User blog:Deshiba/Case study; Mana Regeneration.

Greetings fellow Summoners,

Today I'd like to dive a little deeper into mana regeneration, and as to how this affects your item choices. I'll be doing so by a bit of calculation into what certain champions would need in order to keep casting their skills on cool down. I'll also add a bit of a conclusion at the end of this particular case study, which might be opinionated. Sounds like fun? Well I can't blame you!!!

Mana regeneration
By now, I hope, that all readers are aware of what mana regeneration is, and that it is expressed in the game as MP/S or MP/5. I'm also assuming that all of us know the 5 ways we get mana regeneration, Base Statistics, Masteries, Runes, Items and Buffs. Now the way I see it, the mana regeneration mechanic is something that puts mana based champions at a disadvantage.

Disadvantage?
Well yes, seeing as mana-less champions don't have the same constraints of running out of mana and usually don't need to worry about regeneration at all. Yes, I know that other types of resource management are in the game. Although some champions don't really have to take care of their resource at all, looking at you guys, ,. And to some extend there are champions with a resource bar that summoners only have to think about if they want to master the champs full power, namely, , , , , and ... And then there's "Sacrifice" champions which supposedly pay with health, but I personally rarely notice at all, right , , ,  and ??

Oh and the ninja's are supposedly more burst oriented then mana based champions because of the energy mechanic. Which basically refreshes if you play them right...

Leveling the playing field?
That sounds like mana based champions got all the bad draws in life... But there's upsides! Ofcourse RIOT keeps a tight watch on balance and changes numbers accordingly, no real reason to complain right there. But what if mana based champions could be mana-less? This is where the real fun begins, because in theory, if the mana expenditure is equal to the regeneration, you have just become a mana-less champion!

What would it take?
First you would need to know how much mana your champion really uses up, which is fairly simple: Secondly you would need to know how much mana regeneration your champion has as a base and how much you can increase it with Runes, Masteries, Items, and Buffs.
 * Optional: Calculate ability cooldowns after cooldown reduction.
 * Devide the mana cost by the cooldown for each mana abillity.
 * Add them up.
 * Multiply them by 5.

What would it look like?
Well, I like a whole lot, so I'm just going to make this mana-hungry curr an example to the rest of you all. He has a base mana pool of 235 and gains 35 each level, which regenerates at a rate of 6 mana per 5 seconds increasing by 0.45 each level. While his skills, well, meta doesn't rush a tear for giggles: So to spam each of these skills individually at level 1 you'd need to get 21,05 to 17,75 MP/5 added to Yorrick his mana pool. To spam all of them continuously at level 3 you'd need to add 65,25 MP/5 to Yorrick his mana pool.
 * Omen of War: 40 mana, 9 sec cooldown 4,444... mana per second (22,2 MP/5)
 * Omen of Pestilence: 55 mana, 12 sec cooldown 4,583... mana per second (22,6 MP/5)
 * Omen of Famine: 55 mana, 10 sec cooldown 5,5 mana per second (27,5 MP/5)

As you might suspect, this number will only get worse, with cooldowns becoming shorter and spell costs getting higher, it goes as far as needing 151,87 MP/5 in order to become a spamming machine (with 40% CDR).

Less then worst case
Some of you might give up at that number knowing there is only so much you can do with runes and masteries (30,15 MP/5 FYI). Perhaps you even lost hope due to Yorrick being an AD champion that doesn't really do well as a mage at all (mages get all the good mana items). Because as a support rocking and  you'd rock that hefty +35 mp/5 on top of the +44,25 mp/5 you'd get with shite runes and masteries, would result in 79,25 MP/5 base and 178,5 MP/5 @ 0% mana.

So if you'd get Blue Buff's 25 mana per 5 seconds and 0.5% of your max mana per second you wouldn't need the runes at all, if only you were a support caster eh?

Is there no hope?
Well, I wouldn't say that. We all know about the existence of which translates to 2-8% of your DPS depending on your mana. That might not seem like a lot, but it's 10-40% of your DP5S. So if you deal at least 100 DPS, you get 2-8 MP/S or 10-40 MP/5. Following that logic, Yorrick without any augmenting mana regenaration set up, would need to deal 1518,7 to 607,48 DP5S, or 303,74 to 121,496 DPS trough AA's in order to get the missing 151,87 MP/5 he needs to spam 4 life.

The problem with that would be the way that most people build Yorrick doesn't reach that number even if they wanted to.

So what do you think?
Should we build mana champions so that they can spam forever, even when we can? Or is there a better, cleaner way?