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How to Nerf Sona

WhiteAcres·6/17/2019, 9:01:57 AM·3 votes·2,508 views

(TLDR at bottom)

So it's no secret that Sona is pretty strong at the moment. She's currently rocking a 53% win rate, has a pretty high pick-rate, and has even been seeing quite a bit of playtime in the professional scene too (even without any additional funneling or a Taric on her team).

The real issue though is how impactful her ability-spam is in the later stages of the game. With 45% CDR at level 16, all of her basic abilities only have a few seconds of cool-down. Combine this with the fact that she typically builds a lot of mana-regen items such as item 3040, item 3174, and item 3504, she's able to spam heals, shields, and speed-ups for her entire team pretty much non-stop around mid-late game.

Now personally, I'm actually a very big fan of Sona (I have over 1 million mastery points on her), but I'm not so bias that I'll refuse recognize when she's a bit on the OP side; however, I also don't want her to get nerfed in such a way that makes her early laning-phase even more awful than it currently is, or changes how she's fundamentally played.

Here's my proposal:

Make sona's aura effects scale with how far away her team-mates are.

Right now, all of Sona's auras have an impact radius of 400 units, meaning she can pretty easily apply the shield, speed-up, and slight damage-boot from her abilities to all of her teammates many times throughout a team fight.

Now I would imagine it would feel pretty bad for the Sona player if Rito were to remove some of the effects entirely for the 400 unit range, so to be more specific I'd suggest having a few different "layers" for it's impact. For example:

  • From 400 units to 300 units away from Sona, have the effects of each aura become 75% of live value.
  • From 300 units to 200 units away from Sona, have the effects of each aura become 90% of live value.
  • From 200 units to 0 units away from Sona, have the effects of each aura become 110% of live value.

~ Here's a visualization ~

We'd go from this current setup: https://imgur.com/VpOoEir

To this sort of setup: https://imgur.com/yH1Btct https://imgur.com/BeDkecH

This change does a couple of things:

First, it makes Sona a bit more visceral as a champion, since it requires the player to move around a bit more to tag their teammates with the best buff for each aura.

Second, it makes her laning phase just a bit stronger, since it should be pretty easy to for her to tag her lane-partner with the best piece of the aura.

Third, it nerfs Sonas late-game aura spam by both making it harder for her to tag all of her allies with the best aura, and if she is tagging them with the best auras, then her team would be pretty susceptible to AOE and Hard-Engage abilities: https://imgur.com/fvKCSYe

TLDR: Sona's auras should scale a bit with distance to allies.

6 Comments

NoPaxt6/17/2019, 9:18:34 AM2 votes

Just learn to position and you won't have to hate her.

GreenKnight6/17/2019, 12:29:07 PM2 votes

Sona is strong again? What year is this?

DuskDaUmbreon6/17/2019, 10:23:43 AM1 votes

I mean, that's interesting, but I'd like it to have more range then, so that you don't have to be literally inside of Sona's hitbox to get the best heal, and Riot'd have to redo who the heal chooses to make it not heal stupidly (Because it healing the lowest-health champ but them only getting like 5% would be fucking stupid).

And Sona should either be able to increase the tier of the buff by getting closer (so if it starts off with 75% but I close the distance a bit more it goes up to 90%), or the threshold needs replaced with a smooth scaling (So that it goes down to whatever minimum percent at max range and is always proportionally stronger the closer you are to her, rather than it just being 75% at 300-400 units out and 90% at 200-300, with no 85% ever used). Both at the same time might end up problematic coding-wise, but one or the other should be fine.

Silent Reaper6/17/2019, 1:32:51 PM1 votes

I'm seeing this issue with alot of strong champions where riot tries to balance powerful kits with big hit boxes....sona, aatrox and hecarim come to mind. The main issue with Sona is her laning phase is actually pretty decent and her Q poke when practiced is quite safe/powerful. And her scaling aura touch is quite powerful too.

However what really puts her leagues ahead is that her ult is an AOE nuke stun. Being able to say "sit" to an entire team REALLY powerful, especially when you consider that she can position herself with flash to guartunee the stun lock on prime targets (usually hitting 3 or more people) for 1.5 seconds.

If Sona needed any tuning, I would say making her ult smaller or longer cast time. For reference, Leona ult has about 1/3 the size of Sona ult (not to mention the stun isnt guartuneed) and the delay is 1/3 the cast time of Leona ult.