Who did Manaflow Band Actually help?
I've been playing around with the new Manaflow band since it game out, and Here's what I'm noticing:
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It didn't affect Mages much at all. The average Mana recovered has been about the same.
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Low Mana Cost spammers like
Can now effectively go Mana-Item-less. No. I'm not kidding. Ezreal's strongest kit atm starts him on 
, because Manaflow band heals his Mana more than he consumes. (Same reason 
was reworked and Jungle Ezreal caused a Q nerf in post Season 7) -
Tank/Stackers like
Never have to recall anymore. They can indefinitely have mana now, which means they can just push objectives and sustain the entire game (I do it on myself, because Ornn has the most imbalanced Mana Costs vs Mana Gain in the game. The new Manaflow Band fixes all this problems, and never has to recall. Can fast pace to level 13 without ever visiting a fountain, as long as I don't die; I have a 67% Ornn win rate, even in this hyper nerfed version of him, and a lot has to do with the Manaflow Band change).
All the change did was create the same problems that the old Meditation did: It made Adcs and Tanks's use of Mana behave like Mages.
You know what's ironic about that? To compensate for adcs and tanks not building mana regen items, Riot gave most of them over double the BASE mana regen of mages. This means...... while mages have to struggle for mana or buy the right items/hold the right runes, Tanks/Adcs generally get more mana for doing less.
The TLDR: It's enabling champs which already have other strengths to completely abandon their weaknesses and completely become well rounded with no weakness to exploit.
or 
Mid can occasionally have a problem stacking because it's 2 long range mages who have an inability to poke each other regularly, but even there it's not hard, and there we're talking pretty much about mages.
That always has mana can produce 1v5's 3 times as often. It's him running out of mana that makes him manageable once he's on 5 bleed stacks or high level.
and 
or 
Even then the only one you could arguably take is Ultimate hat because the other option is a magic damage shield. Which you could argue should be in the resolve tree along with a physical damage one.
