@Riot Some thoughts of mana items for manaless champion

leakinb·Mar 10, 2018·1 votes·181 views

AP AD Tanks/ bruisers

There are many items that are usable for the above champ but you have to waste gold to buy for the unwanted mana Such as etc This makes their itemization with much limitations

Suggestion:

Why not create a small rune in sorcery that can transfer mana to AD/AP/defensive stat/cdr/utility?

Purchase the item in original price and refund a little portion of gold (May be 150 gold for 250 mana) over time

Any other suggestions guys*[slayer-jinx-wink]*

4 Comments

ModKnightsKemplarMar 10, 20182 votes

I see what you're getting at, but I don't ultimately think it's a good idea.

Manaless champs are designed with those item limitations in mind, and undoing them wouldn't be good for the game overall, imo. It can definitely be frustrating when you want to build iceborn on shen or garen, but you can always just grab frozen mallet instead. I think it's more work than the payoff could justify.

Dokueki KenshinMar 10, 20181 votes

I think that if you either make it a Keystone, or if you simply keep the conversion very small, this idea could still be serviceable. It’d be nice to not have to gut a build’s gold efficiency just because we don’t have mana.

ModKnightsKemplarMar 10, 20182 votes

But then that keystone would still require you to build mana on a manaless champ to make use of it. right?

That doesn't sound any better to me; that sounds like a keystone that 1 or 2 champs will be able to make use of, and the rest will ignore. It's going backwards from the point of runes to do that.

If you're designing the game around manaless champions, that makes sense, but that isn't a overall sensible way to design the game, ultimately. These champs were designed without mana to offer a bit of a different experience from other, similar choices. If you want that experience, there are plenty of champ with mana to choose from.

I don't see a single example up there of a champ that I think is really struggling because they can't build some certain mana item efficiently. I'd be open to changing my mind if that were the case, but even if you found such a combination, I'd probably still think that either a) that item shouldn't have mana or b) that champ shouldn't be manaless.

Dokueki KenshinMar 11, 20181 votes

To be fair, not being able to make use of a keystone is hardly a thing unique to manaless champions. Look at Garen and Aftershock, for example. He literally cannot Trigger that Keystone. I understand it’s not a 100% comparison, but not all keystones or runes are meant to be used on absolutely everyone.

And though I know that I am probably a bit rare, I can at least give you a personal example of an applicable context for such a rune: Kennen. Yes, he has an on-hit attack speed build that works wonders on him. Thing is, not only do I not personally like that build, but I’ve personally found more success building him as an AP mage.

Now, I will preface this by saying I haven’t played him since the AP item update. However, having played him back from the days of the Tome of the Ancients days, the number of items that he could plausibly take in any given situation without automatically sacrificing gold efficiency kept getting chipped and chunked away as the seasons went on. About half the items are objectively worse choices in any given situation simply because of the fact that I’m playing for stats I literally can’t use. Meanwhile, any mana champion could build any of the items I build on Kennen without any inherent penalty.