Why does Draven have Mana

Im going to copy Daniel Z Klein's post on reddit. From this post, I dont see any good reason for draven to be so strongly mana gated, aside from his w. His ult costs a ton and his e and q can both drain him of mana very quickly in lane. Enough so that I have missed a kill in lane bc I couldnt cast my ult after repeated engages with my e. Here is the thread. Thoughts plz

Let's look at this idea. Spoiler warning: it's probably not a great idea unless you build something players wouldn't recognize as an ADC. What does an ADC pay mana for, typically? It tends to fall into three categories:

1. Steroids. Tristana's Q, Jinx's rockets, Kog'Maw's W.
2. Safety. Caitlyn traps/net, Lucian's E, Corki's Valkyrie.
3. Poke that extends beyond AA range. Caitlyn's Q, Ezreal's Q, Corki's... everything. Now there's two main ways you can "gate" an ability. Gating means the ability cannot always be used. You can cooldown gate or resource gate an ability. If your resource is mana, you have a "depleted" state that is meaningful for a long time and generally must be fixed by returning home (I just used a bunch of fancy words to say "you can run out of mana"). Critically, this is not true for other resource types. If you had a truly resourceless champion, like Garen or Katarina, there'd be zero resource gating. For a ninja-style energy champion, you have very temporary resource gating (I could make an argument that energy is more akin to a shared collective cooldown pool, but that's a whole different post). So let's recap before we move on. There's three types of things ADCs typically do with mana (and I'm mostly talking about base kit here), and there's two ways you can make sure those things don't just happen all the time. The question becomes, is cooldown gating sufficient for ADCs? Steroids lead to interesting window-based play. Tristana's Rapid Fire is where most of her power lives, so if you can wait for her to use it, you have a 20s window where she's appreciably weaker. If you're a tanky bruiser and you want to tango with Kog'Maw, you can wait for him to burn his Bio-Arcane Barrage and then aggress on him when he has way less percent health damage. And if you play both of these champions, you'll already know what the conclusion here is: yes, steroids can be sufficiently cooldown gated. We've said as much by completely removing the mana cost from these two abilities. It gets much more difficult with safety abilities. I'm going to be looking mostly at the laning phase here. Mana does have a function post laning phase, but it changes ever so subtly. It's cleaner in the lane, so let's focus on that. Safety abilities are abilities that allow an ADC to get out of dodge when they need to. Let's disregard soft safety abilities like traps and slows and focus on hard safety abilities, like dashes and blinks and stealth. Due to the nature of bot lane, the enemy can only aggress on you every so often. They have cooldowns and resources too, plus they need to focus on CSing. Let's say realistically the enemy can't meaningfully aggress on you more than 1-2 times a minute. So if I wanted to give them meaningful windows where your safety spells aren't up, I'd need to start looking at 40+ second cooldowns for those spells. At this point, there is no way in hell you'd ever use these spells for anything BUT escaping, what with them having near ult-level cooldowns. This would make champions like Ezreal, Tristana, or Corki much more boring: all of a sudden they'd have one less tool to be aggressive. In short, you'd never shift forward. This is where mana gating becomes very meaningful. Yes, you can Arcane Shift every 19s if you like, but it costs 90 mana. Rank 1 Q costs 28 mana. This means you do actually pay a meaningful long term price for being safe. The enemy may not get a kill for aggressing on you, and the window of E being down may be too short for them to kill you in it, but they did force a meaningful amount of mana out of you and have ever so slightly adjusted the power balance in lane. This is good and healthy for the game! It's possible to imagine safety abilities on a resourceless ADC / an energy based ADC, but they would be very boring abilities indeed. They'd have massively long cooldowns and no offensive incentivization so as not to trick players into using them the wrong way. While safety abilities were a little more difficult to imagine in a mana-less world, category 3 is where it becomes full on impossible. Let's start with why ADCs have poke abilities at all. The best way to do this is to look at ADCs without poke abilities and see if we can spot a difference. We'll look at Draven and Tristana. Draven does have stand aside, which extends beyond his attack range, but I'll discount it as a poke ability. Its cooldown is too long and its damage too low. It's a setup--a slow that then allows you