Talk:Athene's Unholy Grail/@comment-12727893-20140731134751/@comment-10428734-20140827163417

This item is completely broken. It might be balanced with 40 AP, 20 MR and Mana Font being halved. And even then, it would not solve the core problem: 20% CDR + infinite mana at the same time. Morello-book gives CDR too but at least you can still (somewhat) go OOM with it.

One: There is a difference between not being mana-starved and becoming virtually manaless. Once you have Athene, you can literally use all of your abilities whenever available and never ever fall below ~30-40% mana. It completely removes the interesting gameplay of mana: mana is meant to force you to choose if it is worth to use X ability now. Not landing an ability should be/feel punishing: with Athene, champions like Ziggs (just an example, this is true for any AP, but Ziggs is special because his mana costs are already stupidly low) can throw bombs at you every 3 seconds. Does it land? No? Not a problem, he can throw another one in 3 seconds. Same problem than old Nidalee: you might dodge a few bombs/spears, you can't dodge 50. While they can just sit there throwing stuff without ANY kind of restriction.

Two: 20% CDR items are meant to have a drawback. For example, if you don't consider CDR, Frozen Heart is infinitely worse than Randuin. Seriously. 20% CDR, and AP (60 is not too bad and easily compensated by the amount of free poke the mana sustain gives you), and MR (25 is still better than 0), and infinite mana in a single mid-tier item? And everything instantly available, contrary to RoA or Archangel.

Three: Who buys Athene for MR anyways? Plus, if you buy Athene, you can replace MP5 glyphs by MR without any problem.

However, Athene is OP for a reason. If mages actually had to care about mana, manaless champions would become even more dominant. Riot has just accustomed the players way too much to spam without restriction. You can see that every game. Players are used to spam for no good reason, Riven using Q to come back to lane, Ori spamming W to roam faster, Ahri using Q for a single last-hit, Irelia using Q to last-hit when she could have just attacked. You can't imagine how many balance problems could be solved just by modifying mana: Lulu, Soraka, Nami, Leona, Ziggs, Lucian, Alistar, Maokai, Morgana, Riven, Renekton, Lee Sin, Elise... But Riot is too busy nerfing damage numbers, I guess.