Talk:VPBE/@comment-28018860-20170122135357/@comment-1330314-20170123012417

Damage types at this point are fairly arbitrary. If a champion scales with AP, they're given magic damage, and vice versa, and on top of that a lot of AD champions are given magic damage in order to be harder to counterbuild, like a kind of softer true damage (and sometimes they get that too, e.g. ). Kat was originally given hybrid ratios, and when her AP build dominated, that stuck.

As for why champions have no resources, it's usually for 2 reasons: a) there is no real need for a resource to gate their abilities (Katarina's really spammy, for example, and wouldn't work well with mana), and b) those champions usually have some other reason to head back from lane, e.g. short range and a risky playstyle, which Kat has. I think the issue isn't so much that the likes of Kat, Riven and Garen are manaless, but rather that so many champions use mana when it's not really a good gate for them: supports, for example, are spammy by design, and really shouldn't have to deal with mana gates on top of the many restrictions that are imposed on them.