Smite history lesson S1

Hi all since Kriega asked I'm going to be doing a small bit of history on the game and taking you back to S1. For this OP I will be covering Solo lane. If people are interested in the other lanes (if I manage to remember stuff well enough) I can/will add them later. A small disclaimer: it's a long time ago and I maybe can;t remember everything or remember things correctly.

So to start of some pre S1 and beta stuff for some background. During beta jungle wasn't a thing until later with Arachne so solo lane was a duo lane too like with the bots. This is important to note for later.

So well some general things in some cases obvious. A lot was different, less gods, smaller map, jgl camps but most importantly item builds. Item builds were quite stale. Solo lane was one of the roles that had some variety compared to all the others.
Another big thing to notice was the best and pretty much only tactic was to push lanes. The better the wave clear and the safer you were at getting out the better the pick (so escapeless gods were pretty low in the list apart from Zeus with his high burst and stun on detonate)
Lastly, protections weren't really a thing most roles would build, the 3 main damage roles would be glass canons maybe grabbing a magi's blessing on an assassin.
Also items were different. since the wiki doesn't list changes like LoL's items (it does list removed items tho) here is a somewhat better view of how items looked like even though this was just before S1 and items got a shift

So how was solo during S1? Well we had 2 eras divided by the Janus release.

Let's start with the first part. The part were warriors were dominant. At this point warriors were still the better "guardians" quite tanky and doing damage. Kinda like they are now. Only instead of going full tank like most go now, most warriors would go 1-2 defensive items. In this time the big defensive items were Stone of Gaia for the insane amount of regen and not a surprise to anyone Hide of the Urchin. things like Bulwark of Hope, Pestilence and other items had their place in a build too. However, you wouldn't see them as much. What did you see as other items? Power and penetration mostly. Jotunn's Wrath was a staple on a lot of ability users and basic attack user would build more towards Qin's Sais or Crit (don;t forget only Rage and Deathbringer gave plenty of crit) hybrid AA ability builds were also a thing, however you would end up quite a glass canon. Also actives were quite standard with most picking Greater Blink and Purification Beads was a must on pretty much anyone. Excelling warriors pretty much excelled at clearing the wave from a distance and being able to poke at the same time.
While the lane was quite warrior dominated some mages (and guardian Hades don;t know if Loki was also played there then) saw play. Hel, Ra, Zhong Kui, Chang'e Aphrodite and weirdly enough Chronos also performed quite well. Most of them were played because of the heal and with blue buff warriors couldn't kill them well because of this healing and most pushed the wave at the same time. (a big tactic for both Ra and Hel was to burst the wave while healing their wave.

But then this happened and warriors got gutted.

the famous season 1 warrior nerf. the Nerf that was supposed to make warriors more of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none (and finally turn Nemesis into an assassin). They nerfed all warriors on AS and basic attack damage and after that a lot of them on abilities. While a nerf was needed since they could do damage like assassins and tank almost as much as guardians HR kinda missed the plank. Warriors didn't fully disappear, however the mages overtook the solo lane since they were much stronger.

Now a thing that didn't change at all was the start for solo. A start you don't see nowadays. mostly because jungle changes. So at the start of the game the Solo would help clear the buff camp with the jungle (sounds standard) and iirc mid helped them. Then he and the jungler went to get the first blue for solo also pretty standard. After both go to lane and it's a duo lane for ~2 waves (one level for the jungler) then jungle leaves to clear/contest mid camps (so important in the game that support also rotates if needed).

At this point the lane kinda becomes an island with good warding. the goal was to get the tower first so you could roam and pressure other lanes. The faster the better. Also great teamfight abilities were appreciated ( Chaac ult was quite OP because of a 3s silence). In most cases warriors ended up initiating before or alongside the support. Mages ended up in the same spot as if they were played mid or as an utility character (like Aphrodite)

This is what I remember atm. If anyone misses something or has a question feel free to ask.

Inters3ct did something along these lines (in general though) a couple months back:

Play Video

great vid to see the S1 CQ map. how stuff played isn't really explained atm yet

So let's return to season 1 talking about hunters this time. Considered one of the easiest roles to build and actually didn't change that much.

The build hunters used was the crit build. Only till around S1 SWC we saw the unicorn build, which made use of the 6% Qin's Sais passive at the time. So the most common builds were:

unicorn (iirc):
Devourer's Gauntlet- Warrior Tabi- Qin's Sais- Asi-beatstick- Titan's Bane

Crit:
Devourer's Gauntlet- Warrior Tabi- The Executioner- Rage- Deathbringer- Something ranging from Hastened Fatalis (even though it would be considered noob to pick this one up) to double lifesteal to extra pen to Malice (which gave a bleed at a crit like The Crusher)

for both builds you could also used Transcendence however it wasn't as popular unless you were playing Xbalanque.
Also another build you would see sometimes was the double stacking build. However this was quite bad because of the late boots so more a cheese strat.

So how did the role play kinda like a waveclear lane. The faster you cleared the minions the better. This automatically placed anyone with a bad waveclear would be at the people with no escape or even lower ( Xbalanque and Cupid were the worst adc because of the clear). While you would have help from the support early game around the time support finished boots lane changed to a 1v1 lane mostly until you started grouping with your team so the better you could box the better your game would go.

Noticing from a game I played this hasn;t changed a lot apart from the builds being slightly more valuable and guardian waveclear playing a bigger role.