Minamitsu Murasa


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Allegiance: Hakurei Minamitsu Murasa possesses strong burst damage and an excellent ganking skillset. While she may have sub-par stats, she can easily kill unsuspecting heroes in the early game just by using Spinach and right-clicking. However, her inability to chase properly and her diminished usefulness in the late-game make her a weak hero overall.

Attributes
 Strength: 23 + 2.2/level

Agility: 18 + 1.6/level

Intelligence: 16 + 1.9/level

Movement Speed: 300

Range: 100 (melee)

Skills
Capsize "Foundering Anchor" (D)

Throws an anchor in a straight line damaging and hooking girls on contact, when thrown or on return. Hooking effect ignores Magic Immunity, Ethereal, and Invulnerability.

Only damages enemy girls

Spirit Cost: 140

Cooldown: 14s

Level 1: 100 damage, 550 range

Level 2: 150 damage, 700 range

Level 3: 210 damage, 850 range

Level 4: 270 damage, 1000 range

Drowning Sign "Sinkable Vortex" (F)

Murasa throws her anchor at the targeted area, creating a vortex that sucks in units. The vortex lasts for 3s at all levels.

Timers are paused while inside the vortex

Cast Range: 600?

Area of Effect: 160/220/280/340

Spirit Cost: 150

Cooldown: 30s

Level 1: 30 damage/s

Level 2: 50 damage/s

Level 3: 70 damage/s

Level 4: 90 damage/s

Nice Boat "Spinach" (R)

Murasa eats spinach, gaining bonus strength and splash damage for 7 seconds.

Spirit Cost: 50

Cooldown: 15s

Level 1: +36 Str, +30 splash damage

Level 2: +48 Str, +50 splash damage

Level 3: +60 Str, +70 splash damage

Level 4: +72 Str, +90 splash damage

Harbor Sign "Phantom Ship Harbor" (W)

Summons Minamitsu's phantom ship that flies. Allows Minamitsu and her allies to travel along. Ship gains 522 movespeed when Minamitsu is on board.

If the ship is destroyed while girls are on board, they are slowed by 80?% for 15?s.

Channeling Time: 1s Spirit Cost: 150

Cooldown: 100s

Level 1: Summons a Phantom Ship with 600HP and 0 Armour.

Level 2: Summons a Phantom Ship with 800HP and 3 Armour. The Phantom Ship has [Harbor Sign "Eternally Anchored Ghost Ship"] and [Harbor Sign "Ghost Ship's Port"] skills.

Level 3: Summons a Phantom Ship with 900HP and 6 Armour. The Phantom Ship has [Harbor Sign "Eternally Anchored Ghost Ship"] and [Harbor Sign "Ghost Ship's Port"] skills. The Phantom Ship is Ethereal.

Phantom Ship's Skills
Harbor Sign "Eternally Anchored Ghost Ship" (D)

Crashes the boat at the targeted location, dealing 400 damage in an area.

Deals damage to structures and to allied units. Physical damage

Harbor Sign "Ghost Ship’s Port" (F)

Summons the boat back to it's captain. If Murasa is dead, the boat will teleport to your side's fountain.

Channeling Time: 2s

Analysis
Brief overview of the hero's strengths and weaknesses.

Capsize "Foundering Anchor"
Murasa's anchor or "hook", as it's more commonly referred to as, is a strong laning tool as well as gank initiator. As the hook passes through creeps, scoring a hit while laning and trapping the target in your own creeps is a very possible, and very lethal, outcome.

The hook itself has a few minor details that warrant addressing. The hook casting must be channeled until it hooks a target or it will fail. In addition, Kanako while in "Mountain of Faith" cannot be hooked.

Dealing with Hook

If you have clear sight of Murasa, dealing with hook is a matter of being unpredictable in your movement. As hook ignores creeps, you can't simply take cover behind the creep line, unlike in DotA. However, Murasa's hook cannot be stop-canceled properly, so keeping a close eye on Murasa's animations makes a significant difference.

On the other hand, Murasa is most likely going to hook you when you can't see her. You can avoid getting hooked by moving unpredictably (easier said than done), or alternatively, by warding the common gank locations and dodging the hook normally.

