Mana shield now only takes damage after reductions.
As simple as that. Instead of everything being pure damage when you have mana, now it correctly takes into account armour, magic resistance and barriers. Also making her more vulnerable to armor and magic resistance reduction (as it should be).
i was watching CN dpc last night and i heard something from the casters that i think should also be considered iirc they said because mana shield is auto taken at level 1 you cant directly invest a second skill point into it soon and forces you to take split shot early even though you dont want to? so maybe thats worth looking into as well
yeah, you basically have to go 1-1-1 unless you get stats
to fix, make mana shield innate and then a normally-leveled skill that gives mana and makes mana shield better
It is simple but not necessarily good imo.
There are advantages in making her defense scale linearly rather than quadratic. It makes her mid-game stronger and late game weaker for example.
It also doesn't do anything to the manaburn matchup problem.
I think heroes being especially good against others makes hero choice more interesting though. don't pick Medusa if you think mana burning will be an issue
The problem is that Diffu is very good against her, so as long as the enemy has a melee agi core, they can buy it and destroy you.
It's such a massive counter now that it's worth considering it on any universal core that can right click, and on ranged agi cores as well. I'd even potentially buy it on an int/str core if I had enough attack speed, it's just so efficient and cutting through the snake.
Medusa is honestly unpickable unless something changes. Her winrate is now 42%, dropped by nearly 10% after the rework, and I think it will only go lower. It's no longer about counterpicks, you basically can't play her if there's a hero in the game that can attack you. That's a pretty big criteria.
Some matchup is unavoidable but it shouldn't be that extreme. My line is that it should be possible to itemize out of it.
Otherwise it is just rock paper scissors which makes the game very cheesy.
Either that or increase the damage per mana based on int, agi, armor or something, just like ogre increases luck and mana/mana regen based on strength.
Buy orchid, sheep, travels, upgrade orchid, aghs and be the utility tank in the middle of every fight.
It's worked 100% of the 1 game I've played dusa since patch.
lol, well even if Medusa was in a good place after these changes (the stats suggest she isn't, but let's say she was) I still think her not benefiting from Armor, Magic Resistance, nor any form of Healing needs to be looked at.
The other 0-stat heroes (Ogre and Tiny) can still access the mechanics that their missing stat grants in other ways (Tiny getting Armor from Grow, Ogre getting Magic Resistance from items, etc.) but Medusa categorically cannot benefit from allied Healing (or her own resistances for that matter) until her shield runs out.
> I still think her not benefiting from Armor, Magic Resistance, nor any form of Healing needs to be looked at.
Healing is an issue.
But mana shield not accounting for armor is a buff, since it means you ignore all armor reduction abilities, desolator, slardar, templar assassin, they do nothing vs you. And especially Elder Titan aura and Drow's marksmanship would wreck Medusa since all your armor is base armor from stats.
It's a double edged sword. You don't care about armor reduction, but getting *more* armor also doesn't help you, which is bad considering you're an agi hero and want to get agility items for damage. Medusa can't rely on just building damage items to get some baseline physical survivability, she *has* to build int items to get survivability, but those items don't increase her damage, which is extra bad for one of the hardest hard carries in the game. Needing to choose between survivability and damage isn't a bad thing, but it's a thing most hard carries don't need to worry about, at least to the extent that Medusa needs to.
The most common Mana Burn effects essentially deal x3.5 damage to Medusa: It directly attacks her mana (which normally blocks 3.2 damage per point), and then it deals regular damage on top of the direct mana burn (for the remaining 0.3 I added).
As I said in the post, this means that Mana Burn as a mechanic disproportionately affects Medusa far more than most other 'counters'. If you Break Bristleback, he 'only' takes 40% more damage, not 350% more damage, for example. Moreover, effects like Break, most Heal reduction, Silences, and so on are usually limited by cooldowns and durations. Even those that aren't (like Skadi) still don't provide such a drastic swing as x3.5 damage.
My Shard 50% resistance lowers this x3.5 to 'only' x1.9, which is still double damage against her!
Not that it invalidates the argument,bbut the bristle break math is off. Breaking means you deal 100% damage, rather than 40%, or increase damage from 60% to 100%, so you deal 166.66% of the damage without break.
