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Mana depletion after teamfights: an analysis and a proposal

Gooberp·3/19/2015, 2:59:31 AM·15 votes·1,928 views

Everyone should be aware of the severe mana problems mages are facing at present, a result of Riot's attempt to make the concept of mana as a depletable resource relevant in Season 5. While the starvation mages have in lane is problematic and has flushed all previous ideas of lane counters down the toilet while people relearn mana management, I think this can be attended to by general numbers tweaking and other things the Balance team is already focusing on. This thread is not about in-lane mana management.

While I believe it is important that mana be a depletable resource in order to force players to make better decisions about what to spend mana on rather than blindly tossing orbs and spears and pulses and rays haphazardly until one sticks, I think that the proper rebalancing of mana for laning and for teamfights has highlighted another issue with mana as a resource that has until now been relatively unimportant. Specifically, resource depletion after teamfights.

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From a design standpoint, energy resource champions ought to have the highest efficiency of impact-to-energy-consumed for a given engagement, because energy costs are very high relative to their maximum, and energy regenerates relatively slowly while in a fight, giving them poor longevity and forcing energy to be the limiting factor on how many/what spells are cast, rather than cooldowns. While all of the energy champions have energy-recovering mechanics, we can see this facet best with examples of Shen and Kennen. After they both use their combos at the beginning of teamfights, they have significantly less impact the longer the fight drags on; Shen has to choose between Q, W, and E, and Kennens that fail to land a Q have lost a substantial amount of energy, damage, and their recovery mechanic. In brief, energy champions frontload their value (e.g. most of Kennen's power budget is in his R) to compensate for their weakness with sustained fighting. (to preclude counter-arguments, Akali is in the same boat; the delays between her ability uses extend the timeframe but not the resource costs of her output; she will still hit her "wall" and will be gated by energy instead of CDs.)

From a design standpoint, resourceless champions ought to have the lowest impact per ability usage, because they expend only cooldowns to do so. Most resourceless champions have higher CDs and lower damage for abilities for this reason, and scale extremely well with CDR. Katarina is the exception in that her reset mechanic forces her to have low CD, even lower damage abilities to limit frequency of resets and also the impact of each reset on her damage output. In contrast with energy-using champions, they must have less value in their kits, because power budget goes into "resourceless." However, their value in a fight is constant from start to finish: regardless if a teamfight lasts 10 seconds or 60, DrMundo Aatrox Garen etc. will always have the same CC or DPS. (excluding R abilities blah blah 1/fight blah) In brief, resourceless champions have the same value at all times, gated by CDs and scaling with CDR.

From a design standpoint, mana-using champions ought to fall somewhere in between. Similarly to resourceless champions, they are primarily gated by CDs, and we can see that the vast majority of mages rush 40% CDR for this reason. Their mana pools are generally large, but replenish much much more slowly than they are consumed, causing them to eventually deplete. Just like energy-using champions, this provides them a "fight duration wall" after which their value sharply declines as they become gated by mana instead of CDs. Unlike energy-using champions, because the "mana wall" is very long into a fight, it is usually not seen in teamfights: rather, the "mana wall" arises in siege and poke situations, and while in lane, because of the high amount of time devoted to these situations without recalling.

It is important that mana depletes. Mana-using champions are allotted higher value-per-spell than resourceless champions because their spells cost mana. To not run out of mana eventually makes them strictly superior to resourceless champions, a situation that we saw in Season 4, and that Riot attempted to fix with the mana regen changes. Mana needs to deplete in very extended engagements such as laning and sieging in order to discourage unhealthy activities such as spamming abilities on cooldown until a lucky hook lands and breaks the siege. However, mana-using champions have lower value-per-spell than energy-using champions because their "resource wall" is not reached in the duration of most teamfights. This is of course intentional in order to promote counterplay: energy champions try to limit themselves to very short trades and engagements, and mana champions will want to provoke a lengthy engagement.

The major issue that arises as a result of the interaction between the various resources is that of post-fight resource depletion. Regardless of how successful a given team was or how long an engagement lasted, the simple fact is that mana-using champions are at a strong disadvantage afterward. This is because mana regen has been balanced for laning and sieging situations, the primary inherent weakness of mana-users, but mana-users also suffer a problem the other resource(less) champions do not: complete depletion.

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Suppose three different team comps: all mana-users, all energy-users, and all resourceless champs. The timeframe of a teamfight between them is that the energy-users have a strong start then quickly fall off; the mana-users then overtake energy-users and dominate in spell value until they all go oom; here the resourceless champs (if they survived) can clean up at their leisure. Now let's suppose that in these hypothetical situations, each team decisively outplayed their opponents, but did not dominate them. They all expended energy, mana, and long CDs, but are hovering around 40-60% health. Their opponents are now either dead or have recalled. The energy-using and resourceless champions are free to use this opportunity to acquire an objective. The mana-using champions must recall.

This is one of the largest issues facing mana-using champions after the changes to the regen mechanics: many potential opportunities to take objectives are stymied by complete resource depletion, which even energy champs do not face because they quickly recover to full out of combat. Large objectives like Dragon or turrets are not the only issue: mana champions must recall very frequently by comparison and lose out on skirmishing, jungling, and even warding opportunities with comparison to energy or resourceless champions. Unless it is directly intended by Riot that mana-using champions have fewer opportunities for map control, this needs to be remedied.

