The Major Issues With the Mage Itemization Changes We've Seen

There have been a fair number of people on the boards, Rioters included, that have said that mages should have to manage their mana. It really does introduce a great game play prospect. When mana matters, mages can be extremely impactful in concentrated moments, making them ideal game changers. That power becomes reachable specifically because making mistakes will quickly exhaust a mage's capability to make that sort of impact unless they back off to the fountain.

Mana currently doesn't live up to that standard fully. It is harshly limiting in the early game, but the extreme focus mana items have on solving only mana problems starts to quickly remove the pressure on a mage's bar. It's not nearly as bad as it was in prior seasons, and the overly harsh early game restriction was amended slightly with the season's early changes, but we still never reach that feeling of mana being fair, but restrictive. Mana management also doesn't really have any interactive features. It's incredibly passive.

The mage itemization changes seek to address this issue. High regen is restricted in favor of pushing flat mana allotments for mages to bottom out on. It has the potential to allow for bigger windows of 100% mage activity, but adds a far harsher penalty for reaching that low mana threshold without granting yourself the opportunity to retreat to base.

So what's the problem that everyone seems to notice? This newfound look to improve the skill requirement of the game is being established in a vacuum. We've been assured that the resources for this stint of reworks will not span to the length that was given to ADCs, and not every AP champion will be touched. A few may be reworked with the full intention of synergizing well with these changes if possible, but we know for certain that there will be a large number of champions left behind.

Adding to this vacuum issue, it's the one case where players have been expressing that Riot has been player coddling that actually is getting addressed. Mobility is perhaps the most hilariously off putting trend that gives power in virtually every aspect of the game, whether it's in offense, defense, objective acquisition, map pressure, or simply retroactively repairing a major mistake. It's not going to be tackled. At this point, it can't be because the level of work it would take to curb the mobility already in the game is outright astronomical. And this latches right on to the health of mana when other champions, who don't even always need to expend a meaningful resource (or at least not much of one) to dash or blink, can avoid being punished for bad positioning. Hextech Rocket Belt seems to be the chosen answer for immobile mages, simply giving them mobility anyway, but even at 300 range it seems almost implausible for that item to ever make it to live.

Meanwhile, lifesteal is another blight on this game that, albeit being easier to curb, isn't being addressed. The sustain from lifesteal right now is honestly incredible, again being a mechanic that patches up problems after the fact (and in this case passively). And it is directly at odds with the throughput of mana. As an AP champion, lifesteal is just another excessive throughput issue; you either kill them outright or you've shot yourself in the foot. Your mana is exhaustible. Their lifesteal isn't. It's devaluing mana to an excessive degree, and along with targons procs (tapping into my support side here) has made bot lane sustain absolutely insane in particular.

What else makes healthy mana management a pipe dream? The existence of resourceless and short term resource champions with sustain and harass, essence Reaver easily covering mana costs for ADCs, who have a newfound value in their skills along with the ever present value of their autos, while still building strongly into DPS, armor pen being almost ubiquitous on items, defense being so accessible to ADCs and Assassins, tower's offering no sense of a safe bastion... Let's be honest here, the deck is already stacked.

Mana management has become entrenched with a number of other issues in the game that are not being addressed, and with the rate of changes being made may never be addressed. They may not be saying it eloquently, but I believe that a lot of the problems people have with these changes are that you're trying to change a keystone problem of the game and just hoping that things will line up afterward, when everyone can see that it isn't logically possible anymore. These need to be fixed in tandem, not just shoved out one at a time with a year of inactivity between each. There are going to be plenty of people saying learn to play, just manage your mana, get good, etc without any actual perspective on what this means for the health of the game. We've already entered an arms race between the roles vying for their relevancy. It happens in plenty of games that go on for a long while. Simply stripping a single role of it's side of the race, however, isn't going to fix things.

So we need a major talking point here. What are mages really intended to get beneficially along with the newest attempt at reigning in mana? What is going to be done to give mages an edge against these mechanics that greatly devalue mana throughput? What is the likelihood of fringe cases of poor adaptation being tackled in a timely(tm) manner?

TL;DR: Piecemeal cuffing mages with more restrictions isn't going to make the game any healthier when there are several glaring issues that need to be tackled as a system.