Fearless can I ask for your thoughts on Manamune/Muramana since it feels like a super niche item these days and with Urgot and Yorick's VGUs done only Ezreal really builds it

I’ll talk about Manamune in a second, but I want to talk about a shift in how we think about items, especially item balance and audiences of items. We used to talk about infrequently bought items in an entirely negative light. “If item X isn’t bought often, it’s just bad.” This meshes very poorly with the concept of release valve items, and generally limits the ability to build items that solve problems well without being generically powerful.

In the case of Manamune, and I’d argue all TotG items, there’s issues with how we want mana to work. The core tension is that mana is inherently feel bad, but items frequently feel best when they solve clear problems. You don’t care about mana until it’s inhibiting you from doing what you want. There’s not benefit to having lots of it for most characters, outside of not having to worry about it for longer.

This is even more complex as most champions have fairly absurd mana per level values such that buying blocks of mana is often a trap, as your character quickly grows out of mana issues naturally. Over time, we’ve made a lot of champions not need the amount of mana you get from tear, and they’re totally happy settling for a RoA, Morellonomicon, or a Sheen upgrade. This has left the Tear items as fairly hard to justify outside of extreme exceptions, and even the champions that do pick up TotG items can’t be excited about them.

