honestly how do you play soraka?

I mained soraka in s3 before her rework and now only play her once or twice per season to see if shes still bad. I honestly dont understand how people play her. Shes so squishy has no reliable hard cc and her heals literally kill her.

For comparison: I main who is also a heal support with an ult that is used to save allies. Kayle also doesnt have any hard movement skill and has no hard cc at all. Why is kayle effective while soraka isnt?

1. the range on her heal leaves her at a safe distance for someone with no escape
2. her ult is useful in today's high damage meta.
3. she can self heal (notably)

compared to soraka who:

1. her w range leaves her in a terrible position to heal anyone except the very back line which shes usually in anyways trying to land q.
2. sorakas ult is honestly not good, even when used on low health allies with the 10% rune it might be able to what? block the base damage of a single enemy damage ult? Thats crap compared to a cc ult which prevents at least one enemy from doing any damage or for example kayles ult which makes her single target guaranteed to live for 2-3 seconds.
3. soraka's self heal is pretty garbage in most fights because it is so slow compared to enemy damage output.

In addition to this, most of sorakas skills interrupt her movement so her slow goat legs are even worse even though her lack of even a speed buffing skill aside from q which isnt notably fast (and passive which isnt useful during chases or escapes) makes her super easy to catch. Then theres the good ole mechanic where if youve healed 3 times youve lost almost a third of your health. Then theres the root from her e which is so delayed it literally requires the enemy to already be cc'd by an ally or for the enemy to make a moderate mistake to land.

All of this is exacerbated by the fact that she's always focused because of her role as the squishy healer.

most immediate changes required to give her some semblance of usefulness soraka needs a major rework to give her useful damage abilities, useful cc, and a heal which doesnt kill herself and that can also be used on herself. But in the mean time:

1. increase the range on her heal to at least 900. She is too squishy and has no cc or mobility, she should not have to be within 550 range of her target to heal.
2. Reduce the detonation time of equinox to 1s at most and refund some cooldown if no enemy champions are rooted or cause it to persist after detonation for a few seconds and root enemies on contact. This will at least give her a bit of reliability or zone control instead of a nearly useless form of cc that enemies just walk through or that soraka has to rely on enemies to walk into/stay inside of to proc.

Potential changes for a rework P: give her something useful like each successful q stores a charge and once she has x charges she can blink a short distance q: remove the heal over time mechanic and focus this skill on being an effective dps skill, as it is now it's pretty poor due to the delay at range w: revert this to prerework status and tweak ratios to be comparable to similar heals. Soraka says "to heal and protect" but all she does is heal, add an armor buff back and include an equal mr buff. e: this needs a complete rework, needs to be significantly more useful or the cooldown needs to be significantly less. Maybe a single target skill where she buffs a friendly target to heal for a single damage instance (instead of take damage) from an enemy champ and upon blocking damage it will cc the source either with a movement debuff or damage debuff, maybe if it prevents a deat hit will stun the source of damage. idk im sure she could get some really cool e skill here which she really needs becuase currently it's her worst skill (which is saying a lot considering her current w takes her health) r: this should at least increase ally durability for a short duration probably like 15/20/25% for like 4/5/6 seconds. also allow it to optionally be channeled to more slowly regenerate health over time but while providing 30/40/50% damage reduction.