The "Hookspots"

There are various locations in the map which have cliffs of which Murasa can drop off from the boat, but characters without movement skills, a 9-ball or some sort of TP, cannot escape from. The most obvious and useful locations are near the Hakurei tower at the bot lane junction and near the Moriya tower at the top lane junction. As those locations can result in a character being stuck permanently if they happen to be unfortunate enough to lack a TP scroll or 9-ball, using them in casual games is frowned upon.

Drowning Sign "Sinkable Vortex"
Sinkable Vortex tries very hard to be a good AoE disable, but sadly, it falls short. Due to its long start delay, short cast range, long cooldown and pathetic AoE, at early levels at least, using Vortex to initiate a gank or teamfight is a bad idea.

However, Vortex is good at "zoning" targets, at least once it hits level 3. As Vortex disables targets unfortunate enough to get caught on the edge for a rather long duration, using it to close off escape routes in ganks is fairly potent.

Synergy with Hook

Casting a Vortex where you stand before hooking the target buys you some time to cast Spinach before they are ejected from the vortex. If one chooses not to use Vortex before hooking the target, you would either need to cast Spinach beforehand, wasting about 1 second of its duration, cast Spinach after landing the hook, potentially missing 2 attacks against the target, or not cast Spinach at all, greatly diminishing your damage output. Do note that using both Vortex and Hook regularly consumes a great deal of mana, so if you are uncertain about your hook aim, it may not be a good idea.

Nice Boat "Spinach"
Spinach is one of Murasa's most distinctive skills, mostly due to the accompanying "Popeye" music. The bonus strength and splash damage added are extremely high should the skill be maxed early, giving her a reasonable lane presence.

Spinach does have an extremely short duration, so knowing when to use it is crucial to maximize its effectiveness.

Harbor Sign "Phantom Ship Harbor"
Murasa's boat, one of the best and worst escape mechanisms in the game. Against an enemy team with limited sources of spell damage, a Murasa with a maxed boat has more or less free reign to fly around the map unhindered. However, should the enemy team have good ranged burst damage, the boat can become a liability, as the slow from crashing is crippling.

The Partyboat

Murasa's boat can load in allied heroes, further expanding the ganking potential of the boat. For example, a Kogasa using her Ultimate can be loaded into the boat, only to be unloaded into a group of enemy heroes, stunning them for 4 seconds only to be cut down by the boat riders. Another interesting property of boat is that Alice can command her dolls while inside the boat. She cannot, however, command her Shanghai Dolls to use the train ability. To load allied heroes into the boat, both Murasa and allied heroes must share control with each other.

Team Options
As mentioned earlier, Kogasa has excellent synergy with Murasa. She can be loaded into the boat for an AoE stun on demand, Murasa can hook targets into the AoE of her ult, and her armour reduction aura allows Murasa to deal some serious DPS to whoever she can hit.

Other heroes that support Murasa well are any heroes with a reliable slow or disable. Murasa has excellent damage while her Spinach is active, but she has poor sustained chasing ability. With the support of a hero like Sanae, Murasa will probably be able to kill any hero in the early or mid game before her Spinach wears off.

Item Options
What items Murasa should get depends greatly on her team composition, and in addition to that, the role she plays within her team. For instance, a roaming solo Murasa would require items to slow or stun the opponent so as to land hits, while a Murasa who sticks with her team and functions as a disable follow-up in the mid-game could instead get damage items.

Solo Roam Murasa

The life of a captain is an arduous one, especially if you choose to sail the seas alone. Without allies to cover for Murasa's inherent disadvantages, she must compensate with items, and even then, she will often face difficulties in killing targets with escapes. When roaming and ganking alone, items such as Good Girl Cards are essential, as landing hits otherwise would be close to impossible. In the solo roam, Murasa should forgo rushing for damage items and instead get items like Magician's Hat. HOWEVER, if you do choose to use the hookspots, you may choose to get damage items as they aren't going to be able to run.

Murasa with Slow/Stun Support

If you're lucky enough to find yourself in a team with good slows or stuns, you can turn your eyes toward items like Watermelon Blade, Nice Boat and their ilk. Watermelon blade is particularly potent on Murasa due to the massive physical damage she's packing, getting a blade in the mid-game can allow Murasa to kill particularly fragile heroes in three hits after Spinach.

A word of caution to all Murasa players rushing for the Nice Boat: the cleave damage from Spinach is separate from Murasa's attack and as such, it is not multiplied on a critical hit.