This guide has not yet been updated for the current season. Please keep this in mind while reading. You can see the most recently updated guides on the browse guides page
Vote received! Would you like to let the author know their guide helped you and leave them a message?
Reinforced Greaves (Deleted)
Breastplate of Valor
Void Stone
Gem of Isolation
Stone of Gaia
Hide of Leviathan
Magi's Cloak
Watcher's Gift
Hand Of The Gods (Old)
Eye of Providence
Purification Beads (Old)
Blink Rune
Watcher's Gift
Reinforced Greaves (Deleted)
Breastplate of Valor
Void Stone
Gem of Isolation
Mystical Mail
Pestilence
Y
B
A
X
So, you want your score to look like this? This is an average round with this build. On better rounds, you can even go with 20 kills to 0 deaths, if you've played Ares enough.
Pros:
Can wipe the floor with anyone who doesn't get beads.
Drops squishy gods like flies, you won't even need No Escape for that.
Does a lot of damage, while still being quite tanky.
Great at ganking (especially in 3v3).
You get to look really cool.
Cons:
You're nearly useless if the entire enemy team buys level 3 beads.
You're not likely to ever get a successful No Escape on 
Chang'e.
Sobek Can use his ult to escape No Escape.
With this build, 
Ares isn't going to be completely reliant on No Escape, while it should be your primary means of turning the tides of a team fight, most of your kills will be from ganking lanes, obelisks, or jungle buffs, using Shackles followed by Searing Flesh.
Laning Phase:
Most of the round, you're going to be finding yourself sitting around corners, waiting to move in, and rake in some kills. You should be letting your laning partner do all the minion killing for you. Ideally, you should be paired with 
Neith, 
Xbalanque, or other similar gods. Once an enemy shows up, you will want to move in from behind, and try to land each one of your Shackles if possible, once you have them caught, Searing Flesh will just be the extra damage you need to finish them off, and once you have Gem of Isolation, it will be unlikely that your enemy will escape your grasp.
No Escape, after that, you will want to use Shackles, followed by Searing Flesh in an attempt to kill the nearest enemy god.Greaves - Need to be a little faster, but still maintain your tankiness? Go with this, with 25 of both protections, the passive, and the speed buff, it's a nice buy.
Breastplate of Valor - CD Reduction is essential so Ares can counter maxed 
Purification Beads. Not to mention the high defense and ton of mana.
Void Stone - A nice touch for your build, gives you some decent damage, defense, and has an aura to reduce your victim's magical defense by 25, on top of that, thanks to Ares' passive, you get an additional 30 magical power!
Gem of Isolation - This is a great buy if you can land all of your Shackles, paired with Searing Flesh, you'll be able to reduce your victim's speed by 70%! Which will definitely mean the difference between life and death for them. The magical attack power, and the health and mana are an added bonus!
Breastplate of Valor - This is a nice item to pick up, you get 25% of your cooldown times reduced, and this item has nice defense, and Mana! A must have for Ares.
Mystical Mark - A great item to have on hand, it deals damage over time if enemies are near you, it has an aura, which will upgrade your magical damage by 30, which is a good deal, considering this increases your health, and your physical protections! The DoT aura compliments Ares' many DoT skills nicely.
Pestilence - Very good item to throw into the build, gives you a nice 300 health, 65 magic protections (Says 450 here on SmiteFire, but that's not accurate), and it even has an aura to increase your power!
Stone of Gaia - A good item to throw into the build as a substitute for some of your physical defense items if you're laning against magic users, as for game modes where you'll be engaging in a lot of team fights, you may wanna skip out on this if the enemies have dangerous gods such as 
Ah Muzen Cab on their side, as you'll probably want more physical defense.
Blink - A good item to have so that you can just teleport into the crowd of enemies, ult, and let the slaughter begin. You may want to use a different active to replace this, for example: You're laning against 
Fenrir, but need 
Hand of the Gods, as well as Purification Beads, or for other situations, you may just need two actives that aren't Blink.
Hand of the Gods - You won't really need this as long as you're with someone who has good wave clear. For example: If you're laning with 
Tyr (it is a relatively successful combo if you both get Hand of the Gods), this is an item you'll want to have on hand for wave clearing.
Eye of Providence - A good item as long as your team knows what you're doing with it. With the Teleport consumable, people can teleport to this, and since enemies can't see it, it's ultra effective to teleport to one of these when enemies are coming out of their base on Domination mode (RIP Domination mode, you will be missed).
