Riot should just do away with mana as a resource all together.

iainB85·Jan 31, 2015·5 votes·677 views

Take a page from Dawngate (RIP) and come up with a resource on a champ by champ basis that limits the champion's abilities in a meaningful way. It's clear that having mana, energy, and resourcless types of champions is extremely hard to balance.

Instead of constantly juggling a resource like mana for all types of roles against champions with no resources at all (or energy), just do away with mana and mana regen items, and gate each champion's abilities in a way that makes sense.

You'll never have a large number of champions viable competitively until you make some sort of change like this.

9 Comments

SlackerboyTCJan 31, 20153 votes

I agree I made a post similar to this not too long ago, mana should just go away, its not working anymore with the creation of energy based characters

iainB85Jan 31, 20151 votes

Voting without a comment is a crime!

Dock With MeJan 31, 20151 votes

They balance it based off resources. id hate to play against a syndra if she didnt have mana. infinite balls is a terrible idea. mana management on a champ like that is a must, and makes decision making on where to place a ball fundamental to the early game. where katarina can snowball, but can be shut down in the early game really easily.

if they got rid of a resource on someone like syndra, she couldnt be a nuke champ, they'd have to drastically lower her damage. champions with resources vs champions without give pros and cons to every match up.

SlackerboyTCJan 31, 20152 votes

{quoted}

They balance it based off resources. id hate to play against a syndra if she didnt have mana. infinite balls is a terrible idea. mana management on a champ like that is a must, and makes decision making on where to place a ball fundamental to the early game. where katarina can snowball, but can be shut down in the early game really easily.

if they got rid of a resource on someone like syndra, she couldnt be a nuke champ, they'd have to drastically lower her damage. champions with resources vs champions without give pros and cons to every match up.

She could have something in place to make it less op. The way dawngate did it was absolutely perfect, nobody felt underpowered or too powerful either

iainB85Jan 31, 20151 votes

{quoted}

They balance it based off resources. id hate to play against a syndra if she didnt have mana. infinite balls is a terrible idea. mana management on a champ like that is a must, and makes decision making on where to place a ball fundamental to the early game. where katarina can snowball, but can be shut down in the early game really easily.

if they got rid of a resource on someone like syndra, she couldnt be a nuke champ, they'd have to drastically lower her damage. champions with resources vs champions without give pros and cons to every match up.

Nah, certain champions like Syndra can still have a "mana-like" resource to limit the amount they can cast and can't just infinitely spam spells.

http://dawngate.gamepedia.com/Amarynth

Amarynth uses Spirit to cast her abilities. Amarynth regenerates 6% (increased by total Cooldown Reduction) Spirit per 5 seconds, scaling with total Cooldown Reduction.

An example of that in Dawngate. She had spirit that made it so she had to pick and choose when to use abilities. If she just aimlessly spammed them then she'd be waiting for her spirit to regenerate for a bit as a cost for the mistake. Syndra could be the same way.

chumblerJan 31, 20151 votes

Or, the actually good solution, everybody needs to use mana.

iainB85Jan 31, 20151 votes

{quoted}

Or, the actually good solution, everybody needs to use mana.

That would make it more easy to balance, but I really liked the way they did it in Dawngate -- it doesn't make sense for every type of champion to share the same sort of resource.

If you get away from that mentality and just gate the champion's abilities in a way that makes sense for that kit, then you can create way more balanced champions.

Then you can balance items way better too because you don't have worry about "resource regeneration" for every type of role through itemization.

iainB85Feb 1, 20151 votes

Shameless saturday night bump because upvotes with no comments.

Besides the massive undertaking of the project, I really feel like this is something Riot needs to do.

If not, we'll forever see complaints about Zed and Lee Sin whenever they are statistically viable. The only way in the current system to "balance" these champions is just to flat out nerf their base stats until they are extremely bad (see Yasuo).