Peak MPS costs of some champs, or why Soraka is being reworked wrong

I wanted to investigate Soraka's issues a little more and I decided to look at it from the peak MPS costs. I mean you have to start somewhere. What is peak MPS? Well, I'm going to define it as the costs of your QWE if you keep spamming them on refresh. I'm also assuming no CDR or mana items to help with the costs or drive them up. This is a baseline.

One of the biggest complaints about Soraka was that her free E was unfair. I ran the numbers and that is not the case:

Soraka's MPS Soraka's Infuse costs 50 mana - 41 Soraka's Infuse is free - 36

So what do those numbers mean? That means it costs Soraka 41 mana per second to spam her ability. There's one important factor I didn't take into account: how her Q cools down her W's refresh. Basically I didn't want to bother with that kind of calculation and keep things simple. What this means is the numbers I've posted for Soraka are technically on the low side.

Average MPS of Selected Mid Laners Ahri - 27.80 Cass No Passive - 55.22 Cass Passive* - 63.61 Anivia - 35.80 Brand - 27.33 LeBlanc - 33.00 Lux - 27.18 Nidalee - 31.67 Syndra - 36.07 Vekkers - 19.49 Ziggs - 32.99

Okay, Vekkers comes in at the lowest. I was actually surprised how cheap his mana costs are, it's even lower than the supports I looked at. Cass aside, Syndra and Anivia (Anivia's ult not included for consistancy) have the highest MPS of the midlaners I looked at, both around 36.

Cass is a bit weird because of both her passive and how her E works. Without looking at the passive and not using her E on poisoned targets, she has a freakish high mana costs of 55. You'd think that the passive would help, and while once you get to 5 stacks it cuts costs in half, her E's cooldown is .5 seconds. I ran the numbers at 1 second cooldown (missile speed, rounding up, didn't think .5 was sustainable). Her mana costs jumped another 8 points. To anyone at riot looking to fix Cass, I'd really consider her mana costs in her QWE.

For grins, because I like Ahri I looked at her costs as she was just buffed. I did the numbers pre-buff and they were around 30. This means that as far as peak MPS is concerned a drop of about 2 can help your win rate about 2%. This is interesting and I wonder how it'll play out for other champs.

This means even if the nerfs on Soraka's E were rolled back, she'd still have the mana costs of a midlaner. Considering she is being designed as a support, this is just crazy. For those costs, I expect someone who is a mid lane mage. At least from the narrow perspective of peak MPS. For her mana costs, she is a sustained DPS mage.

So since Soraka is a support, I checked out some other supports as well to see their peak MPS.

Average MPS of Selected Supports Nami 27.26 Lulu 28.51 Sona 30.00 Leona 20.24 Zyra 26.50

Hmm.

This looks bad for riot. Most supports have a mana cost in the range of 28 MPS. Leona is low, but she rarely builds MP/5 items. Zyra is MPS cheap for a support or a mid. However considering Soraka's mana costs are about 50% more than her competitors. That's a lot. Now you have to figure she also has to get stuff like sightstones and other support things to buy.

While we all need to understand, there are a lot of balance issues at hand, I hope one thing is clear: Soraka has an extremely expensive base mana cost. Yes I know most champs shouldn't spam spells and despite being a starter champ, she's a bit noob-trappy that way. However when you look at how much does it cost to run a kit, it's pretty clear that Soraka is crazy high even if she was being called a mid-laner and not a support. Even if the mana cost on infuse were rolled back, she's still be one of the more expensive midlaners to run.

And the last thing I heard riot say on her is that she isn't a midlaner. If riot is planning on keeping her mana costs this high, at least as far as this aspect of the discussion of her balance is concerned, she needs to be retooled as a midlaner. Again, this is one aspect, but in this one aspect, her kit is screaming I'm a solo-lane champ and not a support.