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Soraka feels awful to play now, as a support...

Krys Star·2/21/2020, 12:21:37 AM·1 votes·2,311 views

I love playing Soraka, having accumulated 1.6mil mastery points on her. I own every skin and every chroma for her (excluding Winter Wonder's Ruby chroma b/c I was in a financial rut at the time and couldn't make it). My nickname for the past 16 years is Star, my favorite color is purple, and part of my ign for League includes Star in it. I absolutely love and enjoy playing Soraka, she was my very first buy when I first started playing in spring of 2010, but now...

It just feels so detrimental for the team to pick her, it feels like. I was low on mana before hitting level 2, and I remained oom after hitting 2 due to the enemy team trading with us. Not only that, but I was also extremely low on health, and couldn't afford the risk of trying to land Starcall without dying. Healing has always taken its toll on Soraka, but Rejuvenation helped remedy that a little bit so that you could continue to do your job as a dedicated healer.

Now, not so much anymore, as you lose so much mana trying to sustain yourself and keep your lane partner alive and healthy. Starcall costs a ridiculous amount of mana for what it offers Soraka now, coupled with the 20 reduced mana per level, and even the reduced movement speed Starcall gives now makes it so hard to get away from the enemy when you're trying to rebuild your health back up, or just trying to escape, because now it's scary to attempt to trade with the enemy team.

I get Soraka was out of hand top lane, which wasn't her fault at all but the current state of top lane instead. The changes she received were aimed at kicking her out of top lane while trying to maintain her role as a support. The aim was off, however, as I and so many others called out. Soraka struggles to perform as a healer now, given the tools she needed to survive were cut down hard.

Early game is too hard as Soraka now, and transitioning into mid game is even harder, because you're so dependent on trying to max out Starcall and Astral Infusion, but you can't leave Starcall at rank 1 because of its long cooldown and the minimal health and speed it gives Soraka and her rejuvenated ally. Maxing out Astral Infusion first hurts, maxing out Starcall first hurts, and alternating between the two hurts, and even then you're constantly low health and low mana and it's too risky to try rejuvenating yourself anymore.

I really hope a Rioter sees this and comments, and helps Soraka out, because she feels terrible to play as now. She needs help, and I realize lolalytics isn't accurate, but she went from S tier to B- as a support, from a 53% average win rate to 46.55% win rate. If you were willing to hotfix Yuumi and Akali to get them in line after their heavy adjustments, I don't see why you couldn't for Soraka.

Allow Starcall's Rejuvenate to enhance itself by 25% per champion struck beyond the first. That, or revert her entire nerfs and move Rejuvenate onto Astral Infusion instead, so that Soraka can't function top lane without maxing out Astral Infusion, which in turns hurts herself more by not being able to max out Starcall first instead. Please help Soraka, Riot.

TL;DR - Soraka is in a horrible state right now, post-nerfs. Hitting her top lane while maintaining her support missed the mark by a mile.

8 Comments

UpDownLeftRightAB2/21/2020, 12:45:26 AM9 votes

Riot thanks you for your purchase. No Refunds.

LanceTheJungler2/21/2020, 12:59:10 AM5 votes

I like the idea of increasing Soraka's selfheal based on how many targets she hits. Doesn't effect her top lane and is a situational buff to support.

Illabethe2/21/2020, 2:09:26 AM3 votes

And..... I predicted this as it was PBE'd. No one listened. I got downvoted. All because of a 1.6-2.4% Top Pick rate.

Her heals are now so weak, teams don't even need grievous wounds to kill her. With Grievous wounds, they can insta kill her without even playing correctly.

Krinu2/21/2020, 2:10:00 AM2 votes

While she's not completely worthless - there have been more brutal dumpsterings in the past - the changes that were supposed to be "support neutral" are anything but.

The Starcall nerfs brutally hammered her ability to deal with enemy poke. It used to be that if Soraka went in and landed her Q, she could even take an autoattack from the enemy ADC and still come out ahead in terms of trading. Now, with the massively reduced Q healing, that isn't the case any more. To make matters worse, it's also more expensive, doesn't give as much of a movespeed bonus to get away from an enemy engage support, and the window to take advantage of the Rejuvenation is dramatically reduced.

The Astral Infusion healing buff is completely irrelevant. Twenty bonus health on the max-rank heal is a joke. The reduced cost heals with Rejuvenation would be nice, except that we can't use the damn bonus effectively until we're sitting on, again, maximum CDR and a fully ranked up Astral Infusion.

Fixing her is simple, too: Nerf the healing gained from leveling her Q and W up beyond level 1 and her R's healing by, oh, half. Then add a passive to her that increases the effect of shield and heal power by 300-500%, scaling with level. She can still go top lane and build AP... but unless she builds Ardent Censer and Mikhael's Crucible as first items, she'll just be a really weak version of Karthus. If she DOES build those, she won't be able to push a lane or bully her opponent.

Really, this is a side effect of supports still being balanced around having two thirds the gold income of a solo lane, but that's a separate (and much larger) issue that we don't need to fix right now. Just make it mandatory for support soraka to build items that are useless for fighting by herself, and we can have our goat healer back.

fƒ152/21/2020, 2:27:49 AM2 votes

Completely agree. The changes that should have been made and would have been so easy to make would have been for them to simply gut her stats or damage when teammates aren't around. She wouldn't have been so great top anymore, but Support wouldn't be affected at all. Which would have been perfect because the Nerf literally said it was aimed towards Soraka Top entirely, and not her place as support. This change feels horrible for Soraka players like us and I 100% feel your disappointment in these changes as well :(

BenBaxter2/21/2020, 1:10:19 PM1 votes

I can feel you , but oh no they will never nerf nami leona and senna.