A beginner's guide to Poseidon: Release the Kraken!

This will be an overview of what Poseidon's abilities are and what they do for you, a basic itemization path to follow of what to build and when to build it, and a look at how to stay relevant as Poseidon throughout the different stages of the game. Poseidon is a free God (editor's note: free gods rotate every few weeks) that is given to you upon creation of your account so he's a great place to start for people who love playing burst mages. Hopefully by the end of this guide you will be able to understand your role as Poseidon and have a head start on the competition.

Changing Tides (Passive)
Poseidon's Movement speed increases by up to 20% and his abilities do up to 20% additional damage as his Tide Level increases. Successful basic attack hits increase his Tide, and using abilities decreases it.
Basic attacks increase the Tide Level by 10% per hit.

Your passive is your lifeline in team fights for its mobility and your insane damage multiplier when being used correctly. Always try to keep your passive stacked up to ensure your abilities are doing the maximum amount of damage when you need to use them for harassing in lane or dropping your combo in fights.

Tidal Surge (Skill Key 1)
Poseidon summons forth a wave that travels in a line, dealing 100/140/180/220/260 (+70% of your magical power) magical damage and pushing back all enemies in its path. Reduces Poseidon's Tide by 35% when cast.
Cost: 70/80/90/100/110 mana
Cooldown: 10 sec

Use this for wave clearing minions and shoving your lane. It’s also great for disengaging when you don’t want to fight or even knocking enemies back into your whirlpool range.

Trident (Skill Key 2)
Poseidon activates his Trident, granting 15/20/25/30/35% Move speed and making his basic attacks fire 2 additional shots in a spread for 6s. The shots deal 30/40/50/60/70 magical damage plus 20% of Poseidon's Magical Power. All shots increase Poseidon's Tide on hit. Reduces Poseidon's Tide by 15% when cast.
Cost: 65/70/75/80/85 mana
Cooldown: 20/18/16/14/12 sec

This with your passive is essentially your bread and butter. You will be using this to keep your tide up and stay in a good position to keep up your damage in fights. It’s also great to pop this and disengage with your tidal surge.

Whirlpool (Skill Key 3)
Poseidon summons a whirlpool at his ground target location that cripples targets, preventing movement abilities, and pulls targets toward the center dealing(15/25/35/45/55 (+15% of your magical power) magical damage every .5s for 3s. Reduces Poseidon's Tide by 25% when cast.
Cost: 80/90/100/110/120 mana
Cooldown: 15/14/13/12/11 sec

Always, always, always be mindful of the positioning in which you are dropping your whirlpool. Its crippling effect is great in combination with your ultimate and you will want to practice centering enemies inside of your whirlpool in order to make it harder for them to get out of it. Whirlpool is great for harass early game as well as wave clear when your tidal surge just is not enough yet.

Release the Kraken! (Skill Key 4 - Ultimate)
Poseidon releases the Kraken, dealing 180/220/260/300/340  (+60% of your magical power) magical damage to targets in the center of the effect when it spawns, stunning for 1/1.25/1.5/1.75/2s and bouncing them into the air. Enemies caught in the wide radius are slowed by 30% and take 170/195/220/245/270 (+30% of your magical power) magical damage. Reduces Poseidon's Tide by 50% when cast.
Cost: 100/110/120/130/140 mana
Cooldown: 90 sec

This is why you will be feared on the battlefield. Again always be mindful of your positioning with your Kraken and try to catch as many Gods as possible inside the middle circle of your ultimate to ensure you land your stun and to make sure they take the maximum amount of damage possible. The amazing synergy of this ability and whirlpool is what makes your burst potential so deadly. So practice aiming those circles!

Skill Sequence

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Prioritize levelling your skills as follows; 4, 1, 3, then 2. The reason for this is your ultimate is obviously priority number 1 for damage output. Your Tidal Surge once max level has an amazing clear speed for minions in lane. After that getting your whirlpool maxed really helps your damage potential in fights. Finally, maxing Trident is saved for last due to it only really helping your passive stack up and not a huge part of your damage potential and combo early-mid game.

