Rito pls: Why resourceless champions exist?
Hello there!
I will get straight to the point (that I also made a few times in the past) - I do not understand why there are champions that use no resource at all. The only things that being resourceless accomplishes are:
- Limits counterplay against that type of champion.
- Makes balancing them harder (Riot have one less lever to work with).
I cannot see a single positive thing about resourceless champions, maybe except hollow diversity (that actually reduces diversity, but at least you can say "There are 4 types of resource champions use: Mana, energy, heat and no resource"), but that's not much of a good thing.
Now, before you get all defensive about some of resourceless champions, saying things like "But they would be useless with Mana, Energy, Whatever" - I do realize that in current form most of champions would need tweaks if resource was added to them. But please, do not forget that resourceless champions are the ones that seem to be the most troublesome as far as balancing goes. (for example - if Gnar used energy or mana then Riot could've just increase his cost on Q to limit his power instead of nerfing his damage and doing some crazy shenanigans with the Q cooldown refund increasing with his ult rank).
While I did get a short response from Morello back in pre-season about champions' resource (or lackthereof),
Sometimes, resources aren't part of the rich decision, but many cases where there's no- or a wrong resource, there's a problem. Kennen, while not OP, is very hard to balance being ranged with energy.
No plans to tackle just this, but it's a problem we agree with.
I would still love to see more of both Riot's stance on this and the opinions of both Rioters (it's important to remember that sometimes personal Rioters opinion may differ from the whole company's stance) and my fellow players.
, or health 
. I agree that champions with no casting cost tend to run amok because their ability to spam is limited only by cooldowns, which can in most cases be brought down by a pair of 
. Many of these champions have some other function in place of mana, like Fury which can be consumed by an ability like 
or to temporarily increase the champion's abilities like 
. The existence of these alternative resources would pose some logistical issues for applying a second resource, but some champions like 
have nothing.
My thought for some of these champions, .. well it is mostly centered around Riven, ... would be to grant these champions an energy source that is recharged over time, like mana/energy, and is further charged with auto attacks (Like with Shyvana, but faster). Activating abilities then consumes a portion of the resource, again like mana/energy. These resource pools would likely be smaller than mana pools, maybe even range between 0% and 100%. Using Riven for the example here, a full bar of her resource could probably grant her 5-8 uses of her abilities before she has to disengage from combat to recharge. This is where the balance comes in. If the player wants to remain in combat longer they will need to purchase items that grant attack speed. With the greater attack speed,they can get more auto attacks in more often, keeping their resource bar more full, granting them more like 10 -15 abilities in a row. This would work well to balance Riven because there aren't many items that grant a strong amount of damage and attack speed. This means the player would need to decide if they want to play a burst AD assassin or a sustained damage duelist. This idea could be tweaked using different stats for other champions depending on what their strength and weaknesses are. Basically, encourage players to make a choice. They can adopt the more balanced play style, or play them closer to the way they can now, but on a time limit. ... If you really think about it, mana champions have this same option.