Soraka's State and a suggestion on how to shift her power

Let's be honest with ourselves, Soraka is not a Top Tier support. She's middle rung at best. She can be picked into strong compositions but with so much of her power budget invested in healing she has big weaknesses. I won't deny that games where she wins lane and snowballs are rough as you just flat out can't kill anyone. I rarely, very very rarely, see her banned and when I do I can do a quick check on op.gg and find that they just had a game where they lost to a Soraka that snowballed. She is one of those champions that when she is ahead she is really strong but when she is behind she is very weak.

I think this duality is an interesting phenomenon. She becomes so powerful so fast when she gets ahead because all that healing becomes oppressive. This can lead to a frustrating game for many as they feel their impact is effectively negated. A healer should have a powerful impact but in LOL having such strong healing early is a problem as it just exacerbates snowballing. On the flip side, if Soraka falls behind she is extremely weak and can struggle a lot to have any impact in the game. A healer shouldn't feel useless when they fall behind a little.

Soraka has a decent early game (used to be way too powerful when her W was stronger), a strong midgame if she goes even and extremely powerful midgame if ahead. Her late game is on the weak side due to MS boosts (E won't root often), itemization that negates a lot of her healing and high damage. Late game values hard CC a lot which Soraka lacks unless she combines her E with another persons CC. She excels in skirmishes and teamfights with a strong front line. She suffers against pick comps and 1/3/1 situations.

She requires a team with some built in CC to both protect her and to combo her E off of. She is a very poor pick for a 1/3/1 composition as she offers very little peel and has no hard CC unless the enemy stands in her E for too long. Low tier players are often non-interactive thinking they can rely on just passively healing and high tier players can easily be countered by intelligent itemization, burst damage style counterpicks and dive plays. She has a very weak and unfulfilling passive and pretty linear gameplay style. GW shuts down her healer fantasy and there are no ways for her to play around it.

I love Soraka and after so many games and giving her so much thought I want to see her come back into the light as a strong contender. I think this would require a shift in power. We need to move her away from the mid game healing monster to a late game hyper healing hero. Her mid game power is what makes people hate to play against her but her ability to heal ADC's like Twitch, Vayne, and Sivir through their laning phases is one of her stronger benefits. Her power curve should match their power curve as being a late game oriented champion that endures the laning phase.

To be clear, I want to make her a powerful late game champion and move away from midgame. I want her to be "that healer that must die first" when she reaches her late game spike. This is made hard because supports can't just have higher AP ratios but luckily we have some other stats to work with now in particular EXP and how abilities synergism for how her abilities interact with each other as she gains levels.

We want to hit 3 points with Soraka:

1. Make her more interactive in lane.
2. Move power from midgame to lategame.
3. Allow ways to play around GW.

Q changes - - - - Rejuvenation is a neat mechanic for Soraka to sustain her health. That is often all it gets used for and it rarely matters when in teamfights as damage stacks too quickly for the duration to hit. I think Q should drop this mechanic for a new one. A simpler one.

Astral Healing: Healing done to champions below 40% health are healed for 10/20/30/40/50% more health from healing effects from Soraka's abilities.

Sweet simple and feeds into the healer fantasy. I want to note this would affect Soraka too but it does not work with items like Redemption or Athenes. I don't think Q needs any changes other then this but this does leave Soraka with a self sustain problem. This also has some overlap with her R which I will get to later.

Passive Changes - - - - With the above changes to Q this leaves a good opportunity for Soraka to gain a meaningful Passive.

Salvation: Abilities Damaging Enemy champions will mark them with a stack of Salvation for 5 seconds. Attacking an enemy with an auto attack that has a stack of Salvation will reduce their damage by 7/14/21% (1/7/14) for 2 seconds and heals Soraka for 20 + 10 per level +20% AP over 2 seconds.

A strong self healing passive that allows Soraka to be a bit more aggressive in lane and require her to engage her enemies if she wants to sustain herself and prevent her from just being a healing robot. This also has the effect of giving her more to do beyond just healing as she needs to weave her auto attacks in and can reduce the enemies damage as she does so. On a side note, thematically she is saving her enemies with this passive. Granting Salvation to the heathens making them question their choices (reducing their damage) and giving her time to heal.

W Changes - - - - This should change in value to balance out the Q buffs to her overall healing. 80/105/130/155/180 should be the base values. The CD and costs should be the same. Soraka being required to get up and personal to self-heal is a big change for her and she should still be able to heal a lot when the big fights break out. This ability (to me) is her identity and it should remain on a CD that scales down to a very low CD. With it being harder to sustain (you can't just throw out a max range Q to heal up) she will need to be more careful in when and how she heals. Q changes can reward her a lot but she has to max it to get that effect. The combination of a maxed Q and maxed W is where her late game scaling comes into play. She really needs these both maxed to hit that high end healer in the end game as when they are both maxed the values are higher (270 healed when both maxed) but they are lower until both maxed and that extra healing only triggers when they are under 40% health. I do note that the values are pretty close to what Soraka heals now but keep in mind she loses the ability to grant rejuvenation to allies losing some of her healing.

E Changes - - - - none.

R Changes - - - - 200/300/400 (I like round numbers, in all likelihood this is unneeded) and a small area around Soraka purifies allies removing GW while they are within the area (1/2 range of W? A pretty small area to require more risk for greater heal). The area would last 1/2/3 seconds (maybe longer with all the GW options these days). Lose the +50% healing at below 40% health. That was moves to Q.

The above changes would have a profound effect o Soraka's play style. She would have to be aggressive in lane and trade with her abilities and Auto attacks putting her into danger. Her laning will be healthier and encourage players to not just passively stand behind their ADC and heal them as they will quickly run out of health if they do. She has plenty of range on her auto attack to find opportunities to proc her passive and it gives her a pretty good edge when she does proc her passive. Q provides too much safety for Soraka in her current form which allows players to play so passively. Soraka might need some defensive compensations but I doubt it.

Her mid game would be a bit weaker but her late game will be insane as she gains a lot with each level. The increased duration of R Aura will play a huge role in how powerful Soraka can be but she will also be in far greater danger when she does so. I know this would make a scary late game healer but that is the idea, you can't kill her team while she is alive. Just like other games where the healer can keep allies fighting until they run out of mana, heck many games the healer can resurrect their allies after they fall really requiring you to take them down first. Soraka should be no different for players to realize the fantasy of being a carry through healing. They just need to make it to late game is all and when Soraka needs to land AAs to sustain it will be a lot harder for her.

All the changes above will hit the 3 marks. R allows riskier play style to play around GW (which is needed as Mello is pretty standard and exe is cheap to build, and now we have a GW tank item on the way). Her mid game power has been shifted to late game power as she will be weaker in mid game where there are fewer opportunities to AA but her late game healing value will be high once you start to stack up some heal/shield power items, you just need to live long enough. Her laning won't be plague with passive healing robots as she needs to be aggressive to heal up and can't just throw out long range Qs to sustain.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my thoughts.