Sona. It's time to make her good again.

So been playing a lot of Sona recently and WOW she is weak through the entire game. Early your heal is so mana hungry 80 mana at rank 1 to heal for 30 health... yes i am aware it heals two targets but that still means on base numbers you spend more mana then you restore points of health. Even if you factor in the bonus healing that requires both targets to be around 50% health until you finally tip the scale in cost vs health restored. "But it gives a shield as well" Yeah this would be great if it weren't for 2 things. 1) the shield only last 1.5 seconds, meaning its very easy for the shield to fall off between attacks; and 2) you have to be so insanely close to land the shield thus meaning that to get full benefit of your ability you have to be rubbing cheeks with your ally while they (or you) are getting engaged on. This probably wouldn't be an issue on tanky champions who are designed to take a few hits, but on the paper doll that is Sona this likely means that you are highly risking giving a double in the small hopes you can save your ally. Perhaps we could do something like lower the base cast of her heal, or buff base amount healed (buff the % healed vs the % missing), lower the cooldown so that you can maybe land a bonus heal every now and then, allow for the shield to be able to double trigger on the ally healed, or my favorite BUFF HER AURA RANGE. For this last one it's kind of a thing for all her abilities, i know they want to avoid her old problem of standing way out of combat and still having a huge effect, but her current aura ranges are painfully bad. You already removed the passive bonuses, why not at least give her half decent aura range (like say 500) so she can help her allies while having some small amount of safety BUT not so much safety she can't be touched.

Now let's talk about her offensive power and her burst. Even in the early game it's really not all that impressive. Sure her landing a full combo on you looks amazing (AA + 18 damage from powercord + 40 from Q + 20 from empowered AA.) Now factor in resistances, This looks super impressive until you start noticing that once she blows her burst hit she's not going to have any follow up for a while. Even a regular Q+AA isn't all that impressive and really won't do much to push an enemy back unless they were already super low. Basically it comes down to an issue where she's kind of strong level one, most opponent will get their counter skill by level 2, and she's ok level 3.... After that she falls off hard. Her mana costs and cooldowns prevent her from building up a powercord charge, and since they lowered the bonus damage that powercord does (use to be 100% bonus now it's 40%) it's often not worth building the charge unless your plan to use it in the near future. When you look at her offensive power it's also much lower. While the added magic damage sounds nice it's really not all that much bonus damage, and when you compare it to the old +4x(rank lvl) flat bonus to AD and AP you notice that the old way the skill worked usually ended up with a much higher level of bonus damage then this new one. To add to that her empowered AA doesn't trigger on towers so you can't even choose her as a good tower push support. It's one thing to have AP mages in mid who's power is somewhat limited by needing mana regen and CDR, but a support character should not have their utility gated behind a gold wall.

I see a lot of people comment that she has "so much power in the late game" i would argue that she isn't actually all that strong. Her power comes mostly from the fact that she is often built like an AP carry mage (because her base utility numbers aren't great so you need a lot of AP to make them hold up). So players are left with this warped impression that Sona is strong because she can do a lot of burst. Take basically any of the mage support champions and give then 400+ AP and a lich bane. It's amazing how much damage they can put out when you build them with a ton of AP and then hand them a lich bane. If you don't build Sona with damage and instead focus on strictly "support" items, she really doesn't bring much to a team. Her heal is still weak at rank 5, without a lot of AP her shield won't absorb the kind of hits you need it to to help your allies. Even her unique team movement speed buff isn't all that impressive when you compare it to something like or or Sivir's ultimate.

The other big issue is not so much with Sona or her kit, it's that the item she is most incentivized to get is . This item is a huge mess, there is basically no reason to upgrade it (since it gives you a wooping 5 AP and 25% base mana regen) so you are often left holding this very sub par item until you finish your core. To give a comparison, imagine any other role and them being 25-30 mins into the game and still rocking their , , or . Even when you look at the end game for this item it's really unimpressive compared to the movement speed bonus that Talisman give or the shield that Face of the mountain offers (i could also get into how broken the healing is of the relic shield line but that can wail.

For those who disagree let me ask you this, which character(s) or type of character would you say Sona is good against? Which ADC or support do you pick and just groan because your opponent is running Sona?