Sona Buvelle, the New Irelia

#BetterNerfIrelia no longer, the newest trend is **#BetterNerfSona ** After 25 weeks consisting of an undeserved and intentionally failed "rework," the butchering of all in-game models, overly extravagant visual effects that ultimately failed to add the intended clarity and multiple additional nerfs, including both secret ones and documented ones, Sona has become the latest butt of everyone's joke. Thread after thread, hundreds of posts of community cryout. Where is Riot? Hiding. Because they know they've failed us and they don't want to admit it. They know they're intentionally and unjustifiably destroying her, but are too arrogant to turn back now. They'd rather continue nerfing her into oblivion.

Let's take a moment to look at all of the nerfs thus far:

Patch 4.13, The "Rework:"

Base HP - reduced 7.11% As one of the squishiest champions in the game and an early-laning support, this was a huge hit to her survivability, especially at her most crucial point of the game. A champion that was already the easiest to insta-gib, was made just that much more a free kill.

1000-unit radius auras - removed 350-unit radius 1-off effects - added With this, Sona was changed from a ranged champion to a melee. Amongst the mage-support class, she has the shortest range abilities. The closest to her is 500-range, 43% longer and most mage supports have much higher range usually from 700-900 or so range on every ability. The longest non-ult being 1700 units. Sona is the only squishy mage-support in the game with melee-range.

Power Chord: Staccato dmg - reduced 50% Sona saw nothing, but pure nerfs on her passive. What is there to say? She lost A LOT of damage here. The longer CDs means Power Chord takes longer to stack. The differentiated CDs make utilizing the right one for the situation more difficult. Hymn having the shortest of her CDs means Staccato will be up the most often, despite being the weakest Power Chord.

Hymn of Valor: Bolt dmg - reduced 20% Bolt Range - reduced 7.24% (secret) Aura - removed 1-off on-hit dmg - added CD - increased 14.3% The on-activation damage of Hymn was blatantly nerfed, lower damage and secretly had its range reduced. The permanent aura was removed and replaced with an on-hit tied to its activation. The on-hit is one-time use only and disappears after a few seconds. Sona must activate Hymn to help allies, no more assisting your ADC at last-hitting just by zoning the enemy. It can only be procced by auto-attacks and doesn't work on structures. Spells get no benefit, no more helping your ADC harass with spells and any allies that don't right-click gain nothing. Furthermore, even your auto-attack allies lose out if they build crit and attack speed. At rank 1, it's 4 AD/AP vs 20 dmg on-hit. Assuming the average Sona starts 10% CDR from masteries, the new on-hit is up only once every 7.2 seconds, the ADC needed only attack a minimum of 5 times during that time-span. By max rank, it becomes 20 AD/AP vs 100 on-hit, at max CDR only once every 4.8 seconds. Assuming the ADC only made the same 5 autos, with 40% crit the old aura would've granted 160 bonus dmg. To make up for this deficit, Sona needed to personally have 240 AP, growing exponentially for each additional attack and an incalculably higher amount to make up for all other ability-based allies that gain nothing, including mages. To make up for the removal of Hymn's aura, Sona would require an estimated 1000+ AP every game. With the scaling reduced further in a later patch, she now must have over 1250 AP, I bid you good luck in that endeavor.

Aria of Perseverence: Healing - reduced 37.5% AP scaling - reduced 20% % scaling - added Active Armor/MR - removed Aura - removed shield- added Cost - increased 10 mana CD - increased 43% With Aria's base healing reduced, she needed to wait for an ally to drop below 40% for the % scaling to make up for the large deficit. Higher cost and CD meant she could do this less often and a fewer number of times. With the increased cost on top of the reduced base, her effective healing had been reduced by 48% and finally including the higher CD, the effectiveness of Aria's healing had been reduced by the final product of 70.43%. Sona would have to heal an ally with less than negative 133% HP every time to make up the difference. Obviously you can't heal a dead ally, let alone one that's dead more than twice over. Next, it gave armor and MR for 3 seconds on active and a MIN of 1.5 on passive, vs a 1.5 second shield. At rank 1, it's +18% effective HP to a 35 point shield, an equality of 200 damage before cost+CD. At max rank, this becomes +60% effective HP vs a 155 point shield, any ally taking over 250 damage preferred the old Aria aura. Worse still, with the higher mana cost and CD, the old aura becomes stronger by over 2 to 1, requiring more than 775 AP to be on-par.

Song of Celerity: MS % - changed from 4/6/8/10/12 to 10/11/12/13/14 self-bonus - added Aura - removed CD - increased 71.43% Affects allied minions - removed At rank 1 a 325 MS ally covers 81.43 extra units from old Celerity and only 32.5 from new, making it 251% as effective. At max rank, this becomes 244.3 units to 68, making the old Celerity 359.3% effective. Sona herself gets 246 old vs 153 new, a 161% effectiveness on old. As the most AP efficient ability in her new kit, it still requires 240 AP to be on-par with her former self.

Crescendo - no change Not a bad thing, but not a good one either. Sona is amongst a very tiny number of supports that don't have their ult cost at 100 mana for every rank.

Patch 4.16:

Hymn of Valor -** Bolt range reduced 100 units** (secret) If the -50 range undocumented secret nerf wasn't enough, Fearless secretly lowered it by an additonal 100 units. Both of these secret, but intentional nerfs were undone in the next patch, whence Fearless' morals were brought into question for making rogue unapproved nerfs.

Patch 4.20:

Hymn of Valor - on-hit AP scaling reduced 20%

Aria of Perseverance - % scaling reduced 50% Blatant nerfs, AP become less useful for Sona's offensive capability. Whereas her overall healing ability was reduced by yet an additional 17.5%.

Upcoming Patch:

Staccato - dmg reduced 20%

For all that Sona has lost and for nothing she's gained, I greatly question Riot's balance team's intelligence. At this moment a great many people are rolling in their graves at Riot's sheer raping of arithmetic: Newton, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Einstein, Galileo. All of them are sickened by this outrage and question why she hasn't yet been reverted to pre-"rework."