Maokai rework instead of nerfs? 7.4

I was thinking cut down his mana pool by a huge margin and mana items only give him a small percentage of the actual mana, and buff his passive so thats the most important thing in his kit. When you pick Maokai you pick him into a bruiser like Kennen that has to use abilities to be effective in lane, picture him kinda like Swain, and GP (a mixture) the mini-game is are you gonna let him auto you, let him sap u to get all his health and mana back. Are u gonna kite back and play it right? Is his passive up is he gonna sap a minion? How much can he tank with it? Hes still a vanguard his damage is no longer kinda situational its super situational. He needs to use his abilities with utter precision at his highest level of play.

Sap magic is now sap essence you leech a large amount of mana and health from your enemy when you hit a champ a small amount when you hit a minion. Twisted Advance is a skill shot or has shorter range so playing around aa'ing for a full sap isn't so easy Maybe Sapling Toss can now be a Lissandra glacial path or it takes a while for maokai to be able to travel to it or it roots itself and becomes an actual ward. Or maybe put it on a ward and it has a unique interaction. Maybe now his ult takes a percentage of mana relative to his current pool.

Its all about the auto maybe you can't keep your ult on your squishy adc anymore because you need to auto for mana because you can't keep using your ult with your small mana pool that barely scales. You have a hard time leveling tear because you can't just spam abilities.

This also gives him the high skill play you want in your tank rework. I feel like its a good idea, but I can't test it in a high elo environment, because I'm not there. I do understand that this is a very conceptual idea and it might not be good but I'd at least like to know what you guys thought of it.

I'm Silver 4 rn so you know this could be a heavily flawed idea. I was watching the 7.4 PBE changes, you know, what might go down in a couple weeks. I was like damn you guys are gonna nerf him into the background I was thinking maybe just rework him early instead of just putting him aside for a month or two, or work on him bit by bit, see how it goes. I just don't want to see Maokai out of the meta when I think his archetype has a lot of leeway and I know you guys have a lot on your plate but I just wanted to put something out there because I play mostly marksmen and Maokai is one of the few champs I enjoy playing because I like his lore and his play-style. Not because people don't know how to play around a regenerative wall in low elo.