In Greek legends, the Medusa needs only to stare in your eyes and the next thing you know: you turn to stone. Perseus the hero took advantage of this and used a mirror to turn her own powers to turn her into stone.
Sadly, no such mirror exists. And the snake lady has become a terror in pubs after the latest mega patch dropped by Valve.
The latest changes have seen her become a zero strength hero: resulting in her starting with just 120 hp at minute zero. In return, she starts with mana shield – an ability that absorbs 98% of incoming damage. Every level she gives to this ability grows her damage absorption from 2.0 / 2.4 / 2.8 / 3.2 / 3.6.
In other words, with 1k mana, she gets an effective hp pool of about 3528 from mana alone. This mana shield absorbs damage before any reduction in armor of magic resistance.
With her Split Shot ability, she also benefits from the latest changes to the meta, which has expanded the hunting grounds for jungle farming. By level 4 or 5, she can safely go off to AFK farm for the next 20 minutes before returning with a Manta Style and Eye of Skadi to destroy whole teams by herself.
Her stats on Dotabuff reflect this: she has an average of 56.24% win rate across all tiers of Dota 2, making her the hero with the highest average win rate.
In other words, the chances of having her in your team means that are likely to win.
How to beat this latest terror of the pubs? Here are four tips to deal with the snaky succubus.
- Pick heroes with mana burn
This is obvious. If you haven’t banned her at the picking stage and the opposing team first picks her, get your carry to pick heroes that either have innate mana burn such as Anti-Mage and Nyx or heroes who build into Diffusal Blade such as Phantom Lancer, Slark or even Riki. This will neutralize her powerful mana shield ability. - Pick heroes with high mobility
Medusa is a very slow hero, so heroes with high mobility can easily get in and out of range, making it difficult for her to land her spells. Heroes with high mobility include Storm Spirit, Ember Spirit, and Puck. - Focus on controlling her with spells and items
The thing about most Medusa players is that since they focus on building stats and often believe they are invincible, they tend pass on Black King Bar. This makes it imperative that your crowd control heroes get onto of her asap. For offlaners, getting Heaven’s Halberd for the disarm is critical; for supports, consider picking heroes such as Lion, Shadow Shaman, Bane and even Engima. - Destroy her farm
There are very few heroes in the current patch who can outfarm her. So instead of trying to outfarm her, the best way is to dominate the lane – she’s a weak laner – push her out of lane and control her farming spots. This is not as easy as it sounds, of course, since the farming areas have vastly expanded. But it will put pressure on the opposing team to create space for her which could result in more opportunities for your team to exploit.
That said, in the hands of a good player, Medusa remains a nightmare to play against. Perhaps the best way to counter this unbalanced hero is to simply pick/ban her in the first instance.
