Can we give Soraka a love tap or two?
At the moment she's incredibly unpopular. The little power she has to keep her ADC alive in the laning phase doesn't mean much when up against incredible teamfighters such as Leona, Sona, and Braum.
Having % health costs means the more hp she has, the harder it is for her to restore that through her starcall. EX: She damages herself for 300 damage in warmog's build vs 200 in an AP build. Not only will she restore a lower amount with the warmog's starcall because of the lower AP, it will take much more health to restore that 10% HP cost. This pretty much locks her into builds without HP, and the first item she buys is the sightstone, which gives 150 health. I think it's pretty bizarre that Soraka has an entire section of items that are actually detrimental to the one thing she's good at, her sustain.
In addition to the above, the support builds are oversaturated with CDR. Soraka is probably the single worst offender of going over the CDR cap, thus wasting stats and making items less gold efficient. Soraka will get 10% cdr through her income item, and 5% through masteries. Then, she tends to build either a mana regen item such as
, or an
.
Assuming she has boots, an income item, and a sightstone, she's at 15% cdr with 3 items left. Most of her remaining item choices have CDR on them, and she goes way over the cap in the case that she decides to upgrade trinket rather than grab a sightstone.
. This is an issue for a few other mage supports but Soraka is the biggest offender and it's difficult to get around without just going straight up AP which cuts down on her already poor utility.
With this in mind, it would be really helpful if we made other items such as
viable on her. I don't think she needs the % true damage health costs because the cost will always be justified for her build. By this I mean, the more hp she has, the less AP she has, which will even out the cost to about the same as far as potential healing goes. Like I said, higher HP builds are harder to self-sustain, and heal for lower amounts. The only thing that would even out this % health cost was if she also sustained a % health from her starcall (with astral infusion's passive).
tl;dr Give her % health costs and give her % health heal from landing starcall, or don't do either. % health costs are overkill. Also reevaluating some support items CDR would be nice.