Who is Nemesis?
In Smite Nemesis is the Greek Goddess of Vengeance and is a physical assassin, mostly used in the jungle role though has seen popularity in the support role on the odd occasion. Nemesis is highly mobile and is able to steal protections and power which helps her to excel in these roles and tip the scales of balance in her favour.

Nemesis’ abilities

Scales of Fate

Scales of Fate is Nemesis’ passive ability which, upon hitting basic attacks, will steal power from the target’s items that they are using. This passive allows her to reduce the damage that you do to her while increasing her own and, therefore, makes it important to keep Nemesis as far away from you as possible as she is then unable to utilize this ability appropriately.

Swift Vengeance

This is the first ability of Nemesis and this allows her to dash in a line with the potential to then dash again within 2 seconds of first use, unless another ability is used that would then cancel it. The dash will also deal damage to those that are within the range. This ability will be used by an enemy nemesis to either catch up to enemies, escape or as a finisher. To counter all of these uses, the cripple crowd control should be used as this will disable her dash completely and will probably catch the enemy off guard resulting in them having little knowledge of how to act next. If this has been used effectively it will easily result in her death.

A good example of a character that can use a cripple well against her is Poseidon as his whirlpool won’t only stop her from using her dash but also hinder her escape further by pulling her into the ability. If the enemy Nemesis has used this dash to catch up to you (this may be to engage in combat or to pick off a free kill) it would be great to have another dash or leap. This would mean that the use of her dash has now been pointless and it may leave her out of position, at which point teammates can enter the fight to finish her off. The opposite of countering her catching up would also be effective in stopping her escape, by this I mean using something such as another dash or leap against it although it would be used to follow her in this scenario to bring the enemy to an untimely death.

If the enemy Nemesis has used this to finish you off then there are only a few options, one would be to attempt to dodge both hits by predicting the player’s movements or to use an ability that will give you partial immunity such as Nu Wa’s Fire Shards or Aphrodite’s Undying Love.

Slice and Dice

Nemesis’ second ability is called Slice and Dice and when activated Nemesis will swing her blade toward the area in front of her, dealing damage in a cone-style area with two areas of effect. The outer areas on each side of her slice will be dealt the normal amount of damage for this ability but those caught in the center will be hit for twice the amount of damage and will also suffer from a slow for 2 seconds. This ability will be what the enemy chooses to level first and, therefore, will be their main source of damage and control as the slow rating will increase as the ability is ranked up further. As this ability is typically very easy to hit the best way to counter it would be to avoid the center, if you are able to see where the enemy is facing you should quickly move to the left or right of them to receive a lower amount of damage or use another dash or leap to avoid the completely if you face a dire situation.

Retribution

Retribution is the third ability of Nemesis’ which provides the Goddess with a shield that will last 2 seconds, within this time she will protect herself from a set amount of damage (based upon the level of the ability) and within this period of protection Nemesis will heal and reflect damage that would have normally applied to her though it is important to note that hard crowd control will remove this shield. As you may have guessed from the description there is one obvious counter to this ability, hard crowd control, which applies to characters that use such control types as silences, stuns, taunts and banishes.

While it’s all good that all hard crowd control will counter her shield some users are better, especially those who deal no damage with the abilities that apply the control onto Nemesis as she will then get literally no value from using her shield, examples would include Isis’ Dispel Magic and Freya’s Banish. Another counter to this ability if you had no form of hard crowd control would be to simply not touch Nemesis while she is using the shield as this also removes value from the ability.

Divine Judgement

The ultimate ability of vengeance is Divine Judgement, upon use Nemesis will target an individual enemy and reduce their health and movement speed but will also steal protections for a set amount of time whilst increasing her movement speed. It is important to remember that Nemesis will not simply be able to miss this ability, it will always activate on a target though it may not be the target intended by the Nemesis. This ability allows even the support of the opposing team to become a target so in terms of countering the ability it would be a great idea to protect her target as this, again, removes value from the ability as she will not be able to take advantage of the target losing protections.

Another good idea, depending on the composition of the enemy team, would be to group together quickly as this may make the enemy player miss the ability on the desired target though this would not be a good idea if the enemy team had high area damaging characters as it would make more than one member of the team vulnerable.

Counter picking Nemesis
Characters that are viable against Nemesis should be able to cripple her or implement hard crowd control onto her, as suggested by the individual ability analysis as this removes all value from her abilities which is really effective in shutting down her early game before she becomes based around her basic attacks. Based on the above I would suggest characters such as Isis, Hades, Athena, Thanatos, Poseidon, Ares, Aphrodite and Freya though these are a few of many examples that would have the potential to play well against Nemesis based upon their kit as the importance is removing as much value from her actions as possible. A character that has a dash or a leap is also useful against her as this hinders her kill potential against you.

Counter building Nemesis

As suggested by her abilities it wouldn’t be highly sensible to build defensively against her as Nemesis will be able to steal all the protections that you have and use them for her own personal gain so, therefore, building items that grant physical defense will benefit Nemesis more than it will benefit you in a situation against her. It would be best to build items that will grant utility and damage against her, such as cooldown items and high damage items in general (such as critical chance and damage items on a physical character).

I specifically feel that an item such as Winged Blade is the most effective against the Goddess as this item not only grants additional health, movement speed and cooldown reduction but will also grant slow immunity upon times that you would normally be a death sentence to you against Nemesis and will allow you to move, unaffected by abilities that would usually tip the scales of balance in her favour during engagements.

In terms of actives I feel that Purification Beads would be useful against the Goddess as this will also nullify the use of her slowing abilities whilst decreasing your own cooldowns which you may then be able to use against her further. Another good active would be either form of Sprint as this active, when ranked to at least the second tier, will remove slows that are currently applied to you which will again allow you to effectively nullify the control that Nemesis gains in combat due to her abilities. If you are in the jungle role it is likely that you would have picked up Hand of the Gods when beginning the game and when upgraded to Fist of the Gods it can be used as a counter to Nemesis as this active will stun the target caught within its use and as a stun is a form of hard crowd control this can be used to cancel Nemesis’ shield and prevent her from using her dash to escape for a second.

Tip the scales of balance in your own favour!

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