacker, with items that increase his ability damage and physical penetration. You want to lean into that as much as possible, and you can do that with warrior’s tabi. You receive physical power, mana, and the standard movement speed increase that comes on all boots. Some players have chosen to go ninja tabi, the attack speed option, but this one is far less used. We don’t recommend it because Tsukuyomi’s abilities benefit so much more, giving you a decent boost during the start of a game.
Best items for Tsukuyomi
Tsukuyomi’s passive leans into his basic attacks, granting him ways to restore his mana and health when he uses them. While useful, a majority of Tsukuyomi’s items will boost his overall physical power and penetration potential, making his abilities exceptionally deadly. Here’s a standard build for what you could build when using Tsukuyomi in the jungle.
- Bumba’s dagger (evolve into Bumba’s hammer)
- Warrior Tabi (Sell when you grab elixir of speed, purchase Shifter’s Shield or The Crusher)
- Jotunn’s Wraith
- Hydra’s Lament
- Soul Eater
- Heartseeker
These are some of the more standard items you can expect to use as Tsukuyomi. If you want to specialize a bit more with items that boost your ability power, here are additional choices you can swap out for items in the previous build that suit your playstyle.
- Brawler’s Beat Stick (reduce enemy healing)
- Titan’s Bane
- Arondight
- Bloodforge
With Tsukuyomi being a jungler, you might find that he’s a bit squishy to handle most encounters in a straight fight. If you want to survive a bit longer, there are a few defensive items you can consider adding to your build to increase your chances of surviving a few hits.
- Void Shield
- Shifter’s Shield
- Ancile
- Runic Shield
These are some of the best items we’re going to recommend you consider building for Tsukuyomi as a jungler. If you’re considering using the god as a solo lane, you’ll want to build bluestone pendant with lifesteal items and more defensive items.
