A Guide to Making Item Builds (Conquest & More - S2)

Cap: The maximum amount of a stat you can have. If you build a stat past its cap, you don't actually gain any more of the stat in game. Caps can also be reached by using items like Elixir of Power or jungle/fire giant buffs.

CC: AKA Crowd Control, CC comes in two forms: hard CC and soft CC. Hard CC are crowd control effects that severely limit your player in some way such as stuns, silences, knockups, disarms, etc. Soft CC is crowd control that is less extreme such as roots, slows and cripples.

AA: AKA Auto-attack/basic attack, this is your god's basic attack. An AA god is a god that focuses on dealing damage through basic attacks. While some gods can be built to either be AA or ability focused, others are more locked into one of these types of builds. Strictly AA gods include all Hunters (except possibly Medusa and in some cases Neith), Arachne, Bakasura, Kali, Nemesis, Ao Kuang and Osiris. Strictly ability-based gods include all Guardians, all Mages (except Chronos, Ao Kuang, Freya, Poseidon and Zeus), Bastet, Loki, Ne Zha, Serqet and Thor (most Warriors are also typically preferred to have ability based builds, however they can often have one or two AA items as well). All other gods can play with either an AA or ability focused build, or builds that combine both of these aspects to maximize their full potential.

AOE: AKA Area of effect, this is a description of an ability, active or item's passive. Basically, a power's AOE is its size. For example, Zeus' ultimate has a large AOE while Nox's Siphon Darkness has a much smaller AOE.

DPS: AKA Damage per second, this describes the amount of damage a god can output (on average) in a single second. Maximizing a god's DPS is essentially maximizing how much damage a god can output in a given time frame (this is most often considered when determining a build for ADCs since it is their primary job).

Poke: Poking is when you are dealing small-medium amounts of damage to an enemy, usually over an extended period of time. Poke damage is usually dealt using safe abilities like Sun Wukong's magic cudgel or Agni's Rain Fire, but can be done with ranged basic attacks or other means as well.

Farm: Farming is killing minions or jungle camps to gain gold, experience and/or stacks for items like warlock's sash and Devourer's Gauntlet.

Meta: Meta is a complicated concept to explain. In essence, it's the generally accepted way of playing a game. In Smite that can be anything from what an acceptable team composition is to what's an acceptable item build. While "breaking the meta" can be a good tool to win matches, that's still different from building ignorantly. While this guide tries to be in line with the current meta, some aspects such as what's core to each role should probably be adhered to even when breaking the meta.

HP: AKA Health/Hit-points, the cap is 5500.

Mana: Used for casting abilities, the cap is 4000.

HP5: AKA Health Per 5, this is the amount of health you regenerate every 5 seconds. The cap is 100.

MP5: AKA Mana Per 5, this is the amount of mana you will recover every 5 seconds. (Example: I have 25 MP5, I will therefore recover 25 Mana every 5 seconds). The cap for MP5 is 100.

Physical Lifesteal: Physical lifesteal returns some of the damage you deal back to yourself as healing. For example, if you have 10% lifesteal and you deal 100 damage to an enemy, you will recover 10 HP. AOE basic attacks like Bellona's hammer and Bakasura's cone ultimate divide healing received by 3. Unlike magical lifesteal, physical lifesteal only applies to basic attacks, NOT abilities. The cap for lifesteal is 100%.

Magical Lifesteal: Magical lifesteal returns some of the damage you deal back to yourself as healing. AOE basic attacks like Freya's Irradiate and Agni's Rain Fire divide healing received by 3. Unlike physical lifesteal, magical lifesteal applies to both basic attacks and abilities. The cap for lifesteal is 100%.

Healing: Healing is the amount you are able to be healed. This stat can be altered by healing reduction items like Weakening Curse, Pestilence, Divine Ruin and Brawler's Beat Stick, increased healing items like Rod of Asclepius and Heavenly Agility or abilities and passives. The formula for healing is
100%(base healing) + (additional healing)% - (healing reduction)% = (actual healing)%, thus items like Weakening Curse that reduce healing by 100% will not prevent enemies from healing with increased healing items.

CDR: AKA Cooldown Reduction/Cooldown %, this stat reduces the cooldown timer on your abilities. The cap is 40%.

Movement speed: This is the speed your character moves. The cap is 1000.

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Physical Protection: AKA Physical Defense, this stat reduces the amount of physical damage you take, but can be temporarily removed or bypassed by penetration and protections reduction items/abilities. All gods have a base amount of physical protection without items. Towers, phoenixes, titans, minions, Fire Giant, Gold Fury, jungle camps and minions all deal physical damage. The cap for physical protection is 325.

Magical Protection: AKA Magical Defense, this stat reduces the amount of magical damage you take. All gods have a base amount of magical protection without items. The cap for magical protection is 325.

Flat Penetration: AKA Pen, this stat allows you to bypass enemies' corresponding protections by however large its value is, eg: if you have 20 penetration, you can bypass 20 of their physical/magical protection. The cap is 50.