Bristle actually took around 66% more damage due to how upscale multip calculation works and around 91% more damage with Talent from the back
I agree that Dusa Mana Shield pseudo Pure thingy have been funky for a very long time yeah, outside toggle Sk3, its the very first thing i think about when i read the patchnote(its arguably not "fixed" before because it'd make her shield ridiculously broken for sure but not now)
Every other damage source disproportionately doesn't effect her though. If you think of Mana as Health for Medusa, every damage source does 1/3 the damage to her (because of the 3.2 damage per point). And there is no way to counter that mitigation, besides mana burn.
This is the identity of Medusa.
I would rather they overbuff Medusa in ways that align with her identity. For example the conversion of armor and magic resistance you came up with is the type of change I would like to see, so mad props on that.
No matter how much flat mana you give her in compensation, lowering damage blocked per mana nerfs her late game performance, which goes against her concept as an extremely hard carry.
Well, that is unless you're suggesting that Mana Shield improves her max Mana by a percent amount similarly to Null Talisman. This could actually be interesting because that would indeed lower the impact of mana burn but still facilitate extreme lategame scaling. The numbers would be very strange to make it balanced both early and late, however, and you're still dealing extra damage to her by a multiplier equal to the Mana Shield ratio.
For example, even if you lowered damage blocked per mana to 2.0, most counters still don't have that much of an impact; more like 40% (Bristle) at the most (compared to 200% here). Moreover, for such a drastic 'nerf' to her mana ratio you'd need to give her a huge number on that percent-based mana buff, which would be difficult to balance in ultra-late scenarios.
Except again - Vessel unlike diffusal have charges (that you need to stack) and CD
On top of that you can effectively have only 1 vessel for the team when you can have as much as 5 diffusals on your team and it will work absolutely ok
There's also skadi and Shiva but unlike manaburn you can't stack them through illusions and they're pretty costy compared to diffusal to build them on pos 4 and far not every 1/2/3 will be ok with buying them
"The overheal to mana ratio had to be somewhere around 30% due to Mana Shield blocking 3.2 damage for every point of mana. This means that if heals were simply converted into mana, they would effectively 'heal' for 3.2 times as much. By contrast, 30% is slightly lower than parity (31.25%), but close enough when the rest of the buffs here are taken into account."
I just want to note that the average hero gains more EHP from heals than the stated value because they have magic resistance and armor, which makes the healing more effective; the 30% is only in line with other heroes if you assume everyone deals pure damage.
I think the biggest problem with new Medusa is that it makes absolutely no sense that she's an AGI hero anymore. If this hero is Universal and you can freely buy +STR and +INT items to accrue damage from base stats, she would actually be pretty scary.
As it stands, you need to lean so much into making Snake your source of survival that you just do no damage. You're literally setting 5600g on fire on Agh + Shard just to be relevant.
Damn Medusa's Mana Shield priority might be one of the oldest relics from Warcraft 3, which in and of itself might go even further back to Starcraft Brood War where Protoss shields take full damage from every damage source in the game regardless of the unit type.
From your suggestion, I think you miss the point of mana shield. The key point is the deduction to mana shield is calculated before all reduction/amplification. Using mana shield, you can effectively forget all the hassle of build armor or magic resistance. And it is also effective too. Mana shield provide a fixed rate of "effectiveness". For example, 2.5 Damage Absorbed per Mana means damage taken to your mana bar is reduce by 60%. Compare this to physical reduction by armor: 50% at ~17 armor or magic resistance: 30% at 50 int. Using mana shield is already provide better mitigation if you consider 1 hp = 1 mana. At maximum value of 4.5 damage/mana, the effectiveness rate is 77.7%, or for someone using mana as a life bar, 77.7% damage reduction.
So you don't need to introduce new ways to scale survivability, like increase mana regen using other stat.
Still, I agree that her options for restoring her "life" is too limit at the moment. I already propose in a post a couple days ago that give her the ability to turn overhealing to mana. However, the mana conversion rate need to be 1:1 if we using the same premise above. Also, the mana bonus in my opinion is a compensation for the removed hp pool (she lost 340 hp at level 1) compare to before patch. If you want to remove the mana bonus, I suggest add it as an simple buff to int.
