League of Legends: Tears Stacking

Robb left a comment on my Facebook post about Manamune asking if it would be worth it to get the first piece of Manamune (which builds up the stacks of extra mana) and then wait a while before spending the rest of the cash upgrading it to Manamune (which turns the extra mana into damage). My gut response was no since I didn't think it would stack up fast enough on the characters I've been trying it on. But what good is a gut response if you don't justify it with some math? So, lets look at how the items gain stacks... (Throwing in Archangel's Staff as well. It also builds from tears and turns your mana into ability power instead of attack damage.)

Tears of the Goddess - costs 995g - each time you use an ability you gain 4 maximum mana - at most 2 stacks gained every 6 seconds
Manamune -  costs an extra 1115g over Tears - each time you use an ability you gain 4 maximum mana - at most 1 stack gained every 3 seconds - each time you autoattack you gain 1 maximum mana - at most 1 stack gained every 3 seconds
Archangel's Staff - costs an extra 1860g over Tears - each time you use an ability you gain 4 maximum mana - at most 1 stack gained every 3 seconds


Take Tristana to start. She has 4 abilities she could use to add a stack on. Her Q has a 20 second cooldown and costs 80 mana. It increases her autoattack speed. Her W has between a 22 and 14 second cooldown depending on how many points you put into it and also costs 80 mana. It jumps her across the map and does damage when she lands. Her E has a 16 second cooldown and costs between 50 and 90 mana. It puts a dot and a mortal strike debuff on the target. Her R has a 60 second cooldown and costs 140 mana. It does big damage to a target and knocks them and all nearby enemies back a fair distance.

Some things to note... The mana costs are all substantially higher than the permanent mana gained from using the abilities, so spamming them is going to run her out of mana pretty quickly. Most of the abilities have a pretty long cooldown and will have no beneficial game effect if used at random. (Unless you're shooting an enemy champion you don't care about your attack speed. Ditto with putting up a dot or blasting them back.) In the case of the W it's actually detrimental to spam it since that's how you get away from a gank. Having it on cooldown so you could get 4 mana back is really bad when you die...

How about standard use? Well, if I engage on an enemy hero I'll generally use all 4 abilities in quick succession. Use W to get the jump on them, E to dot them, R to knock them back into my friends, and then Q to attack them faster. Even though I use 4 abilities I'll only be able to get 2 stacks because they'll all be used within the same 6 second window. (If it seems odd that I'd use my escape to engage you should note that W's cooldown refreshes immediately on killing/assisting on an enemy champion, so I can use it to get in, kill someone, and get out.)

So in standard fights I'll be getting 8 mana. And maybe doing one of these every minute or so? So it would take over 2 hours to stack up to full mana. Now once I have a reasonable amount of mana I'll start using abilities on the creep waves but even then unless I burn my W I'm only going to get 8 mana every 20 seconds. That's still more than 40 minutes until full!

What about Manamune? I lose the ability to stack up twice in 6 seconds but 3 seconds will have elapsed before I W back out of the fight so I should still get 8 mana per big fight. The difference is I gain 1 mana every 3 seconds I'm autoattacking which will be most of the time. Even when farming creeps I'll likely be attacking at least every 3 seconds. Take into account walking around the map and delays between the cooldown refreshing and I'm going to ballpark it at 1 mana every 6 second from autoattacks on top of the above 8 mana every 20 seconds from abilities. Which is still 30 minutes until full. Upgrading to Manamune shaves off about 25% of the time but it's still painfully slow.


Warwick works almost the same way. The only difference with him is his Q has a 6 second cooldown and I buy some cooldown reduction on him. It's a lot more palatable to spam it since it's a self heal along with doing good damage. He should be getting 4 mana every 5 seconds or so while engaged so probably more like 4 every 8 second accounting for running around. This is better than 8 every 20 but not by all that much... It should be noted that Warwick will hardly get hurt at all by the change from 2 every 6 seconds to 1 every 3 seconds since he doesn't spam a lot of abilities in a short window. His long cooldown ability is a self stun so I can't even spam after using it! So Warwick gets a bigger boost out of upgrading to Manamune than Tristana.

That said, I don't think it makes sense to buy it with Tristana. I simply don't want to spam her abilities in normal laning. With Warwick I actually do want to spam his abilities because I'm jungling with him and can use the healing. Looking at how I play them without Manamune I'm spamming with Warwick and not with Tristana. Warwick normally solves his mana issues by taking the massive mana regen buff but if you have Manamune you can give that away to someone else on your team who will love you for it. Tristana doesn't want to be dotting up creeps!

So I think I'm going to keep building it on Warwick and just not build anything mana related on Tristana. Her abilities are almost entirely fixed cost so while she has real mana issues at low level it's not so bad at higher levels. She can't go from big fight to big fight without a Manamune but winning a fight and then going back to base isn't the end of the world. It's certainly better than losing the fight and being dead! That puts you back to base too but with less moneys!