What if Veigar...
What if Veigar's Q had a mana burn effect, or scaled in addition to the enemies current/max mana? That way he'll be a true anti-mage, and won't get rolled as hard by AD mids.
Thoughts?
2 Comments
Aren't the main AD mids in the game manaless?
Also - mana burn has design issues.
First - the main goal of mana burn is to silence a foe. With the rate of MP/5 in LoL, you're looking at up to a ~40 second silence in some cases. Even if you just burned away the last 15 mana a champion needs to cast their ult and you silence them for 8 seconds, if there aren't 8 second silences in-game as-is, there probably shouldn't be mana burn.
Secondly - mana burn doesn't really feel that interesting or rewarding to actually use. It's pretty difficult to actually see what it's doing, making it feel pretty unrewarding to use. And even if you do silence a foe for ~15 seconds, it's difficult to tell what abilities you're disabled and when that's happened when you're burning mana, leading to a pretty anti-climactic application of power. However, you'll Reallly feel it when mana-burn silences you playing against it, and constantly feel the pressure applied against your mana reserves when facing it.
Which is actually pretty different from most mechanics. Skillshots are pretty solid to play with and against in many cases - the payoff and success indication is really obvious and they'res no confusion, and dodging skillshots in of itself can feel rather satisfying. Noob Nidalee wasted like, 400 mana chucking missed spears.
When you're talking about mana-burn, it's more a slow-acting disease with a very endurance-heavy game you're playing, and it just isn't obvious what good your really doing with it.
Third - most of the champions that actually burn through mana pretty fast have the most range of any champions in the game through their ability poke. 
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What mana burn forces to utalize optimally for that 40 second silence end-goal is put you in a poke-war, regaldess of how it's applied. You want to slowly whittle through 2501000 mana until you're opnent is empty.
And you know what champions will slap the taste out of your mouth in a poke war? The ones that like itemizing for mana, the ones you'd actually want to use mana burn against when reading "mana burn - burns mana".
So - that's a fairly big issue in clarity of purpose, and kind of a trap. On this note - Veigar isn't an anti-mage due to his poke potential or endurance runs, it's because he'll obliterate them in an all-for-nothing ham fest, which is the exact opposite play-style of burning mana.
That way he'll be a true anti-mage,
Fourth: Just as mana-burn being good against mana is missleading, so is this. It takes longer to burn a champion to 0 mana if they itemized for more mana. Burning 100 mana from a Ryze means something entirely different than burning 100 mana from a Nasus. The more mana a champion has, the more they don't care about you burning their mana reserves. They've got reserves of their reserves, which added to the poke-war aspect: actually makes mana-burn awful against mages, as it mostly pushes one into playing to a mage's strengths rather than exploiting their weaknesses, which isn't anti-mage so much as makes mages your anti when trying to use mana burn.
Fifth: where mana burn shines is the exact same circumstance that Teemo uses to be Teemo. Poking bruisers to death while staying at range and weakening their retaliation options if they actually manage to get to him. Champions that don't itemize for mana/mana sustain and who are weak to getting poked down are the ones mana-burn would actually be good against. Nothing exactly wrong with dealing with bruisers, but it should be a mechanic called something like "%armor penetration" to get the idea accross, mana-burn doesn't emediatly bring "bruiser buster" to mind.
With the massive design issue of mana-burn feeling pretty unrewarding to actually use and awful to face off against, I don't see adding it to anything in LoL going to live. Also - being called mana-burn is super misleading in what it actually does.
Jeah, he should get something, he is not good as he is now.