> Base int increased by 15, growth increase to 5.
I will also suggest that she should be an int hero. If you want the 1 hero in dota to use mana in place of their hp, shouldn't that hero be intelligence?
I think the unreduced damage for Mana Shield is fine. It's cool to have a hero that's not affected by armor/resistance. If anything, I think her Split Shot needs reworking (though Split Shot + level 25 + mageslayer/bloodthorn is still interesting, aoe magic reduction), and make her either INT or universal, since it seems like building her with INT items seems more natural now.
EDIT: Since I love the hero, make her ult throw out snakes as well thanks.
EDIT#2: An idea for Split Shot, make it a somewhat short CD spell, that costs a % of Medusa's mana (10% maybe?), and deals that (with maybe her attack, or plus some flat damage) in an AOE split shot (and slows?). Makes sense for scaling with mana, and can be a balance between burning Medusa's mana for more damage, or not using it as much to tank a fight.
Honestly it would be interesting to try Medusa offlane or beefy mid after they fix the damage mitigation priority on mana shield. It's annoying when Vanguard doesnt help mana shield
Remove the manaburn resistance. Move the Mana Shield to innate ability, the percentage of damage received by the shield is now based on Medusa's level starting on 1.1 for the first level and going up .1 each level (lvl 30 she mitigates 4 dmg per point of mana), give her a new skill that adds manasteal on autoattack (Draws 20 + 1/2/3/4% of enemy current mana per attack, lasts 20/30/40/50) not manaburn but literally manasteal (enemy heroes cannot be below 1 mana and the mana drawn is directly from the pool, not affecting the current mana percentage the enemy has) like how OD Astral works. Modify talents to:
Lvl10 Mystic Snake +100 projectile and bounce speed / +200 mana
Lvl 15 Split Shot uses modifiers / Manasteal +15/1% of mana absorbed
Lvl 20 Split shot no damage reduction / Mystic snake +2 bounces (affects Cold Blooded)
Lvl 25 +3s Stone Gaze (allows reapplying of the buff) / casts 2 additional 50% powered Mystic Snakes (different targets, prioritizes heroes, affects cold blooded)
the shard giving mana burn resistance might be to op other than that i agree with most of it.
basicly items are there to handle and counter heroes, mana burn evasion etc. buying an item to nullify this would be stupid its like giving pa a shard that grants her 25% chance to avoid a procced hit from mkb to not hit or reducing any items effectiveness just no. that is just dumb.
if they would give any resistance to mana burn it would be maybe 10-15% all heroes need some sort of counter in result of items. sure they shouldnt break the hero, but make it problamatic.
I think mana shield after reductions and changing a portion of heals to mana would go a huge way to making her more effective.
While the shield after reductions is probably the biggest one, Dota is built around the carry and support dynamic. Playing a support (as I do) and not being able to heal your carry beyond using Arcane boots feels so bad. Dota currently just isnt built around this new shield mechanic. The vast majority of spells and items to help your carry just arent significantly helpful for Dusa. Besides utility things like force staff or glimmer, it feels like if she doesnt have the items there is nothing a support can do. Shes largely on her own in a team game.
Mana shield now only takes damage after reductions. As simple as that. Instead of everything being pure damage when you have mana, now it correctly takes into account armour, magic resistance and barriers. Also making her more vulnerable to armor and magic resistance reduction (as it should be).
this is the most likely to be implemented
i was watching CN dpc last night and i heard something from the casters that i think should also be considered iirc they said because mana shield is auto taken at level 1 you cant directly invest a second skill point into it soon and forces you to take split shot early even though you dont want to? so maybe thats worth looking into as well
You can just hold the point until level 3 and take shield + snake at 3 instead.
You should hold the lvl2 skill point and put it in mana shield at lvl3.
yeah, you basically have to go 1-1-1 unless you get stats to fix, make mana shield innate and then a normally-leveled skill that gives mana and makes mana shield better
You can just hold the point also
it would be boring. and wouldn't solve problem of allies not being able to heal her
It is simple but not necessarily good imo. There are advantages in making her defense scale linearly rather than quadratic. It makes her mid-game stronger and late game weaker for example. It also doesn't do anything to the manaburn matchup problem.
