I think its time to bring some spell vamp items to even out the playing field for mages. Swain is practically useless without some bonus spell vamp and vlad is just a sad vlad without it. AD champions are rewarded by building lifesteal with their primary stats being attached to it be it ad or attack speed. Either give all mages innate spell vamp or give us an item that can help us sustain in lane like any ad champ has access to.
Ravenous hunter
They actually had a good rationale in whittling spell vamp practically out of the game, here’s basically what it was:
ADCs have 100% uptime on their damage because it’s auto attacks so lifesteal makes sense (ADCs and lifesteal being too impactful is a conversation for another thread btw)
Abilities however, are gated by cooldowns so meaningful spellvamp came from either High damage burst spells or slowly with DoT/low cooldown spells (which usually are low-ish on damage).
While the latter was “healthy”, riot did NOT like the burst healing a mage or AP assassin could achieve with spellvamp. It made trading back with burst (their intended weakness) a difficult option.
This is not my opinion, it’s a paraphrasing of riot’s 2016 MYMU when spellvamp was removed from items
