Underrated Dota 2 items: Pavise

One of the most important notions in Dota 2 is that of durability or tankability. Or, if you will, survivability. That notion is made up of other notions, such as health points (HP), armor, magic resistance, evasion, untargetability, damage block, and magic immunity.

But in the early game, the most common type of damage that you will need to deal with is physical damage. If you are highly resistant to it, you can play in a very aggressive way and distract the enemy team sufficiently to allow your teammates to win the fight.

The strengths of Pavise

In the first 15 minutes of the game, most heroes operate with around 1500 HP. This makes an item like Pavise extremely powerful because it only costs 1400 gold and gives you excellent stats: +3 armor, +2.5 mana regen, +175 HP, and most important of all, 300 physical damage barrier.

You can cast this barrier every 16 seconds or around 4 times per minute. It’s probably safe to say that in a lot of cases, the fight will last longer than 16 seconds. This means that you are getting 600 extra HP (against physical damage) + 175 HP + 18% HP (against physical damage) because of the armor.

When you do the math, you realize very quickly that Pavise gives you around 1000 effective HP against physical damage for 1400 gold. That kind of efficiency is absolutely remarkable. What’s even more remarkable is the fact that you can use Pavise’s active on an ally.

When you use the ability on yourself, it’s great. But you can play support and give one of your cores a lot of extra HP in fights. If that support has healing abilities of its own, that strategy becomes even more powerful.

Imagine a Treant Protector giving his Pavise’s Protect to an ally and casting Living Armor on that target at the same time. And now imagine using a Medallion of Courage on the same target, for an extra 6 armor. Immediately, the target gets +16 armor, +6 HP regen, and +300 physical damage barrier.

Trying to kill such a target is a very difficult task in the early game. And make no mistake, you can have both your Pavise and a Medallion in under 15 minutes when playing Treant. These items don’t cost that much. By the time your networth is 4000, you have Arcane Boots, Pavise, and Medallion.

Header: Valve