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Soraka's new passive is garbage!

eztarg3t·9/1/2014, 6:53:43 PM·5 votes·2,105 views

Well, at face value. Long post ahead. TL;DR version: Her passive isn't too bad when you look at it from a different perspective.

I previously brought to attention that Soraka's passive would actually convert MR/Armor to Ap. The response about it was...negative, to put it nicely. http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=4825938&highlight= I also didn't like it at first but let me be the Devil's Advocate and try to defend this passive.

I believe people have only looked at this passive at face value without taking into account the rest of her kit. So in this thread, I am going to look at the two abilities that, I believe, influenced the creation of this passive.

Her Q and Her W

Lets look at her Q first. So what do we know about it so far. 1.This is an ability that, when it hits enemy champions, heals her. 2. Her Q will scale "very well" with AP -Vesh 3.We know the blast radius is a bit bigger than Karthus's Lay Waste-Vesh

One of the biggest comments I have seen is, "If Soraka scales really well with Ap, then doesn't that make her passive kinda useless? What's the point of me building armor/MR when I can go full AP?"

You can go full AP if you want but one of the biggest problems of doing that is her W. Lets list the things we know about W:

  1. Soraka trades 10% of her MAXIMUM health to heal an ally.
  2. It's on a low CD.
  3. It has the passive that heals Soraka, not her Q.

Now that we know a bit about her healing, there are two things that I want to point out about her W.

  1. This discourages her from building health because if you do then your Q will become less effective.
  2. Because you are using health to heal your allies, you will be vulnerable.

So back to my previous statement, you can build full Ap. But the way her W was built, it's gonna create situations where the enemy will take advantage of. "But the kit discourages from building tanky as well!" will probably be the obvious response. Well...Sort of. From my understanding there are two types of tanks. Buffering tanks (those that build health.) and Mitigation tanks (those that build armor/MR). The kit most definitely dissuades people from going the buffering tank route.

The one thing I know from both Vesh and Morello is that they didn't want her to build tanky. Why? Well from their account, Tankraka was pretty much one sided.

"You can't kill her allies because she heals them, and you can't kill her because she's tanky. It creates a situation with no clear optimal choice and feels bad for the entire enemy team."-Vesh

So how about that Mitigation tank then? If they didn't do anything with mitigation tank then Riot would just have the exact same problem with Soraka from before. Soraka may no doubt build some mitigation items but they wanted Soraka to have some clear weaknesses, thus the passive.

So at the end of it all you are going to ask yourself as a Soraka player: Do I want to go full AP with no defenses or do I want to throw in some tanky items so I can have a bit of durability. It may not be a lot but last time I checked, 80 Armor is a lot better than 0 Armor.

I would also argue this kinda opens up Soraka item pool because items like Frozen Heart or Guardian Angel actually provide a bit of AP now as well. Even support items like Mikael's Crucible will also provide AP. [BTW, I think Mikael's Crucible will be a must have on Soraka's kit.]

With all of this said I am not saying this kit is perfect. There is a reason why people are being negative about it. I'm just trying to look at this from a more positive light and simply make sense of it all. But by all means keep criticizing it and pick it apart. I would far more prefer a kit to go through hundreds of negative reviews and be blasted rather it go through the PBE with nothing but praise only for it to fall apart once it hit live.

So what are your opinions now? Did I alleviate some of your fears? Or did I make it worse? Tell me what you think, I'm more than happy to discuss the new kit!

20 Comments

Tsunday9/1/2014, 10:09:22 PM3 votes

I love the new passive. Soraka should always build some mitigation because she isn't a burst mage, and she can't 100-0 somebody as a form of protection. If you don't have a clear escape (like a lot of ADCs have a dash) or the ability to combo somebody to their death you really need some sort of defensive stats to make sure you can use your kit to its full potential without dying before you finish your spell rotation and serve your purpose.

