The thing that has bothered me since S6 started

Is that mana problems have never been addressed for casting based laners. In fact they have even kind of pidgeon holed mid laners even further into mana issues.

It is the sole reason people like and (pre-rework) have been so dominant. Unless you stack and get , you have to wait out your mana issues until post-6 when often its too late. It's the reason went from top tier in S3-4 to one of the worst picks currently. It also caused people like who are more focused on innate mana regen over mana pool to explode in strength. Almost all of the champs that are really good right now have: low costs, no mana, good sustain, or stupid amounts of damage building it or not.

I mean how do you kill Zed the proper way (poke him down) if you can't cast enough spells because you are mana gated using a champ meant to poke. Ziggs used to be one of the top counters. used to be pretty high up on that list too.

Sure now we have , but I feel like it is meant for people who already have the advantage in lane. And with the buffs to jungle items, often feels pretty lack luster.

Let's just look at . It went from + to + . So now you have to wait longer for your AP when you really need that mana to poke. Sure, its a shorter wait to finish the item, but the AP takes longer to get to by about 3 minion waves. 90s is a long time to delay a power spike compared to about 50s.

The biggest thing I don't understand, is that Riot said they are reworking mages, but they technically just did that around summer time. They redid AP itemization to make it smoother and cleaner as well as better overall, but instead we got a bunch of items (that for the most part are better) but screwed over spam casters even harder than they had been when mana regen was converted from a flat value to a % and mana regen values were tweaked.

Note: I do not hate Zed, I just feel like his counter play has slowly been removed from the game (I have been around since S3 where he was kind of an eh pick). He is strong due to everything else around him being drastically changed, and Riot seems to kind of ignore him because of their reworks.