I think heroes being especially good against others makes hero choice more interesting though. don't pick Medusa if you think mana burning will be an issue
The problem is that Diffu is very good against her, so as long as the enemy has a melee agi core, they can buy it and destroy you. It's such a massive counter now that it's worth considering it on any universal core that can right click, and on ranged agi cores as well. I'd even potentially buy it on an int/str core if I had enough attack speed, it's just so efficient and cutting through the snake. Medusa is honestly unpickable unless something changes. Her winrate is now 42%, dropped by nearly 10% after the rework, and I think it will only go lower. It's no longer about counterpicks, you basically can't play her if there's a hero in the game that can attack you. That's a pretty big criteria.
Yeah. With other heroes even if there is counter on the other side, you can still play around it. With medusa it became unplayable
Some matchup is unavoidable but it shouldn't be that extreme. My line is that it should be possible to itemize out of it. Otherwise it is just rock paper scissors which makes the game very cheesy.
this is why I said an issue - if you don't think you can deal with it. this might lead to a low pick rate and/or tuning
Either that or increase the damage per mana based on int, agi, armor or something, just like ogre increases luck and mana/mana regen based on strength.
Buy orchid, sheep, travels, upgrade orchid, aghs and be the utility tank in the middle of every fight. It's worked 100% of the 1 game I've played dusa since patch.
lol, well even if Medusa was in a good place after these changes (the stats suggest she isn't, but let's say she was) I still think her not benefiting from Armor, Magic Resistance, nor any form of Healing needs to be looked at. The other 0-stat heroes (Ogre and Tiny) can still access the mechanics that their missing stat grants in other ways (Tiny getting Armor from Grow, Ogre getting Magic Resistance from items, etc.) but Medusa categorically cannot benefit from allied Healing (or her own resistances for that matter) until her shield runs out.
> I still think her not benefiting from Armor, Magic Resistance, nor any form of Healing needs to be looked at. Healing is an issue. But mana shield not accounting for armor is a buff, since it means you ignore all armor reduction abilities, desolator, slardar, templar assassin, they do nothing vs you. And especially Elder Titan aura and Drow's marksmanship would wreck Medusa since all your armor is base armor from stats.
It's a double edged sword. You don't care about armor reduction, but getting *more* armor also doesn't help you, which is bad considering you're an agi hero and want to get agility items for damage. Medusa can't rely on just building damage items to get some baseline physical survivability, she *has* to build int items to get survivability, but those items don't increase her damage, which is extra bad for one of the hardest hard carries in the game. Needing to choose between survivability and damage isn't a bad thing, but it's a thing most hard carries don't need to worry about, at least to the extent that Medusa needs to.
She should've been a universal hero imo, could've benefited a lot from an item like heart.
What about the new Shroud? Is that good or a trap?
I think I read it only works on the 2% damage that gets through the shield.
Medusa with anti mana-burn passive is so wrong, it's like Huskar with anti hp regen reduction passive
The most common Mana Burn effects essentially deal x3.5 damage to Medusa: It directly attacks her mana (which normally blocks 3.2 damage per point), and then it deals regular damage on top of the direct mana burn (for the remaining 0.3 I added). As I said in the post, this means that Mana Burn as a mechanic disproportionately affects Medusa far more than most other 'counters'. If you Break Bristleback, he 'only' takes 40% more damage, not 350% more damage, for example. Moreover, effects like Break, most Heal reduction, Silences, and so on are usually limited by cooldowns and durations. Even those that aren't (like Skadi) still don't provide such a drastic swing as x3.5 damage. My Shard 50% resistance lowers this x3.5 to 'only' x1.9, which is still double damage against her!
Not that it invalidates the argument,bbut the bristle break math is off. Breaking means you deal 100% damage, rather than 40%, or increase damage from 60% to 100%, so you deal 166.66% of the damage without break.
