question about mana

To some degree. Champions with a mana item (morrelos, or whatever) are less affected, but if you use spells a lot then yes.

Mana is in a funky place balance wise. Mana has been so overtuned that it’s virtually mandatory for any mage using mana to buy at least a Lost Chapter and/or a Tear of the Goddess at the beginning of the game. From those, there’s virtually no reason to not go ahead and build them into Morrelonomicon or Archangel’s/Seraphs, meaning that everyone ends up doing that. Those two items provide even more mana, and so it’s this cycle of overbalance. The balance of meta right now is “did they buy a mana item or not”, not “are they using their mana effectively”. The issue here becomes there are some champions that are extremely mana dependent - Karthus, Kassadin, Cassiopeia, Veigar, etc - who would lose their ability to scale or do long term damage if they were unable to consistently cast abilities. For that reason, they’re given the mana items - but the mana items are so powerful and early game mana on other champs is so weak that they’re used by almost all mages.

To fix the issue I think that they either need to tune up the early game mana so champs are not buying LC/TotG first item, or they need to simply make the upgrades so piss poor that the champs that buy one of those items end up selling it instead of upgrading it. Otherwise, everyone’ll have a mana item mid-late game, and everyone will be virtually mana-free - especially when considering runes, ocean dragon, and baron.