My suggestion is to provide ALL mana champions with accelerated out-of-combat mana regeneration. There is precedent for this in regards to Evelynn and Bard. These two champions are largely defined by roaming capability during the early-to-mid-game. For this purpose, they have built-in mana recovery when out of combat, via Evelynn's passive regeneration and Bard's chimes. The bonus mana recovery lets them expend as many resources as needed to be beneficial in one area, then move to another point on the map and have regenerated enough resources to still be useful at their new location. No other mana-using champion can do this without heavily devoting gold to it, (either max mana pool or the heavily nerfed chalice/morellos) which leaves them weaker overall when compared to energy-users and resourceless champs.

tl;dr I believe that mana champions should innately have increased mana regeneration when not in combat, either as a multiplier (3x maybe?) or as a separate base stat to adjust for individual champs. (e.g. Janna 9.0 base mp5, 20.0 base ooc mp5) The amount of time allotted to determine "in-combat" can vary to ensure that, for example, laners can't sit back briefly and regain half their mana, but in general I believe that 5 as a start should be fine, i.e. if boots of mobility are active you should be regenerating mana faster.

What are your thoughts on mana depletion in the teamfight phase? Do you think this change would help or open another can of worms entirely? Do you think that mana champions should have fewer opportunities for map control to compensate for greater relative power?

21 Comments

The5lacker3/19/2015, 3:21:41 AM6 votes

Accelerated out-of-combat regen for Health AND Mana have been a long time coming. I've seen a number of games to it and it works well to reward players for managing correct map awareness.

Though, I would like to point out that mana regen is still a very relevant thing.

DreadPirateChris3/19/2015, 3:34:49 AM3 votes

Realize that this would not only affect mid-lane mages. It also affects many top laners, all ADCs, most supports, many junglers. As an ADC main, I see it being a -much- stronger buff to those ADCs that currently have tight mana constraints, and also a stronger mid-game buff than late-game buff. Considering that Corki and Graves with powerful mid game power spikes would be getting a big mid-game buff... that's going to require a lot of champion rebalancing or it'll throw everything out of whack. I expect similar effects in the other roles, but I can't quickly assess who has what power points and what mana constraints for other roles.

Anyway, I'd somewhat prefer to see this mechanic on an item than as a global effect (unless, for the previously mentioned reasons it went with global champion rebalancing, and -that- would be a big project. Possibly doable between seasons.)

However, in terms of an effect on an item to solve this problem - Athene's Unholy Grail already addresses it to some extent. It doesn't increase regen by being out of combat, no, but it specifically addresses the 'total mana depletion' issue by providing stronger regen as your mana gets lower.

So, if you were to implement it as a global, how would you deal with champion balance issues? Would you be happy with your mechanic on an item?

Miku Lv993/19/2015, 10:50:53 AM3 votes

Problem is that champions can be in lane and still be doing things and yet be considered out of combat. They'd have to nerf Sona more since she could stay in lane and yet be out of combat to get enough mana to keep doing more w's. And Targon's Brace is now way worse than coin on blitz since it forces you into combat all the time so you get way less mana. Coin blitz could just keep trying to pull all day and only ever be in combat when he lands a grab lol. But if there were some way to prevent this from being usable too much during the laning phase I think this is a great idea. It really sucks winning tons of fights and feeling like you never get anything for so many of them.

Erockandroll3/19/2015, 1:20:38 PM3 votes

I think we should just look at the champs most hurt by the Regen nerfs. I mean, the 3 most played mages in the midlane (lcs level) are Ahri, Leblanc, and Victor. Leblanc being an Assassin, really can just kill her target before mana becomes a Problem, Ahri works in the same way. Victor has Mana built into his Hexcore.

The champs most hit by this are siege mages like Ziggs and Lux. Champs where the "manage your mana" argument falls of because their kit revolves around spell spamming. But the thing that escapes me is since we moved to a system of %regen increases, Why haven't these spell slinger have their mana Adjusted as Such? Slightly increase their Base Mana Regen, and they would become more responsive two having that single mana item. whether that be tear, grail, or Morelloomicon.

BakugoBestBoy3/19/2015, 1:04:49 PM2 votes

UNIQUE: Restores 15% of your max mana on kill or assist.

If you won a team fight and you have grail you should have a minimum 45% of your mana bar left to push/take objective whatever. You're a mage using AoE spells there's no way you get an ace without at least 3-4 assists.

paShadoWn3/19/2015, 6:26:45 AM2 votes

My thoughts is to get RoA plus Grail and forget about mana depletion. And as a bonus slaughter those all-ap-not-a-single-mana perma-oom "carries".

Paige3/19/2015, 1:39:32 PM1 votes

the only thing that really comes to my mind (because i'm not very smart in thinking about all the aspects this would affect!) is that this would be possibly too strong on some supports? like a nami or sona who spam heal or janna who just spams shield - those actions don't put you in combat. thus, that would promote that passive sustain play style riot hates so much.

maybe the idea of putting it on an item is a better idea, but i can just see the item being nerfed over and over again, like all mana regen items are. and in the end, doesn't the passive on grail sort of combat this whole thing already? if you're oom from a teamfight, you should have gotten assists and therefore grail gives you mana?

missou3/19/2015, 4:48:04 PM1 votes

What mana issues? Even the most mana-hungry mages are doing alright with Athene's.

Chespin20133/19/2015, 10:51:49 PM1 votes

finally not a post about qqing on zed no one just doesn't want to do their research glad you brought this up zed was never a problem in the midlane really the mana regen as it is right now is just crap

Philantrophe3/19/2015, 11:01:56 PM1 votes

Love for summoner 13 ?