Editor's note: Team Dignitas players recommend prioritzing your skills in this order: 4, 3, 1 and 2.

Essentially, in fights, what you'll be looking to do is making sure your passive is stacked, then dropping your Whirlpool, and immediately after dropping your Release the Kraken on top of it. With your major burst combo down you'll look to clean up or disengage with Tidal Surge or Trident. Just remember to start a fight off by getting your passive stacked or initiate with your passive already stacked to ensure you output the maximum amount of damage possible.

Items

Editor's note: Team Dignitas players do not recommend this as optimal item build.

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You want to start Vampiric Shroud, Shoes, and two Healing Pots. Your Vampiric Shroud will be your sustain early game it procs every time you kill a minion so keep that in mind when farming up early. Prior to building any major items you want to finish your Shoes into Shoes of Focus preferably. The reason for Shoes of Focus is that you're a combo God, and you want that combo up as much as possible. Shoes of Magi work as well if you need the magic penetration when their tank is rather fed and already stacking magic resist, or if you just want to try and output even more damage when your combo is up. Once done with your boots we're going to be picking up two actives, Aegis Amulet and Purification Beads, the reasons for which I'll go over in a later section.

So once you're rather stable in lane you'll want to start building one of two items, Void Stone against an enemy mage in mid, or Wall of Absolution if you're against a physical champion. Void Stone gives you great damage potential early and upon finishing it you'll want to buy the Focused Void Stone option. Reason being is that Focused Void Stone gives yourself more magic penetration than the other option would. Upon finishing your major defensive item you'll want to build Gem of Isolation. When you build Gem of Isolation your Whirlpool's cripple effect becomes even more dangerous with the Whirlpool tick occurring every .5 seconds for 3 seconds, activating the slow on Gem of Isolation to keep them inside your Whirlpool.

Next up we start rounding out our mid game build with Spear of the Magus. This will help with our damage potential against heavy magic resist targets and will annihilate pretty much everyone else on the battlefield. Presumably at this point we are out of the lanning phase and you'll be wanting to finish those actives we started earlier in lane. Our next major purchase will be Polynomicon for the magical lifesteal it will gives us to ensure we stay alive long enough to combo out in fights, or to simply just survive a fight once its finished. Your build up to this point should consist of Vampiric Shroud, Shoes of Focus or Shoes of Magi, Void Stone or Wall of Absolution, Gem of Isolation, Spear of the Magus, and Polynomicon.

Late game is here well, let's step things up a notch. First off replace Vampiric Shroud with Rod of Tahuti if you're in need of some damage to keep blowing things up or stay ahead. If you are getting blown up yourself fill in Vampiric Shroud with the other defensive item you didn't get earlier, either Void Stone or Wall of Absolution. Game is still going on? Replace that outdated Spear of the Magus with the new and hip Obsidian Shard. We want Obsidian Shard over Spear of the Magus late game due to magic resist scaling maxing out at level 20 for Gods and the magic resist enemy Gods have built through items in the game. For even more bang for your buck buy the consumables Potion of Magical Might and the Elixir of Power.

Actives
Upon finishing your boots we're going to pick up the first tier of two active items that are particularly useful to Poseidon; Aegis Amulet and Purification Beads. With your actives bought it will give you a little more variety in what you're capable of doing while fighting in lane. Against a hard crowd controlling mid laner? No problem, Purification Beads should help you get out of those snares and into a better position to drop your damage. Aegis Amulet is particularly useful for avoiding burst damage from the enemy mid laner. A great example would be popping your Aegis Amulet as an enemy Kraken is released under your feet and then countering with your own Kraken. 

Other viable actives could be Meditation, Sprint, or Blink. Meditation gives you some lane sustain to make sure you can hang around and farm pretty safely knowing you've got some extra mana to push or defend yourself with. With the active Sprint, I don't particularly like it on Poseidon, but it can most certainly be doable; the immunity to slows helps in certain match ups and your already high movement speed will be cohesive with the active effect. When it comes to Blink it's mostly used if you're out of position. If you're about to get caught, blink away or blink in to position to drop your Whirpool to Kraken combo. As far as the other actives go I would just ignore them.