to go full Draven on their asses. Tristana does not have a poke ability at all. She can possibly splash some damage on a bad enemy player who stands next to low health minions or next to a turret with her explosive charge on it, but that's that. What this means is that this class of ADC becomes very binary. They're either within engagement range (their AA range) and can trade damage, or they're not and they can't. Tristana gets around this with her passive; as the game progresses, her engagement range gradually grows. Draven... Draven does not get around this. Draven either outstats you super hard if he's mastered his axe catching loop, or he straight up loses to you. (Little Volty aside: Volty, the designer behind Draven, was one of the more accomplished and experienced champion designers on the team when I started, and we all learned a shit ton from him. So when I say this is a Volty champion pattern, I'm not making fun of him. I'm describing a pattern I see in his champions, and clearly it is a pattern that can work super well, as many of his champions have been mostly untouched since release and are still amongst the most popular champions ever. Look at Vayne, Leona, or Maokai. But yes, this is a Volty pattern: you're all in, all of the time. Both Leona and Diana have move blocks that only work toward the enemy. Vayne's passive makes her run faster at the enemy. Draven's movement speed steroid becomes really strong only if you're juggling axes off the enemy's face. So when two of the ADCs that have no poke beyond their AA range were designed by Volty, I think it's fair to say that not having this kind of poke leads to a Volty pattern.) With poke beyond your AA range, you have a spectrum of aggression. The closer you get, the easier it becomes to land your skill shots, so you can either poke from the safety of max range and very rarely hit anything, or get up close and personal and use your poke as additional damage. Now let's look at how we gate poke. For poke to be relevant to a gameplay loop, it needs to be a persistent low level threat. You can't have a 30s spell that hits like a Veigar ult and call that poke. At this point you just have an unreliable nuke. So low cooldowns are a must. Cooldown gating is out the window. This already removes poke as an option for resourceless champions. Observe how Katarina's Q was much reduced in potency and half the damage loaded into followup (which requires putting yourself in harm's way). Gnar's Q is tuned to be very dodgeable and does not penetrate far through minions, and even given those restrictions still starts out at a 20s cooldown. Even the amount of cooldown refund you get from catching it scales with rank in R. All of these are tuned to make sure he doesn't get free poke forever in lane. Remember release Rek'Sai and the AP builds because Prey Seeker had a 100% AP ratio and could basically be spammed? It's a little different with energy champions; both Zed and Kennen have a poke on their Q, but both of their kits are built around either requiring followup (Kennen wants to hit-confirm with his Q to build stacks and follow up with AA / ult / speed form to proc a stun) or setup (Zed's Q costs 3/4 of his energy bar at rank 1, still more than half the bar at rank 5, unless you have a shadow out that hits the same target). So let's pull back and look at what we learned: Poke is what softens the success profile of an ADC. Allowing the ADC to do meaningful damage sometimes from outside of the range where the enemy can unload 100% of their damage allows for fallback patterns and gradual success, rather than the Volty pattern of "I all-in you and one of us dies". (To be fair, both Vayne and Draven do have an "abort" button, but they do tend to use it early and aggressively). Poke cannot be cooldown gated. Meaningful poke cannot exist on resourceless champions. Even on an energy-based champion, poke needs to be otherwise gated or it brings the entire pattern to a grinding hold. So let's further pull out. What have we learned? ADCs use mana for steroids, safety, and poke Steroids are a-ok! They can live on a resourceless champ! Safety is difficult. On a manaless champ, safety spells would be long CD with no offensive use case. Poke is right out. So if you wanted a manaless ADCs, you'd end up with a poke-less ADC with two effective offensive buttons, neither of which is poke. If you'd ever be forced to use your defensive ability in lane, you'd have to play back and lose CS for a pretty long time. In return, you could probably outlast the enemy ADC in lane and partially make up for the CS disadvantage that way, and you could sit and posture around neutral objectives forever without running out of mana. In short, I don't think we will make a manaless ADC, unless a better designer than me (pretty much all of them) can think of solutions to the problems I stated.