Soraka's Mini-Rework

Soraka main here. I've spent some of the afternoon playing the new Soraka, in both support and solo lane roles, and I have a couple thoughts that I'd like to share.

Let me begin by saying that I agree a change was necessary. Being able to hang back and avoid interacting with the enemy laner(s) while still providing large amounts of health to her carry wasn't particularly fun for her team, and was frustrating as all hell for her enemies. Shaking that paradigm up was definitely a good move.

However, I see a few problems with her current mini-rework that I'd like to discuss.

First off, there's her passive sustain in lane. Soraka has a very low base HP/5 value for a reason. The balance of her original rework (the one that brought the health-sacrificing W) required that her health be a relatively limited resource in order to keep her healing in check. And by and large, this worked - with two key exceptions: Warmog's and Ancient Coin / Nomad's Medallion.

Warmog's I don't actually consider to be a major problem. By the time she can afford it and enough AP for her heals to be relevant, the game is typically over or she has such a dominating gold advantage that it will soon be. It's imbalanced, yes, but in the same kind of way that a Veigar that's farmed for 45 minutes versus an all-AP team is: Horrifying in theory, less of an issue in practice because of how rarely it comes up in a typical match

Coin, however, is a different story. While Soraka's health regeneration is relatively low during laning, Ancient Coin provides a huge boon, to the point where a wary ADC can safely farm with Soraka well out of harm's way. Between Windspeaker's and Runic Armor, each nearby minion death grants her almost 12 health.

This means that any mechanism designed to force her into engagement with the enemy needs to provide more of a benefit than just sitting back and letting the lane minion deaths heal her. Shifting some of her healing from Astral Infusion to Rejuvenation helps that to a degree, but frankly the balance is still heavily tilted in favor of "hang back, only land Q when it's perfectly safe."

In short, while Rejuvenation has provided some incentive to land more Qs, it's still not really appealing for Soraka. She doesn't want to try to land Qs; her preferred method is still hanging back and regenerating.

Second, she's far more vulnerable this patch than she was last patch. Since her self-heal is now A. a heal over time effect, B. no longer scales with missing health, and C. no longer scales with enemies hit, the potential consequences for going in are much higher than the potential benefits in most cases, especially when compared to playing it safe and holding back.

I understand that the goal was to get Soraka to have windows of vulnerability, but right now, I'm not seeing that. Yes, we have more reason to go in than we did last patch, but we also have more reason to hang back. We can't rely on a fast Q heal to save us from an enemy engage, we can't punish teams that are tightly grouped (say, in bush ambushes) by restoring most of our health, and the benefit from Rejuvenation is pretty marginal.

As a side note, I'm seeing the movespeed buff regardless of whether I'm running away from or toward enemies. Is that working as intended, or is it a bug?

Third, she has some issues in the solo lane. Many of those boil down to "it's hard to land starcall on enemies that have more dashes than you can shake a stick at," but it's also very difficult to CS on her with how long her autoattack animation takes to complete and how slow the projectile travels. Speeding up her animation and projectile - or simply allowing her Equinox to damage minions - would help her ability to play as her mage secondary without skewing her power balance elsewhere.

TL;DR for those that don't like reading long posts:

• Passive healing from Coin combined with survival nerfs make using Starcall unappealing compared to waiting for passive regeneration
• CSing is hard with a slow AA and slow projectile

While I personally have opinions on how to fix her "hold back vs. push forward to starcall," problem, they're nowhere near as cut-and-dried as making her CSing slightly easier, so I'll leave them off of this post for the time being.