Soraka needs a minor change to her "W" passive.

With the change to soraka, there is a minor problem with her gameplay. While the overall idea is interesting and balanced in theory, in practice, there is some unique problems and flaws with the overall design. The biggest flaw comes from the hp cost of soraka's "w". Riot tried to balance this by creating a system where landing a "Q" on enemy champions would give you more hp to continue healing- in essence, if you can land the "Q" skillshot, you can heal more frequently and continue Riot's philosophy of "higher skill should yield higher rewards". In laning phase and teamfights, this works as it should, your low mana cost and decent cd on "Q" gives you plenty of chances to heal up as you heal your marksman (unless the enemy marksman is Lucian, in which case, much harder). In teamfights, soraka is able to land plenty of "Q"'s allowing her to be the premiere healer Riot intended. Where her kit fails is in 2 very common situations in today's meta: During epic monster fights and sieging. Both scenarios involve intensive poking on both sides, usually until one side concedes or team fight occurs. Soraka is faced with an unusual problem in these scenarios, her "Q" range doesn't allow her to safely poke to heal herself up, so that she may heal her allies in return. In order to land a "Q", she must either risk getting into any potential cc range or just opt to sit in the back line and only heal at her own risk. The safe play is obviously to sit back, since getting cc'ed would spell instant death for soraka. The only way to dish out additional healing in these scenarios during "safe play" is to build hp regen... Which leads to a second problem of Soraka's mechanincs. There are currently few item choices for soraka in order to get hp regen- Locket of the Iron Solari, Talisman of Ascension, Spirit Visage and Warmogs. Talisman is currently the ONLY support item option for soraka as it is her only safe item and gives her the safest gameplay. Locket is also very practical and Warmogs and Spirit Visage sounds good in theory but both have a similar problem when built on soraka. Soraka's "W" is based off MAX HP (and a solid 10% of it), meaning that all that hp regen doesnt counter your self-sacrificing issue if you have too much hp. In order to counter this, Riot should consider the following 2 ideas: 1) there should be additional hp regen items (which I have noticed Riot IS working on in beta, though would like to see it go through) and 2) soraka's "Q" should heal her when attacking EPIC MONSTERS. Soraka has negligible damage during dragon and baron attempts and her main form of contribution is by healing. Unfortunately, she is limited to the number of heals she can do since her "W" is based off max hp and tanking a dragon to help team would limit her even further. By allowing her to heal off dragon, she would be able to contribute more to those attempts (especially in the early stages of the game) while maintaining her role, and this shouldn't create a rise in "jungle raka's" since it would only apply to epic monsters and her damage is low enough to prevent her from soloing it.