But Soraka's defense doesn't come from a massive shield or a huge Armor/MR boost like a normal tank. Tanks normally get bonus scalings on their abilities for building tank. Soraka building tank wouldn't make sense to help her defensive spell, the massive heal. Heals just aren't a tank scaling ability, they're an AP kind of thing, normally. So building AP on Soraka is the same thing as building defensive stats for her team. But building AP is the same thing as not providing yourself with the defensive stats you need to use your kit to its full potential. It doesn't often make sense that building the scaling for a defensive ability leaves you defenseless, but in Soraka's case it does.

Because her W can't heal herself.

If Lulu builds AP and then gets focused she can use that shield on herself, if Nami builds AP and gets focused she can start the Ebb and Flow on herself, if the new Soraka builds AP and gets focused she can hope to land a good Q for a small amount of healing. If Soraka doesn't build AP on the other hand when she tries to heal her poor Miss Fortune, she uses 10% of her own health and Miss Fortune gets a barely noticable heal. AP on a normal support is both an offensive and a defensive stat even though it's gated by cooldowns. AP on Soraka is a selfless stat, and Armor/MR is a selfish stat.

Soraka needs both to do well, but as a healer her primary focus is therefore the selfless AP.

Which is why her passive is so useful. In order to live Soraka is going to want Mikeal's, Locket, Visage, Frozen heart, Randuins, Thornmail, Banshee's--at least a couple of those in every game. She's not going to want to go DCap and Void Staff after her Sightstone. By giving her AP for building those items, it gates Soraka from becoming a useless tank who can't heal things, and it adds to her teammates tanking potential as her heals are now stronger (with the bonus AP) than they were before.

Giving Soraka AP on tank items allows for her to use so many more items to her team's advantage than practically any other support. She can use all of the mage support items, she can use all of the tank items (except things like warmog's) effectively as well. If you built Soraka full tank, she'd still have some AP to go off and heal people with, if you had to get that big ticket tank item over the AP Support item you desperately wanted, you're still getting AP support stats. Soraka's more selfish tank items are now more useful to her team.

Honestly I'm ecstatic to know that when I build my Locket/Crucible (which I'm building for the actives and not the actual stats anyway) I'm benefiting from the stats more than any other Mage Support because I get more AP from it than they do.

Stephenizgod9/1/2014, 7:06:26 PM2 votes

I like the new passive, i feel that it makes sure she wont be too tanky because she only receives 80% of what the item gives and the other 20% goes to AP so building small armor items only gives her a little armor and even less AP. Kinda helps balance her i think.

Origami Kaiju9/1/2014, 7:13:23 PM1 votes

I think you bring up a good point about Soraka's Itemization. Items like Crucible and Frozen Heart will be somewhat enhanced by the AP conversion (of course at the expense of part of their tanky nature)

To be honest, I think we need to see Soraka's kit in action. I think that would give us a lot of insight about how she's effectively going to build and behave in specific situations. I think we can make more informed decisions based on what we see happening on PBE.

But at that time, I do hope that Vesh and the team is honestly willing to compromise and change parts of her kit based on player feedback.

Yukata9/2/2014, 8:44:38 PM1 votes

i think she is balanced right now and see no need for a change

AliceInMadness9/3/2014, 2:36:07 AM1 votes

Dual passives seem so... unelegant? I dont think she needs both, and they dont seem to have any connection with each other. Id like if they dropped one off and reworked the other to compensate. I'll try to be creative here:

option a:Weee wooo weee woooo:

Space unicorn gains increased movement towards low hp allies, a % of the value healed is given an an aoe/ soraka heals for an amount healed from that target(so, she heals additionally only from low hp targets).

Option 2: Martyrism:

Our holy banana deity donates 20% of her own resistances to nearby allied champions, each affected champion grants an amount of ap based on it to her.(so, if she gets a frozen heart, she has 80 armor, and has an aura that grants 20 to her allies, but not herself, and for each one she affects she has additional ap based on the resistances donated or whatever.)

Its just an example so dont bash me for it.