[Mechanics] Building (incl. Counterbuildling)

#Building

##General
Building in Smite is very complicated, and there's never a "perfect" way to build a God for every game, as you might need to adapt your build to your specific game. As such, cookie-cutter builds are not a very good way to build (although they are useful as a start) but you should rather learn to build yourself. There are different aspects that affect how and what you build, the most important ones of which I'll try to explain below. Keep in mind that this isn't meant as a "do these 5 steps and build perfectly every game" kind of guide, but rather as a guideline that outlines how you could go about when buildling.

##Your God
The most obvious (and common) thing to base your build off is your specific God.
###Strenghts
You can base your build around what your God excells at. To do this effectively, check out the wiki, look at all aspects of your Gods kit:

What are his abilities? What CC does he have? How much damage do his abilities do? How much of that damage is base damage, how much scaling? What's his AA progression? What's his movementspeed? What's his health? How many protections does he have and how many does he gain throughout the game? etc.

It's often useful to check out common builds and/or guides to see what other's are building so as to more easily find out what your God is good at (e.g. if everyone is building lots of attack speed, you're likely to be using AAs a lot).

Once you've found your Gods strenghts, build to support those. If you have great scaling on your ability, build power and CDR. If your God has mediocre ability damage but good utility, consider buildling some defence as well as CDR so as to stay alive and continuously apply your utility to teamfights, etc.
###Weaknesses
This aspect of building is very important and often neglected. Do the same thing you did when looking for strenghts but instead try to see what your God lacks and how that might be abused by enemies. This is a little harder, because while most Gods have a few aspects of their kit that they excell at, most Gods have plenty of weaknesses, which you can't all build against. It's important that you focus on as few as possible weaknesses, namely those that your strenghts can't counter. It is, as an example, a bad idea to build AA based items on Agni to counter his weak AAs, because not only will you still perform worse in AA trades than other Gods, but your high ability damage is more than sufficent to counter your lack of AA damage. It would be equally sub-optimal to build him full on defensive to counter his lack of defence and HP. Even if you do so, you will still get outtanked by tankier targets even if you get 6 tank items. In contrast, however, it is a good idea to get purification to counter-act the fact that he has no CC immunity.

It's rarely as white and black as I made it out to be in the above paragraph, because a lot of it also depends on who you're facing (e.g. A God on whom anti-slow items are vital because he's prone to being slowed should be building slow immunity if none of his enemies have a slow, etc.). More on that under "Counter building".


##Your Role & Your Team
Another way to look at building is looking at the role you're playing a specific God in. Depending on your God there might be no difference between your specific God and their role, as they're only played in one role, but certain Gods can be played in multiple roles and are thus built differently depending on where they're played. Keep in mind that building to your specific Gods strenghts/weaknesses is more important than your role (e.g. Rama should always be built AA based, if you play him as an ADC, Solo or even something as silly as Jungle).

That said, looking at what your role needs is still important, both when it comes to items as well as relics. This espescially true for roles that focus less on pure damage but rather on utility (or trend towards utility later on in the game). This is namely Support and Solo (although not exculsively). These are the roles that are most likely to build to their team's strenghts/weaknesses, more so than other roles might. This is more obvious on a support, who might build aura items to help protect their team against the damage of certain enemies, or who might build a relic to specifically counter a certain God. This also applies for Solo laners though. If your team features a relatively squishy support, you might want to build into defence more heavily than you otherwise would to supply your team with the much needed tankiness. Similarly, if your team has very little in terms of initiation capability, it might be in your favour to build towards that goal, building so as to enable you to dive their backline and set up kills for your team.

##Counterbuilding
###Introduction
Wether you're counterbuilding against your lane opponent or a onesided enemy team, there's basically two ways to approach this and two questions you should ask yourself.
###Strenghts
The first question to ask is: "What are my enemy's strenghts?".
Do you have an enemy who has a very good heal? An enemy who relies heavily on his attack speed? Any enemy who needs to crit in order to kill you?

Once you've figured out what your enemy's strenght is, you can start to counter that. Buy items or actives that counteract whatever they're good at. Sometimes this completely walls them , sometimes it lessens their advantage just enough for you to sneak a kill in. Sometimes they might not only excell in one category, so closely observe them and judge what's really giving you problems (e.g. Is it Hercules' crowd controll or his survivability due to his heal that's making him so strong?).

###Weaknesses
The second question to ask is: "What is my enemy bad at, where does he have a (major) deficit?" Does he not have any survivability? Does all his damage rely on his skills? Does he not have any escapes? Is he frail once his heal is down?

Once you know what your enemy's weakness is, you can try to build into that and completely wall them. Stopp them from using their own strenghts by abusing their weaknesses to such a poin that they become useless.

###Team vs a single player
Sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture and ask yourself if it's really worth to counter build against a single enemy. If you're playing in the solo lane, forget this part and counterbuild, **always**. For anyone else, it's not as easy as that. Do you really want to give up your one of your actives spots for an aegis only because there's a midlane Poseidon? If there's also a Scylla in Solo lane and a Ao Kuang in Jungle, it's definitely a good idea. Or  if he's ahead of your midlaner and winning every teamfight with his Kraken it might be worth it. But just buying an Aegis because you spotted him when pressing tab is a waste of an active spot.

Look at their team composition too - if they all have heals it might be a good idea to get curse, even if the heals don't seem all that strong on their own.

###Usefulness of counterbuilding items
Don't just buy any item; make sure you get an additional use out of it too. Once you've determined what you want to counterbuild against (be it strenght or weakness), look for an item that not only fulfills that role but also helps you out. If you're up against someone with lots of phyiscal damage and you want to get some physical defensive, look for an item that also helps your own playstyle, and don't just buy BoV if you've already got full CDR.