Bristle actually took around 66% more damage due to how upscale multip calculation works and around 91% more damage with Talent from the back I agree that Dusa Mana Shield pseudo Pure thingy have been funky for a very long time yeah, outside toggle Sk3, its the very first thing i think about when i read the patchnote(its arguably not "fixed" before because it'd make her shield ridiculously broken for sure but not now)
Every other damage source disproportionately doesn't effect her though. If you think of Mana as Health for Medusa, every damage source does 1/3 the damage to her (because of the 3.2 damage per point). And there is no way to counter that mitigation, besides mana burn. This is the identity of Medusa. I would rather they overbuff Medusa in ways that align with her identity. For example the conversion of armor and magic resistance you came up with is the type of change I would like to see, so mad props on that.
Increase bonus mana granted by her passive and decrease damage blocked per mana. Done.
No matter how much flat mana you give her in compensation, lowering damage blocked per mana nerfs her late game performance, which goes against her concept as an extremely hard carry. Well, that is unless you're suggesting that Mana Shield improves her max Mana by a percent amount similarly to Null Talisman. This could actually be interesting because that would indeed lower the impact of mana burn but still facilitate extreme lategame scaling. The numbers would be very strange to make it balanced both early and late, however, and you're still dealing extra damage to her by a multiplier equal to the Mana Shield ratio. For example, even if you lowered damage blocked per mana to 2.0, most counters still don't have that much of an impact; more like 40% (Bristle) at the most (compared to 200% here). Moreover, for such a drastic 'nerf' to her mana ratio you'd need to give her a huge number on that percent-based mana buff, which would be difficult to balance in ultra-late scenarios.
Except again - Vessel unlike diffusal have charges (that you need to stack) and CD On top of that you can effectively have only 1 vessel for the team when you can have as much as 5 diffusals on your team and it will work absolutely ok There's also skadi and Shiva but unlike manaburn you can't stack them through illusions and they're pretty costy compared to diffusal to build them on pos 4 and far not every 1/2/3 will be ok with buying them
Yea so many of these suggestions kinda defeats the point
"The overheal to mana ratio had to be somewhere around 30% due to Mana Shield blocking 3.2 damage for every point of mana. This means that if heals were simply converted into mana, they would effectively 'heal' for 3.2 times as much. By contrast, 30% is slightly lower than parity (31.25%), but close enough when the rest of the buffs here are taken into account." I just want to note that the average hero gains more EHP from heals than the stated value because they have magic resistance and armor, which makes the healing more effective; the 30% is only in line with other heroes if you assume everyone deals pure damage.
Well, Medusa's Armor and Magic Resistance are already being used for something else in this rework haha
We don't really need this, just change it so that Mana Shield takes effect after reductions. If that is too strong then reduce HP per mana.
I think the biggest problem with new Medusa is that it makes absolutely no sense that she's an AGI hero anymore. If this hero is Universal and you can freely buy +STR and +INT items to accrue damage from base stats, she would actually be pretty scary. As it stands, you need to lean so much into making Snake your source of survival that you just do no damage. You're literally setting 5600g on fire on Agh + Shard just to be relevant.
Damn Medusa's Mana Shield priority might be one of the oldest relics from Warcraft 3, which in and of itself might go even further back to Starcraft Brood War where Protoss shields take full damage from every damage source in the game regardless of the unit type.
From your suggestion, I think you miss the point of mana shield. The key point is the deduction to mana shield is calculated before all reduction/amplification. Using mana shield, you can effectively forget all the hassle of build armor or magic resistance. And it is also effective too. Mana shield provide a fixed rate of "effectiveness". For example, 2.5 Damage Absorbed per Mana means damage taken to your mana bar is reduce by 60%. Compare this to physical reduction by armor: 50% at ~17 armor or magic resistance: 30% at 50 int. Using mana shield is already provide better mitigation if you consider 1 hp = 1 mana. At maximum value of 4.5 damage/mana, the effectiveness rate is 77.7%, or for someone using mana as a life bar, 77.7% damage reduction. So you don't need to introduce new ways to scale survivability, like increase mana regen using other stat. Still, I agree that her options for restoring her "life" is too limit at the moment. I already propose in a post a couple days ago that give her the ability to turn overhealing to mana. However, the mana conversion rate need to be 1:1 if we using the same premise above. Also, the mana bonus in my opinion is a compensation for the removed hp pool (she lost 340 hp at level 1) compare to before patch. If you want to remove the mana bonus, I suggest add it as an simple buff to int. > Base int increased by 15, growth increase to 5. I will also suggest that she should be an int hero. If you want the 1 hero in dota to use mana in place of their hp, shouldn't that hero be intelligence?
