League of Legends: Mana Items

I've noticed that many of the champions I've been playing recently aren't traditional spell casters but still use mana to use their abilities. A lot of mana. I'm building either strictly defensive or strictly melee attack items on these characters, therefore not increasing my mana pool or my mana regen in any way, and therefore I'm running out of mana. I find I keep running out of mana in the middle of big fights, and therefore not being able to use abilities I think I can use, and dying as a result. I need to come up with a solution to the problem, and I believe my options are...

• Get better at monitoring my own mana and the cost of my spells and pull back from fights earlier.
• Start buying mana potions.
• Switch my runes back to mp5 runes. (I bought some tanky runes which I've been using instead.)
• Change my item build to include a mana item.

The first option could well be the right one, but I think as long as I'm playing with puggers it isn't a good idea. I can't expect them to know when I'm going to pull back and I can't tell them over voice chat. So they're going to end up committing to a fight we can win if I have mana. I'm going to hang back. They're going to die and get bitter at me. Bitter I could handle, but it's also going to feed the other team and decrease my odds of winning which is bad.

So I think I'm going to have to sacrifice something for some mana. Maybe it's going to be cash and an inventory slot for potions. Maybe it'll be 'worse' items. Maybe it'll be 'worse' runes. But at least with these three I can crunch some numbers to see what exactly I'll be giving up.

Seals: I can have 13 armor or I can have .585 mp5 per level. Assuming level 10 as a baseline that would be 5.85 mp5.

Potions: A mana potion restores 100 mana over 15 seconds and costs 40 gold. 

Items... (Ignoring the ones that obviously have no place on these types of heroes like an archangel's staff)

Eleisa's Miracle - 20 mp5, 25 hp5, 35 tenacity for 1300 gold

Soul Shroud - 12mp5 + 10% cooldown reduction as an aura, 520hp for 2285 gold

Nashor's Tooth - 10mp5, 50% attack speed, 55 ability power, 25% cooldown reduction for 2885 gold

Philosopher's Stone - 8mp5. 18hp5, 5 gold per 10 seconds for 800 gold

Chalice of Harmony - 7.5 mp5, 30 MR, 1% extra mana regen per 1% mana missing for 890 gold

Fiendish Codex - 7mp5, 30 ability power, 10% cooldown reduction

Manamune - 7mp5, 350 mana, 20 damage, 2% of mana becomes damage, extra 1000 mana eventually for 2210 gold

Meki Pendant - 7mp5 for 390 gold

Tiamat - 5mp5, 50 damage, 15mp5, auto-attacks become splash damage for 2070 gold

Doran's Ring - 5mp5, 15 ability power, 100 health for 475 gold

Faerie Charm - 3mp5 for 180 gold

Banshee's Veil - 375 mana, 375 health, 50 MR, counters one incoming spell every 45 seconds for 2715 gold

Frozen Heart - 500 mana, 99 ac, 20% cooldown reduction, enemies attack 20% slower for 2775 gold

Sapphire Crystal - 200 mana for 400 gold

Sheen - 250 mana, 25 ability power, after using an ability your next auto-attack does 100% extra base damage for 1260 gold

Trinity Force - 250 mana, 30 damage, 30 ability power, 30% attack speed, 15% crit chance, 12% move speed, 250 health, 25% on autoattack hit to slow the enemy for 35%, after using an ability your next auto-attack does 150% extra base damage for 4070 gold

For starters, lets compare the seals to some items. I can get 18 armor for 300 gold. The runes were 13 armor, so lets pretend that would cost 217g. Faerie charm is 3mp5 for 180 gold, so if we could spend 217g on faerie charms we'd get 3.6mp5. Which is worse than the mp5 seals at level 7 or above. So given the option of cloth armor + mp5 seals or faerie charm + armor seals we should choose the cloth armor at level 7 or above.

But what if the mp5 seals aren't enough? Then we're going to have to give up some damage for the mana by changing items. A good damage baseline is probably the BF Sword, which is 45 damage for 1650 gold which is 37 gold per damage. Manamune is probably 57 damage on top of what amounts to infinite mana for 2210 gold. Which is 38 gold per damage. Worse than the sword, barely, but not by a whole lot. Manamune actually seems pretty reasonable compared to the sword!

What about a top end damage item? Bloodthirster is, fully stacked, 100 damage and 25% life steal for 3000 gold. That's 30 gold per damage plus some added life steal which is really good. It's harder to keep fully stacked than manamune is, and it's 50 gold per damage after you die. 

How about my personal obsession, Tiamat? At 50 damage for 2070 gold it's 41 gold per damage. This is worse than the other options but it does do an extra 35% damage in a big splash radius. Sadly it's only 5mp5 so it's not even good enough I don't think... Bad mana and bad damage? I should probably stop buying this. 8(

Ok, so Tiamat is out. Manamune is probably in. I'm going to try it out and see how it feels!