IN ACTION: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a85BcHCOtiY
Smite Mag is like Energy Vampire Trinity with extra steps. The biggest upside is that Mag's kit brings more to the table with crowd control and armour strip. The biggest downside is that the Smite & Magnetize combo needs the player to be Host, as the jank is just too high when Client to the point of not working at all
Counter Pulse and Arcane Aegis are flex slots
With a cast-heavy setup energy can quickly become an issue
The way it works is that Smite generates a bunch of orbs that do damage equal to 35% of the target's health. Magnetize traps those orbs, applies a damage multiplier, and forces them to all return and damage the isolated target as they can't escape the bubble. It needs armour strip as the orbs are not true damage. Viral will buff the orb damage
A level 9999 Thrax Centurion has approximately 9.5 million health, and approximately 15 million Overguard. Due to the damage buff of Viral not applying to Overguard, a certain amount of overkill is required to make sure the damage you're generating from the health will get through the Overguard - this is where the damage multiplier of Magnetize and Vigorous Swap helps. The jank always persists - sometimes Smite orbs will keep orbiting inside Magnetize and not return to the target, and in live gameplay you're always at risk of another unit being sucked into the bubble and taking some of the orbs. You want to know that each orb is doing as much damage as possible when it makes contact
Viral helps damage against the Thrax's health, but most importantly it helps against the Spectral form. You will see in the footage, that an orange crit headshot with Raplak, buffed by 10 Viral stacks, is enough to oneshot a level 9999 Spectral form while using Vazarin (the one focus school that has no way to buff its own damage). Level cap Spectral forms have approximately 3.5 million health
You can use a budget Smite combo with any frame with a Void bubble proc, but it doesn't work anywhere near as well
Mag's entire kit is extremely good for Cascade - using Smite is a fun interaction but it's not required. Pull is excellent for pulling enemies into Exolizer circles. Magnetize is CC and a damage buff - it will benefit any single target Thrax killing weapons as well as dealing with crowds of trash easily (Nullifiers aside). Polarize is a natural shield gating ability, made better by using the Counter Pulse augment to add some CC and breathing room. Crush pretty much always wants its augment, but is an excellent low strength armour strip, CC, and shield gating ability