A Healthy Balanced Diet

Just a few things I would like to point out with this build:

• This build is fairly balanced in terms of defense, and does not focus too strongly on protections, getting you right to the point where you get diminishing returns for each.
  
• It takes advantage of Khepri's Passive, which gives a shield based upon a percentage of health every few seconds. More health means a bigger built in shield, and increased HP5 (and healing if you have a healer on the team) means better sustain. I rarely die as khepri unless their whole team focuses me down. ADCs have a hard time killing me until late game, but burst damage mages will be more of a nuisance earlier on.
  
• Depending on what your team needs from the passive, Sovereignty or Heartward Amulet can be built second, with the other item taking third slot.
  
• This is about the time where the laning phase is ending, so grabbing Hide of the Urchin is great because you can get the protections up quickly by helping assist in team fights right at the start, before either team gets a chance to snowball too far. Having the increased protections so close to the start of the team fight stage with your auras already up makes you a viable front line tank in team fights. And the longer the team fight stage goes on, the stronger your protections get because of the Hide of the Urchin passive.
  
• If the enemy team is all physical or all magical damage, remove hide of the urchin and replace with either Breastplate of Valor or Genji's Guard. If their ADC has strong penetration and has somehow managed to build in a way that lets them melt your face down with just basic attacks, grab Hide of the Nemean Lion as your #4.
  
• If you don't plan on rotating much, or you feel you need extra protection and are willing to sacrifice some mobility and sustain, then replace your Traveler's Shoes with Reinforced Shoes. The recent buff in patch 3.17 has possibly made this a better option in some situations. I have not played with this setup enough to know which is better in most situations. I would still recommend Traveler's Shoes, but we will see how things play out with the recent buff.
  
• Shell is a great early-game buff for your team. It is the best option mathematically for early game protection.
  
• Meditation is a great compliment to your ultimate. Using your Ultimate, followed by Meditation not only returns your mana spent to cast your ult, but also puts your ally's health around the 70% mark almost instantly, and effectively lets them jump right back into the action. Coupled with shell, this can effectively turn a 2v2 into an unfair 3v2 if played right. And remember your passive gives them extra health as well.
  
• Blink is a wonderful surprise to effectively set up ganks and initiate for your adc. You see blink on cc-heavy tanks fairly often, and there's a good reason why. Not only is it fun, but it's effective. It also allows you to quickly get to an ally to use your ultimate if there are barriers in the way. Can also provide an escape if needed and used properly, but you cannot be hit for 3 seconds prior to use, remember this when deciding your relics.
  
• Curse is great for slowing the whole team (enhancing your CC capabilities further) and providing anti-healing AoE in team fights, depending on why you are grabbing it, use it right as the enemy starts to retreat to secure the extra kill or two for your team before they can get away, or use it right at the start of the fight if the enemy team has strong healing capabilities. (An enemy Aphrodite or Hel is pretty much the main reason why you would get this for anti-healing, but I won't say it's exclusively for counter building these two)
  
• You want to start your skills with Rising Dawn to help clear camps at the start as well as soften enemy minions for your adc, but leaving it be for awhile so that you do not take the minion kills from your ADC. The goal is to soften them to let your adc farm quicker, and push your minions to enemy tower faster to deny them gold and start snowballing, not take all the last hits from your adc and cripple your adc at the start. Throw rising dawn onto the minion wave as soon as it appears while they are full health, and let your adc do the rest of the damage themself, while you focus on hindering the other adc's ability to farm your minions, or forcing the enemy support to disengage with CC when they attempt to initiate, prolonging the time your adc has to feed. If your bleed is still active while the minion dies, due to Smite's mechanics, the bleed will take priority damage and the last hit (and bonus gold) will go to you and not the adc, which will hinder your adc's ability to get ahead. DON'T DO THAT.

***This math is done from the perspective of level 20 with full build and full stacks, and is intended to showcase the possibilities of this build.***


Before penetration and mitigations, with a full build Khepri should have 144 Physical Protection, and 128 Magical Protection. With the passives from Sovereignty, Heartward Amulet, and all 10 stacks of Hide of the Urchin, that makes his total protections 204 and 178 respectively.

Damage, before penetration, is determined as such: Damage * (100 / 100 + Protection) = Damage Dealt

This means that, again before penetration, our physical protection means we are only taking about 33% of physical damage, while magic protection allows us to take only about 36% of magical damage. As you can see, an extra 26 physical protection only gives us about 3% damage mitigation, while 100 protection actually gives us 50% damage mitigation (do the math), so we have effectively hit diminishing returns for both types of protection.

The rest of this build is focused around sustainability. Without taking any passives into account, including being out of combat or his build in ability passive, we have a base HP5 of 84 with full build at level 20... While this typically caps at 100, the passives on Mail of Renewal, Stone of Gaia, and his own built in passive ability, allow you to push past this cap in the form of percentages, which is calculated seperately. (If anyone can provide conclusive evidence that this has been changed, please let me know. As of right now, you can break the 100 HP5 cap using percentages like this).

Because we have built Sovereignty, and this passive aura is also applied to ourselves (hence why we calculated the added protections from it above), our actual HP5 is already at the max of 100 by the time we have full build. Traveler's shoes serve only as increased movement speed and gold at this point. Due to the diminishing returns already explained above, changing to the reinforced shoes later in the game still does not seem worth giving up the extra gold as support or the additional movement speed to get in and out or rotate effectively. I still recommend keeping Traveler's due to these two aspects of the build.

So, with a health pool of 3710 at level 20 with this full build, the increased health regeneration from your Stone of Gaia passive would be an additional 74.2 health every 5 seconds. This is also the same amount of additional SHIELD (not HP5 or healing) you receive from your passive every 5 seconds (every 10 seconds if in combat), which is separate from your health pool, this will cap at an additional 371 health shield after 25 seconds of being out of combat. Now take into account the Mail of Renewal, which can proc on a kill or assist on an enemy god OR an objective (Fire Giant, Bull Demon King, Gold Fury, etc.) - that is an additional 15% of your health over 5 seconds - or 556.5 health regenerated.

So, taking all of this extra information into account and rounding our numbers up, lets look at a particular scenario. You just helped the team kill the fire giant. This means that in the first 5 seconds you will be restoring 731 health... You will also be receiving a passive for an additional 75 points of shield in that 5 seconds. In other words, when you achieve an assist, due to the way smite calculates different values seperately, you just gained basically over 800 health in 5 seconds.

Obviously, your HP5 is not like this all the time, this is an extreme example that shows just how strong this build CAN be in certain situations.

5/9/2017
Updated for Season 4 Patch 4.7
Guide is still viable. Thebes is now a better option than Mail of Renewal. Also added Mantle of Discord in possible replacements for item #4. Gets you nearly same protections, but a lot faster, and has a built-in stun which is great for team fights. Would recommend this for all modes except conquest.