Laning Phase
Laning phase is the first stage of the game in which our goal is to walk up that middle lane and kill as many minions as possible. The more minions we last hit the more gold income we're going to have and the faster we'll be able to have our items built. Early level laning we'll be stacking our passive and farming the minion waves with our Tidal Surge. When possible try to line up your Tidal Surge to clear a minion wave and smack the enemy God in your lane for some easy harass. This can be difficult depending on the positioning of the enemy God so try not to focus on it too much, just try to keep it in mind.

Whirpool is another great tool Poseidon has for harassing others in lane just try to drop the pool with the enemy champ in the middle of the circle and try to follow up with a Tidal Surge when possible. You'll want to play pretty passively early to conserve your mana but as you continually come back to lane your kill potential will grow stronger with every level and item you get. So always keep an eye on the enemy God when low and make sure you're in a position where you can land your burst but easily escape his if he decides to commit on you.

When you're being shut down in lanning phase you have two options. One is to attempt to passively farm it out and try to catch up in gold against the enemy God. Two would be to start roaming around the map and going to your left or right lanes looking for kill potential. That second option is also viable if you are doing extremely well in lane and want to help out your other lanes. Roaming can help catch you up in gold or keep you ahead with the kills and assists you can bring in. It is also an effective tool for helping your team when they're ahead to keep someone behind, or when they're behind to try and catch them up as well. As you play Poseidon more and get a better feel for his damage potential keep an eye out for opportunities to walk into lane, be it yours or someone else's, and just drop your combo for a quick kill or assists.

Objectives
You'll know when to start going for objectives when either most Gods have their core items built or the enemy team is trying to group up to take down towers. What we'll be looking to do in this situation is to keep our minion waves pushing into their towers and grouping to take down towers or Gods with our team whenever an opportunity presents itself. This game is a lot about knowing what to do and when to do it so when it feels like you're behind in a game rather than hitting tab and seeing who has died the most start thinking about why your team is behind. Do they have more towers than your team? Have they been grouping while your team has been split up across the map? Who on their team has the most damage potential and why aren't they dying? What keeps getting me killed in fights and how can I stop it? Questions like these will help improve your play overall, no matter what God you're playing.

Poseidon has extremely strong pushing power. When his Tidal Surge is max level try stacking your passive and shooting through a minion wave to quickly burst it down and shove the lane you're in. Keeping your lanes pushed keeps your opportunities open and lets your team pick and choose which objectives they want to go for. Just be sure to communicate with your team when splitting off to push and group up when the enemy team is grouped and shoving down a lane together. Team play and communication are extremely important when going for towers, fire god, phoenixes, and even the minotaur as well, so be sure to try and speak with your team mates when you can and stay on the same page.

Team Fights
Poseidon is a burst God so timing your combo is essential to playing well in team fights. Poseidon will want to take out whatever carry has the misfortune of stepping out of place and into your Kraken. You will excel at close quarter fights so keep that in mind when positioning for your combo. While in lane the enemy God will have more breathing room to try and evade your combo so you'll need to be careful on when to drop your damage.

Always try to prioritize the enemy carries when you have the positioning to do so without being punished too badly. When you're in a good position stay in that position and initiate when the enemy is out of position rather than putting yourself out of position to go in on an enemy God. Due to the skill shot orientation of this game positioning is extremely key in trying to provide damage for your team and to stay out of the enemy team's damage. A good positioning for Poseidon would be right behind your tank or bruiser so you can follow up when they go into fights. Try to keep them between yourself and the enemy and you should be able to combo out safely and efficiently. Killing their tank line is not a bad thing so don't be afraid to do so when somebody is out of position or when you have to. Just keep in mind with your burst potential you want the biggest threats gone before they can effectively drop their damage.

Conclusion
I hope this guide helps you to learn Poseidon and crush your enemies on the battlefield. If you have any suggestions of additions to this guide, any opinions on Poseidon for myself to consider, helpful advice or criticism please feel free to comment in the section below! Try to keep everything constructive with an open mind for discussion and good luck out there!