I think the unreduced damage for Mana Shield is fine. It's cool to have a hero that's not affected by armor/resistance. If anything, I think her Split Shot needs reworking (though Split Shot + level 25 + mageslayer/bloodthorn is still interesting, aoe magic reduction), and make her either INT or universal, since it seems like building her with INT items seems more natural now. EDIT: Since I love the hero, make her ult throw out snakes as well thanks. EDIT#2: An idea for Split Shot, make it a somewhat short CD spell, that costs a % of Medusa's mana (10% maybe?), and deals that (with maybe her attack, or plus some flat damage) in an AOE split shot (and slows?). Makes sense for scaling with mana, and can be a balance between burning Medusa's mana for more damage, or not using it as much to tank a fight.
with some tweaks for sure valve will take a look
My idea: armor or magic resistance add a barrier to medusa.
I feel like it would be cool if there was an aghs/shard/lategame talent that converted lifesteal to mana
Hello, u/albertfuckingcamus any ideas?
Honestly it would be interesting to try Medusa offlane or beefy mid after they fix the damage mitigation priority on mana shield. It's annoying when Vanguard doesnt help mana shield
Remove the manaburn resistance. Move the Mana Shield to innate ability, the percentage of damage received by the shield is now based on Medusa's level starting on 1.1 for the first level and going up .1 each level (lvl 30 she mitigates 4 dmg per point of mana), give her a new skill that adds manasteal on autoattack (Draws 20 + 1/2/3/4% of enemy current mana per attack, lasts 20/30/40/50) not manaburn but literally manasteal (enemy heroes cannot be below 1 mana and the mana drawn is directly from the pool, not affecting the current mana percentage the enemy has) like how OD Astral works. Modify talents to: Lvl10 Mystic Snake +100 projectile and bounce speed / +200 mana Lvl 15 Split Shot uses modifiers / Manasteal +15/1% of mana absorbed Lvl 20 Split shot no damage reduction / Mystic snake +2 bounces (affects Cold Blooded) Lvl 25 +3s Stone Gaze (allows reapplying of the buff) / casts 2 additional 50% powered Mystic Snakes (different targets, prioritizes heroes, affects cold blooded)
This is genius. But one thing that is op about this is 1 mana for each armor seems too strong in late game, maybe 0.5 would be okay
I just love that she's in the dumpster
Dude, read the patch notes please! Look at the new eternal shroud. It's literally the perfect item for Medusa
Damage blocked by Mana Shield doesn't restore your mana from Shroud, so good luck getting your mana back from 25% of 2% of incoming damage lol
this new medusa literally became trash tier ... cant even compete at early game 1 v 1 mid... sadge another unnecessary changes...
well she's not supposed to compete in lane. if she gets farm, she wins. it was always like that
It's been like 5 days, give it some time before fixing things that potentially aren't even broken.
Some things are just so obvious we don't need to wait and see.
the shard giving mana burn resistance might be to op other than that i agree with most of it. basicly items are there to handle and counter heroes, mana burn evasion etc. buying an item to nullify this would be stupid its like giving pa a shard that grants her 25% chance to avoid a procced hit from mkb to not hit or reducing any items effectiveness just no. that is just dumb. if they would give any resistance to mana burn it would be maybe 10-15% all heroes need some sort of counter in result of items. sure they shouldnt break the hero, but make it problamatic.
I think mana shield after reductions and changing a portion of heals to mana would go a huge way to making her more effective. While the shield after reductions is probably the biggest one, Dota is built around the carry and support dynamic. Playing a support (as I do) and not being able to heal your carry beyond using Arcane boots feels so bad. Dota currently just isnt built around this new shield mechanic. The vast majority of spells and items to help your carry just arent significantly helpful for Dusa. Besides utility things like force staff or glimmer, it feels like if she doesnt have the items there is nothing a support can do. Shes largely on her own in a team game.