Talk:VPBE/@comment-6061249-20150610114621/@comment-3974211-20150611015728

Because they didn't want to add a mana cost in the first place. They are only doing it to pander to the community. Riot has explicitly stated that giving his ultimate a cost will not affect any of the situations where his ultimate actually annoys people, and that people are just latching on to the notion because "it does loads of things but is free, this must be why he's OP"!

They do concede that if he's out of mana he should be vulnerable, which is why they are adding it rather than ignoring players who don't know what they want. The increase to his mana/regen so that he should always be able to cast it whenever he can on live (assuming the same number of abilities used, for example) - since he's currently balanced around his how many casts he can pull off assuming his ultimate is free. (He has below average mana, as Keith pointed out).