General DiscussionMedusa item/skill build?

skill build depends on the offlaner you are staying against
if he is afraid to approach creeps, skip snake. if he is agressive, max it.

about itembuild, i heard phase - mjollnir - yasha - skadi - manta is legit

No lifesteal? Against aggresive lineups I consider a morbid until 1 - 2 items done

lifesteal is more of a weird than typical build

Dominator is weird, if going lifesteal just go mask of madness and clear waves super fast with mask and split shot.

As for skills... I don't think you want to skip snake, maybe just delay a couple to get an early stats or two but snake is actually quite good for farming at rank 3, 4. It will generally return close to the amount of mana spent at those levels. You can use it when pushing waves or go into jungle, pull two camps close by (get a quelling blade to chop trees to make this possible), snake em all.

Rushing links just leaves you with no dmg and no impact early which is why people hate it, but it's recommended as core which is why people build it all the damn time.

For items I get boots (I always phase. Treads are ok but I can't live without the speed, medusa is so slow) and aquila then it depends. You basically want one or maybe two farming items then rush your skadi. Then you want one big dmg item and from there decide if you are tanky enough to go another big dmg item, or go a tank item, or go bkb.

So a typical build would be phase, aquila, yasha, skadi, finish s&y or manta, daedulus or mkb. Or if going the mom route, you can just slip it in before yasha or in place of yasha, skipping yasha until ready to build entire thing.

Or you can skip yasha altogether this build is pretty good, phase, aquila, maelstrom, skadi, daedulus or mkb, finish mjollnir.

I don't think dominator or satanic make a ton of sense on her. Mask has nice synergy with split shot, you run up to a wave, pop mask and clear it, and the lifesteal is good sustain to keep farming. But dominator doesn't add that steroid of IAS during your ult or when clearing a wave, it's for long term sustain with armor and +dmg, but dusa can only lifesteal off her main target so it's not going to help you that much in big fights, not nearly as much as just having more mana like skadi or even bloodstone. For the price on satanic, just seems too much since medusa single target dmg isn't that high and you don't lifesteal off the spread dmg.

you generally want phase because of how slow you are. in real scenarios you have to take movement speed into account when calculating dps, rather than just attack speed and attack damage. all your damage means nothing if you're getting kited.

from what i've seen good dusas dont bother with lifesteal, lifesteal doesn't do much in fights and for farming creeps it's unnecessary too as you're ranged - just pull neutrals back instead of being lazy and tanking them. if you want to tank up, get skadi.

also manta's a situational defensive item rather than an item that you have to get every game. yasha is a good early farming item because it's cheap.

if you get treads hotd and manta you have no damage and you get kited. with phase, yasha and skadi instead which is basically the same gold, you're not dead weight. you farm faster, don't get kited from your speed and skadi, and you're more survivable too.

Medussa is not that slow, and after skadi you will never get kited

I find treads yasha better than phase maelstrom, is cheaper, gives you 69 attack speed and helps you survive more than phase ( in my opinion )

lifesteal only steals on 80% of your base DPS, and much of your EHP comes from mana not HP. there is nothing wrong with going MoM if you need the attack/move speed & in theory HotD could be OK for the stacks/damage/armor but in practice it doesn't really work, casual lifesteal makes even less sense.

I'd love to see what competitive players make on a specific hero (e.g. Medusa in this case) without having to look at top-100 hero rankings and it's a real shame that we can't search the esports tab for specific heroes (you can see that data by accessing a competitive team's page atm but that's really time consuming).

@OP try this if you're bored. You can get the exact ehp and dps values for specific items and compare the cost.
http://devilesk.com/dota2/apps/hero-calculator/

"Medussa is not that slow, and after skadi you will never get kited"

What are you talking about, her base movement is 290 which is incredibly slow. She's in like the bottom 5th of hero speed, tied with a bunch of other slow pokes and only like 12 heroes slower. Average move speed is like 300-305.

I'm not a fan of maelstrom either unless you have tons of free space and time. Then it can be quite good.