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I'll make a better one.
Illuminate: reveals stealthed targets further out. Default, you must be almost touching them. Level 3 reveals out to Viktor's effective rifle range, which is quite far. Very few characters use stealth, and they can all be detected and countered by sound, but level 3 illum makes an utter mockery of stealth heavy teams. Situational, but the cost reflects this, and if you're the only rifler on a team fighting lots of stealth targets, taking level 3 lets you kill things like Skye before she can even get into range, and track the ever-popular Seris far more effectively.
Haven: reduces direct damage, which is the majority of damage sources. Bullets, laserbeams, arrows, fiery sword slashes... The benefits of taking less damage overall doesn't need to be explained. Not taking damage is generally a far more effective defense than relying on healing off any wounds you end up with. A select few characters are blessed with generic damage resistance loadout cards, which combine nicely with haven. Haven, and damage reduction in general, doesn't mean you're invincible, or that you can facetank like a tank with 4k HP and a beefy deployable shield. Overconfidence has killed many a Viktor and Tyra with stacked defenses. Usually, they die with piles of magazines dropped from their very deft hands, as well. Learn from their mistakes.
Blastshields: reduces splash damage, which is much rarer than direct damage, but a lot more destructive and disruptive. Rockets, bombs, ice blasts, area of effect attacks, Willo's spores and wand, Ash's flak cannon... Having a level in blastshields can mean the difference between dying instantly to a well placed aerial attack, but due to how much damage splash attacks generally inflict, you're not gonna be outlasting blasters. Lessening their impact, and forcing them to spend valuable time reloading their low ammo weapons while you pew-pew them right back, is the true power of this item.
Resilience: reduces crowd control and status effects. Slow, knockback, cripples, stun, and various essentially character specific status effects, like Strix's flashbang and Mal'Damba's fear. Level 3 resilience lets you shrug off ANY status and CC like it was nothing. This is a very powerful item, especially for the cost. Many characters have potent early game CC, like Khan using vortex grip, but if you get resilience, he might as well not have taken a talent at all. Resil's primary importance is lessening knockback and knockup effects, as well as stuns, which are everywhere. A DPS character that gets stunned typically dies in short order, but even with a low level resil, you'll recover in time to get out or fight back. Because of the power of this item, many ultimates that have CC or status effects have a minimum timer, like Maeve's midnight, which can't be decreased below 2 second, no matter what. Resilience has no effect on straight DEBUFFS, like the damage taken status bestowed by Drogoz's firespit and Tyra's hunter's mark, the hunter's mark reveal, Skye's poison bolts, cauterize's healing reduced, or Lex's retribution reveal.
Chronos: global cooldown reduction for all abilities, with few, very specific, exceptions. The power of this item cannot be understated. It's also the most costly item in the game, at 2400 credits for level 3, which is about 70% of what you can be expected to make in total over a normal, average skill match. The utility of chronos scales with how cooldown dependent the character (or your own playstyle) in question is. Viktor and Koga have zero use for this item, but Khan, Sha Lin, Tyra, and Vivian all benefit greatly. Due to how the game calculates things, having something like 4 second cooldown cards, % cooldown reduction on elimination/kill card, a talent that lowers cooldown by further [X] seconds, and chronos on top, is very inefficient and wasteful, but certain characters, like the aforementioned Khan, may still consider it, because he has such long cooldowns that any decrease is worth its weight in gold - or credits.
Nimble: boosts unmounted speed. Primarily useful on characters that already have some amount of speed. Allows better control, terrain usage, and positioning in fights, and the occasional chase to finish wounded opponents, but isn't intended for getting from point A to B. This items is very good on the riflers and supports who play aggressively, but overall is situational. Notably, movement speed scales all the way up to +150%, which is a lot higher than most other effects in the game. Also worth noting while discussing terrain usage and positioning, most guns in the game fire from the character's right hand, so try to peek out from the right, not the left, and lead people along with your faster movement speed until you've worn them down. Try this on the rocks near the point on ascension peak, with a level in nimble. You're welcome.
Master riding: allows superior map control and an order of magnitude faster reinforcement rate. In any situation where two characters have to get somewhere, the one with merster riding will always get there first, which like chronos' global cooldown reduction, is a power which cannot be understated, and doesn't need much explanation. This item is especially useful on the more defensive tanks, who rely on getting into position before their enemies to have an impact (Inara, Barik), but every character, no matter the class, benefits from having this. The opportunity cost, and lack of actual on-grounds impact, that is to say when you're actually fighting, is what keeps it from being an automatic buy.
Morale boost: increases ultimate charge. Character dependent and situational, but very self-explanatory. If you decide to get this, get it early, to squeeze the most use out of it. You'll primarily see this picked by certain supports and flanks, as well as Viktor players who know what they're doing.
Rejuvenate: boosts healing bestowed by other characters. Due to how healing works in the game, this item, and loadout cards with identical effects, lessens the effects of cauterize. Cheap, effective, straightforward. Level 3 rejuv effectively reduces level 3 cauterize to 'only' 60%, which is quite a difference already, but when stacked with silly things like Inara's earthen guard, you essentially get to ignore caut, and heal for 5855686 gorillion HP from the simplest of heals. For obvious reasons, rejuv isn't very good if your team doesn't have someone who can actually put out healing.
