A not so brief, hyperbole laden musing on ability resources (and Mana in particular)
But first, context:
I've spent the months between New Sion hitting the PBE and now playing an uncomfortable amount of Dawngate, and came back because Dawngate's closing, and because the map redo gave me some cautious optimism that's mostly paying off. Also, because Rek'Sai is basically a Godzilla scorpion and I am so stoked for that.
The important thing to bring up here is that Dawngate, for the most part, didn't use resources on it's abilities save for cooldowns, and when it DID use resources, it made those resources at the core of the character. The energy-equilivent champs were heavy brawler types who needed to be in a fight to use their abilities because playing safe denied them their main source of resource recovery. The rage-equivilent champs used rage not to CAST, but to fuel interesting mechanics. The health casters not only had a way to get the health they spent BACK, but also had abilities that hinged on their current health, and also didn't necessarily need to bleed for every single spell. And the bulk of the characters just HAD no resource. The one character with something close to mana had it's regeneration scale off her CDR, and had mana because the rate at which she could chain spells was frankly INSANE.
The long and short of it was, for the past several months, the game I was playing made the resources I had to play with matter the whole game through, and if a resource didn't accomplish anything, it simply wasn't needed.
I bring this up, because when coming back to League, I found myself having to worry about mana again at the start of each game, and between that and various discussions on the boards made me ponder a question, and the best way to get an answer is to actually ask.
So, with that in mind, let's get to my point: why the hell is mana a thing in League?
Historically, I know the answer: because DOTA Allstars had it, because Defense of the Ancients had it, because Defense of the Ancients was a mod of a Blizzard RTS, and because those have it. But that's a terrible answer from a design perspective because Blizzard RTS's have it for a reason that doesn't really apply to this genre. Also, from a practical standpoint, historical precedent has a hard time making real progress: we get too hung up on what's already happened!
Blizzard RTS's have a mana-equivilent on specific units, who's abilities are massively battlefield altering. Specialist units like the Science Vessel (warning: the only Blizzard RTS I've played much of is Starcraft 1; my references are outdated), who you produce specifically to use those abilities. Those abilities are EXPENSIVE, because things like stopping time or poisoning a whole army ought to be, and that resource takes a while to recharge. So, if you need to poison things again, you either wait for the resource to recharge, which happens SLOOOOOOOWLY, especially when one considers that abilities like that often take up something absurd like half the damn mana bar, or you build another, which is expensive, and could go to things like your main effect forces. Tanks and planes and stuff. In short, the things that use mana in Blizzard RTS's aren't meant to be your main effect force. They're specialists. They set up for the main effect force to do their thing. That doesn't WORK in League, because quite frankly, the champions are the main effect force in a game of League, and designing a champion that's only supposed to use their abilities very sparingly, but to great effect, would create a boring champion. Sorry, doing stuff is fun. Doing stuff every four minutes or so, less fun.
Hell, a lot of games that generally use mana use it for reasons that don't apply to League, or in situations that don't apply in league. Old school Final Fantasy esque RPGs use it because most of the challenge comes from attrition: gotta save the good stuff for the big bad. Problem is, in League, the big bad marched to the front line to shoot you in the face: attrition isn't a thing when you get to the big bad! Action RPGs like Diablo and Torchlight use it to limit ability spam, but use it in conjunction with the fact that mana restoration is cheap (like, cheap as in free in a lot of cases), plentiful, and FAST, and none of these things apply to a blue potion on the Rift.
It doesn't help that a lot of the times, mana stops really being an issue once laning phase is over, since by then, the mana pools are so much larger that using an ability is basically just a drop in the bucket as far as the pool is concerned, and a good half of the champs can get Athene's Unholy Grail without being derided as a troll. The only characters I can think of who have to worry about mana late game are Swain, Anivia, and Maokai, who have to sustain big togglable ults, and Kassadin and Kog'Maw, whose ults gets retarded expensive in a hurry if they chain it. Ryze has a mana scaling, but not really a mana PROBLEM: his abilities aren't dramatically more expensive than anyone else's. Karthus isn't in dire straits manawise either, given his W's passive.
What's more, with a tiny subset of exceptions (specifically, Renekton, Aatrox, Gnar, Tryndamere, Rumble, and Rengar), the resource decision feels entirely arbitrary. At best, you can make the case that the energy champs have an ideal combo that takes advantage of their situational energy regain, but I'm struggling to come up with a defense for mana. All it accomplishes from where I sit is it that it keeps certain persistent abilities from becoming completely oppressive, and it makes the early game passive, tedious, and boring, because no one wants to run out of mana trying something that might not result in a kill, because it's failure condition isn't 'eh, didn't work', it's 'crap, that didn't work and now I can't try again without either going back or waiting several minutes'.
I'm aware stripping mana out of the game entirely would require a lot of work at a lot of levels, and that if we just did a quick 'make abilities free' change, a lot of champs would get really crazy really fast, but for the most part, switching to a manaless default would be better for the game as a whole, for two reasons.
A : It's make the decision of 'how does a Champion pay for their abilities' a meaningful discussion in the design phase of a character, and a good place to decide a character's playstyle.
B : It'd make the start of the game way more active and fun, since with free abilities comes a more active, constant jockey for position, instead of a passive preparation phase.
Abilities should have a cost for a better reason than, 'My daddy had to pay to breathe, and his daddy had to pay to breathe, and by god, I don't want to breathe for free!', and given how much focus Champion design has put on characters' designs being cohesive, it's odd that the resource discussion never seems to last longer than a few seconds for most champs. Further, it seems weird that, for all the focus on interplayer interaction we hear about, the games default is to put a giant blue WALL around it at the start of the game.
Maybe I'm talking out of my ass, but I stand by the thesis that historical precedent is a terrible justification for anything, especially in preseason, when the chance to really shake things up is presenting itself, and people are JUMPING on it, so while we're in preseason, let's talk about some fundamentals, and discuss some potentially really basic questions.
TL;DR : Is there a better reason than historical precedent for mana to be the default thing? Is there a good alternative to mana being the default thing?
