General Discussionmedusa's mana shield

Yes as you can see 2.5 is greater than 1.6

but every damage u take 2.5 mana will be taken(?)
lvl 1 only absorbs 1.6 mana for a damage

is that how the mana shield work?

its actually rather huge, but you usually dont need it early on.

Not a lot of reason to do it early unless you manage to lose all your mana faster than all your health. The damage your mana absorbs stays the same, what differs is the amount of mana you spend for that.

alright thanks for the very informative reply guys

when you actually think about it, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

its the other way around. damage absorbed PER mana. so you absorb more dmg the more you level it obviously.

i used to put a value point in it, and then just stats over shield. at certain point you can start leveling it up, or just sneak 1 level here and there instead of getting it like 3 times in a row.

but it states clearly that it blocks 60% of damage.
does that mean for every 2.5 damage taken, it blocks 60% of it?

The Dotabuff description doesn't actually help though I agree, it should be

Damage absorbed per point of mana: 1.6 / 1.9 / 2.2 / 2.5

There is a thread somewhere on the mechanics of it where it explains why stat items/bloodstone etc are better than armor, heart, and other items of the like.

Mana shield works like this:

If you have mana shield (lvl 4) your hp only take 40% of the damage before reductions, 60% of the damage goes to mana and mana has 60% damage reduction against all damage types including pure, so if you take:

1000 PURE DAMAGE
-> you loss 400 hp -- 240 mana

1000 MAGIC DAMAGE
-> you loss 300 hp -- 240 mana

1000 PHYSICAL DAMAGE
-> you loss around 160 hp (lategame) -- 240 mana

Every 1000 damage of any type you loss 240 mana, if you have mana shield lvl 1 you loss 375 mana and you still loss the same amount of hp. I take 2 points in mana shield early on and max it later, as you can see medusa is a beast tanking pure and magic damage but with physical damage its easier to burn her mana but still you have stone gaze to counter that.

Basically it always blocks 60% of the incoming damage. If you take 100 damage, 60 is blocked by mana shield. However the level determines how much mana it costs to block that damage. At level 1, each 1.6 points of damage blocked will drain 1 mana. At level 4 you block 2.5 damage for each mana.

So that 60 damage will cost 37.5/31.6/27.3/24 mana to absorb. So yes its definitely worth levelling it up.

The only reason upgrading it would be worthless is if your hp is so low you die before going oom. I think that's almost never the case though, you'd have to be stacking a ton of int items in that case.

That said though, if it's leveled enough where you can survive, you can drop a point or two into stats over shield. Same with ult since it only increases the stoned duration, not the gaze effect duration which is really the good part cus everyone runs away from you during it. It's wouldn't be the worst build ever to go 4/4/1/1 and stats til like level 15 or so.

This kind of entirely depends on whether you're skilling splitshot early to farm jungle/push.

You don't need to upgrade it to level 4 immediately. I usually Max out snake and split shot first. Only time I max out shield before split shot is if I'm involved in a lot of early fights. But you do need to max it out by the time you plan on joining fights.