Liferip: the only healing item that actively helps you in combat. Regaining HP, no matter how little, gives you a huge edge over enemies who can't. This is a very useful item on characters with a lot of quick firepower (Viktor, Talus, Tyra), or VERY strong singular attacks (Strix). Bear in mind the numbers. Tyra has a built in 15% lifedrain on her normal attacks, which amounts to 18 HP gained per successful hit within optimal range... Even with level 3 liferip, and a natural lifedrain ability, this isn't something you can rely on to keep yourself alive, but it'll keep you in the fight longer.
Kill to heal: provides a significant HP restoration on target elimination, but unlike liferip, the heal comes after the combat's over. This is a general purpose item that most characters and classes will benefit from, provided they actually partake in fights, and lets you push and take ground more aggressively and fluently than with supports alone.
Veteran: a gimmick for solo memelords, characters who can interact with the world without triggering 'combat' status, and misguided tank players who, desperate and outraged with the world around them, decide to go at it alone. Theoretically, if you were to spend a lot of time on the defense, behind some kind of shield (deployables only), barrier, or have some kind of really mobile and long last escape, you could get some use out of this, but this is all theory. In reality, this is completely useless, and exists simply because it's a vestigal part of the game's core design elements. The one and only character that can use veteran without drawing accusations of throwpick is Khan, thanks to how his shield works, and the ease with which he can put himself 'out of combat,' but buying another item is still a better option than wasting time giggling about making a veteran Khan build.
Cauterize: bestows your auto-attacks (mouse 1) with the 'healing reduced' debuff, which lasts 1.5 seconds. Any and all sources of HP gain while this debuff is in effect will be reduced by the listed number. Level 3 caut thus turns the 900 HP gain from a level 3 kill to heal into a puny 90 HP gain, and a bankshot heal from Seris goes from 2k to 200. Contrary to popular belief, the whole team doesn't need this item. As it's a debuff, it also doesn't stack, and only the highest level 'healing reduced' is ever applied. If you already have someone with level 3 shooting a guy getting healed, then adding your level 1 caut shots to the mix isn't gonna equal level 4. As touched upon in rejuv, the counter to healing reduced is healing increased, and characters like Inara can shrug off level 3 caut fairly effortlessly, while some (Pip) have gimmicky ways to largely get around it. The most effective counter to caut, however, is to not stand out in the open and let people shoot you in the face. Shields also can't be cauterized, for obvious reasons, so deploying a shield to absorb a volley lets you effectively dictate the engagement. Spending 1.5 seconds not taking fire also cancels the effect. By the last two rounds, this item will be in full effect, and if you're relying on HEALING damage, as opposed to not taking damage in the first place, you're gonna have a bad time.
Wrecker: multiplies damage done to shields of both kinds. Fernando, Barik, and Ash might seem like they have infinite HP on their big deployable shields, but one wrecker boosted magazine from any of the riflers, or three of Sha Lin's arrows, will make that shield essentially melt away, and the countless characters that run around with that annoying yellow bar on their HP meter won't be escaping so easily if you pack this item. Due to the large number of personal shields (that's the yellow section of the HP bar, which some call 'armor'), this item's become a bit of a staple, but it's primarily useful on accurate, slow firing, long ranged characters, like Sha, Strix, Kinessa, and Io. Characters that lay down torrents of fire are much better suited to carrying cauterize. A special note must be made that if the enemy team has Torvald, you need to prioritize wrecker, even if it's a mere level 1 per teammate.
Bulldozer: multiplies damage done to deployables, which by now is a pretty big category of misc. things. Ying's illusions, Io's familiar, Imani's dragon, Inara's walls and stone circles, Barik's turrets and big shield/turret combo ultimate, bomg king's sticky bombs... The list keeps growing. This is another specialized item, like illuminate, and the cost reflects that. Against teams with no deployables, this does nothing. Against teams with singular annoying deployables, or players that run builds that rely on said deployable, this allows you to nullify them in the same way you would stealth characters with illum. With level 3 bulldozer, even fairly weak damage dealers like Io can kill Luna (4500 HP) with a mere 8 shots.
Deft hands: boosts your DPS by cutting down on the time you spend reloading. Level 3 cuts reload time by 60%, which also happens to be the maximum possible reload speed reduction allowed, regardless of what other nonsense you stack. This is overall a fairly useful item (more dakka is always better than less dakka, and you can't ever have enough dakka), but it's not something you should prioritize over utility, and many characters have ways to grant themselves reload speed reduction, or outright generate ammo, if certain conditions are met, anyway. Another rarely mentioned benefit of deft hands is that it throws off enemy timings, which makes you that much more effective when fighting up close, or pushing. It's not uncommon to win damage trades against less experienced DPS players when one has deft hands, and the other doesn't. Likewise, it's not uncommon to lose every fight you get into when you spend 1500 credits on level 3 deft hands, and nothing else to back up all the bark you now have with some kind of bite.
Characters can buy 4 items total, and all players start out with 400 credits, with more gained for doing game mode specific things, as well as generally contributing to the team effort, and class specific things. Good itemization can turn a 0/3 into a 4/3. Never underestimate this part of the game, and don't be afraid to experiment, no matter how salty the russian Androxxxus gets that you didn't get caut as your first item because waaah.
It didn't have a lot of information in it, thus my huge post.
Dude, go make a guide with that/... you already typed it out; hate to see it just add to the 75k forum posts that never are read after they leave the first page of the steam forums.
I didn't even read thru it all but liked your writing style and think you should go earn some ... steam rep or whatever for a great guide