What if Unholy Grail was only for spam casting?
So the primary problem with Athene's and the reason it was nerfed, i think, was because it does too much. In ye olden days, it gave 80 AP, 40 MR, 20% CDR, a bunch of magic regen and both its passive. This made it a decent offensive buy, a decent defensive buy, a great CDR buy and a great mana based buy. They nerfed out its stats but it was still a mandatory rush buy on mana champs because it offered defense, offense, and spamsss.
So, what if Athene's was a primarily spam-casting item. Or a defensive/spam casting item.
Basically (sample numbers):
- 20% Cooldown Reduction
- 40 Magic Resist (Maybe 30 instead)
- 125% Bonus Mana Regeneration
- **Unique Passive: ** Recover 8% of missing mana every 5 seconds.
- **Unique Passive: ** Recover 12% of max mana on champion kill or assist.
This keeps it a defensive buy and also adds a lot of mana regeneration allowing heavy mana cost characters like Lux or Ziggs to have access to near infinite casting-- in exchange for a near 3k drop. Without the AP on the item, it's much easier to control how the item is used and its power levels without having to finetune multiple champions. Now champions can choose between the spam casting ability and defense of Athene's or the inferior mana maintenance item Morello's in exchange for damage, utility, and a good unique passive.
This doesn't begin to address the huge disparity between mana champs and non-mana champs but at least it permits people to choose the degree to which mana acts as a gate (and have to balance their power levels around that).

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no one would get it without ap, either u plan on shorter fights and manage you mana, going
, but you surely won't sacrifice a slot for no ap and poor much defens