Protections Reduction: This stat will either allow you to reduce the physical/magical protections of an enemy by its value or a percentage of their total protections. Unlike flat penetration, there is no cap to this value, your allies can also benefit from it when attacking enemies with reduced protections, and it unfortunately lessons the amount of protections bypassed by percent penetration items. Turrets and phoenixes are also immune to protections reduction making other options more effective.

Percent Penetration: This stat will allow you to bypass a percent of an enemies' protections. This is different from flat penetration since the amount of protections you bypass depends on how much protections your enemy has. Protections reduction items make percent penetration less effective since it will only allow you to bypass a percent of the enemy's reduced protections, not the original stat.

Power: Affects the power of your god's basic attacks and abilities (most abilities' power is calculated as base damage + some % of your total physical power). The cap is 400 for physical gods and 900 for magical gods.

Basic Attack Power: This is how much damage your basic attacks deal. Magical gods deal 20% of their power per basic attack while physical gods deal 100% of their power (items like Hydra's Lament and Polynomicon may temporarily augment this stat).

Attack Speed: This stat increases the rate at which your god can use their basic attacks, the cap is 2.5.

Crit Chance: This is the chance that your god will land a critical strike (deals 2x power or 2.5x with Deathbringer). Only physical gods can hit critical strikes. The cap for crit chance is 100%.

For any god that you're creating a build for, there are certain stats that cannot be ignored.

Movement speed is essential for all roles and gametypes, regardless of your god you must purchase something from the Boots or Shoes item trees. These items also give good stats for their price points, so there's no real point in not buying them.

Penetration is another essential stat for any god that wants to deal damage. The way damage is calculated, even against squishy teams you will do significantly more damage by purchasing a penetration item if you haven't bought one already than another damage item late game. Even supports and tanky gods need penetration if they wish to deal legitimate damage late game. Many of these gods also have high base damages on their abilities, but poor scaling making penetration superior to damage anyway. The only gods that can forego penetration are gods with protections reduction or penetration built into their kits like Guan Yu's Taolu Assault and Bakasura's Butcher Blades.

CC immunity of some form is recommended against most team compositions. This can range from Purification Beads or Magi's Blessing to counter hard CC to Winged Blade and Improved Sprint to counter slows to Aegis Pendant to survive enemy nukes, whatever allows you to survive. An important thing to remember is that you can only be helpful and dish out damage while you're alive, so building all attack power with no CC immunity or defense will leave you as a rather useless teammate. One thing to remember is that some gods like Chang'e have built in CC immunity into their kits, or have escapes and leaps that allow them to run away. Build around your god's kit, know their strengths and weaknesses and account for them. Always have some method of escaping, or you're just an easy target for the enemy team.

Certain stats aren't useful for all gods, but are incredibly essential to others. You shouldn't build attack speed on ability based Mages, or cooldown reduction on AA based Hunters. You should learn what your god excels at and struggles with and build to strengthen their best traits and account for their weaknesses. While you can try and break the meta, avoid building all of one god class the same. I've seen too many people try to build ability based gods like Bastet and Serqet with attack speed, people building lifesteal on gods with built in healing like Hel and people building Combat Blink and Aegis Pendant on gods that already have them built into their kits like (in this case Loki and Chang'e). If you learn the ins and outs of your god's kit and build around it, you will find yourself not only playing better, but also getting the feel for your god is meant to be played.

While it can be useful to have a specific build in mind for your god when you enter a game, more often than not you will need to counterbuild against enemies in order to maximize your effectiveness. Generally this is pretty straightforward, build items like Pestilence, Divine Ruin and Weakening Curse to counter healing, build items Witchblade and Hide of the Nemean Lion to counter basic attackers, build Improved Sprint or Winged Blade to counter teams with lots of slows, etc.

However, it's important not to get locked into your build just based on an enemy team composition as well. If fighting a lot of squishy gods, don't invest as much in penetration, if facing a team with 4 physical gods, you should probably buy physical defense. Determine what part of your build is your core (some gods may need more core items than others) and what part of your build is flexible to change. A flexible build will almost always beat a rigid one, so be open to trying new things even if you've seen success with other builds previously.

One factor of item building that I've mentioned here and there is cost effectiveness. Cost effectiveness is essentially how much an item provides you relative to its cost. For example, a complete item like Ichaival will provide much more benefits for around 1700g than a tier two item of a similar price. However, a complete tier 3 item will almost always be more cost efficient at that price than a less expensive item like Ichaival (ie: for every 100g spent towards Ichaival you may receive 5% attack speed, while for every 100g spent on a different tier 3 item you may receive 6%).

However, it's important to note that calculating raw stats does not take unique passives into account. For example, it's hard to put a price on Gem of Isolation's passive slow since it's a unique passive that can range from highly useful to completely useless. When building your god, it's easy to take all of the most cost effective items and build them giving you a final build with the greatest stats. However, there may be less cost effective items that let you come online much faster and have a better early and mid game, or items with unique passives that while they do not provide the same raw stats, may provide far greater benefits.

Overall, be aware of whether your god has a good early or late game, whether you should be building for early or late game in the current match your are in and what passives your god's kit can truly take advantage of.