Purification Beads - Every Ares player should know what these are for, but for those of you who don't, I'll explain. If you're up against another Ares, you'll want to get these, what these do is nullify all crowd control effects, such as No Escape, or 
Pillar of Agony. Not only will you be able to escape his ult, but you'll also be showing the other Ares who's boss!
Magi's Blessing - This should replace the Gem of Isolation if you're going up against high crowd control enemies. For example: You're laning against Chang'e, and Neith, you'll definitely want to use this.
Hide of the Leviathan - See why you would use Magi's Blessing directly above this.
Watcher's Gift - This is for early leveling, so you don't fall too far behind, that really is all there is to having this item. Many people skip it all together, but it's very useful early game. If you need an extra inventory slot to finish your main build, that's the time to replace this. If you want to outright skip this, feel free to do so.
Shackles will be your main method of attacking aside from No Escape, and you need good timing to use them to your full effect, when paired with Gem of Isolation, the enemy should be slowed to such a point that if YOU can't finish them off, a team-mate will most definitely finish the job.
Bolster Defenses Not much to say about it. It buffs your defense, along with all of your nearby team-mates (this includes minions), only level this up if it won't let you level anything else up.
Searing Flesh Overall, not the greatest attack in the game, but it pairs very nicely with your Shackles, if you land all of your Shackles, this will just be icing on the cake that is your victim's doom.
No Escape Your most deadly attack, this can mean the difference between winning a round, or losing it. Paired with Blink, the enemies will have no time to attempt at dodging your attack, it's only downfall is Purification Beads, 
Aegis Amulet, and Chang'e, but if the enemies don't have either, which it's likely they won't (don't apply this to ranked play), then go to town on the enemies!
It can be done, but mostly by very skilled Ares players.
It'll need some teamwork, though, so if you're the loner type, you may wanna hold back on using him for ranked, but go ahead and see how it works, if it works for you, continue playing ranked. If not, keep practicing.
If you like this guide, and you like free gems, click the link below, you can get some there!
Don't believe me? Look at this!
(PM me if this isn't allowed)
1/31/2014: Changed Greaves to Reinforced Greaves like it should have been in the first place.
SMITEFire is the place to find the perfect build guide to take your game to the next level. Learn how to play a new god, or fine tune your favorite SMITE gods’s build and strategy.
Copyright © 2019 SMITEFire | All Rights Reserved
New gameplay section (laning phase and teamfights) looks good. I think, however, it could be expanded a bit more.
For example, let's say you face the mother of all enemy team comps, a Neith and Sobek lane. They will be as aggressive as ****. How will you react to Sobek's Constant Charges? Or to Neith's Zoning?
Actually, you could add a counter section. That might help. (Also, still no update log. Did you press publish accidentally?)
A counter section might be good. I'll play a few rounds, and establish what I do to counterattack. I don't really play conquest that much, so that's a reason this guide isn't really talking about a lot of situations that would be in conquest matches.
For example, let's say you face the mother of all enemy team comps, a Neith and Sobek lane. They will be as aggressive as ****. How will you react to Sobek's Constant Charges? Or to Neith's Zoning?
Actually, you could add a counter section. That might help. (Also, still no update log. Did you press publish accidentally?)
I think you should keep an update log on this, since it's hard to see any changes when you can't remember a guide to the last detail.
I'll do that with my next update. Thanks for the suggestion.
The changes to the build, and the splitting of them, are very nice.
The guide is also a bit more easier to read, but that could just be me.
You could still stand for a little more expansion on gameplay (laning phase and roaming come to mind), teamwork, a teamfight section, and maybe even a matchups section. Ares is usually in the middle of a teamfight, since he literally can't do much else by himself.
But you've improved this guide, and I will commend you for that. I'm not quite sure that this deserves an upvote yet, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and trust you will update more in the future. Upvote.
EDIT: Did another big rework.
I have a few suggestions:
Try dividing your build like this:
Core:
And then you can give a list of items for each purpose.
Physical Defense:
Magical Defense:
Situational: magi's blessing, hide of the leviathan.
With the recent patch changes to gold spooling in Conquest (now 3g per second instead of 2g),
And to be honest, telling people outright not to pick
EDIT: In regards to Subzero's comment, his reasons for recommending
And by my editing powers combined, I have updated Pestilence to show the correct stats!
Oh, hell, all this time I thought that
Sunfall, if you can really edit stats, them I think
God images are beyond my authority sadly. But I can fix the item descriptions and tagging.
Leon Porter, when I mean flexibility I mean variance in your build. For example, let's say in the laning phase you encounter a team of
Make a "core" build of 3-4 items, then make variables. Something like that.