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Soraka & Stat Scaling

Krinu·2/10/2015, 9:04:25 PM·5 votes·1,608 views

So! Soraka. Everybody's favorite banana-tosser, recently reworked to make her... well, I suppose "not broken" is the best way to put it. Her rework largely accomplished that, too. Some of the vagaries of her new kit strike me as a bit off, though, and I'd like to touch on them briefly.

My biggest issue with her is the somewhat odd stat scaling quirks the 10% health cost on her W have given her. Specifically, she's one of the few champions that is actively punished for getting health on items. There are others with similar mechanics, like Irelia preferring to go for armor or magic resistance to increase her toughness rather than health due to the static healing on Hiten Style, but none so severe as Sorka's distaste for health.

The problem is that while the cost of her W scales with her health, her regeneration (either natural or from dropping her Q on an enemy champion) and her output don't. This makes the only benefit to health a slight increase in time to live when attacked... but it also brings a corresponding decrease to her sustain. It's entirely possible to end up with her W actually costing more health than it heals for. If you're above level 8 with a sightstone and only one rank in your W, it's a net health loss to cast it. You can still use it to save a carry, but forget about sustaining with it - and I'm of the opinion that the league's preeminent healer probably shouldn't get into a situation where she loses more health than she gains.

While that would be an interesting way to differentiate between a "support Soraka" and a "mage Soraka," her Q and E's weak damage, weak scaling, and prohibitive mana costs have resulted in her mage secondary being more of a legacy element than a viable role. As a result, she only has one build path and one role, which pigeonholes her pretty heavily.

"Okay, Krinu, that's nice," you say, "so just don't build a lot of health! There are a ton of defensive items that don't have health on them. Get those instead."

This is true! There are many items I can build that don't have health. The problem is that many of the health regeneration items that Soraka desperately needs to fuel her W also have health on them. Furthermore, Soraka is probably one of the squishiest and least mobile champions in the game... with the result that she has to be very careful where she stands, since a stern glance from the enemy ADC can send her back to the fountain. Now, you can argue that these just raise the skill cap on her, and to a certain degree that's true... it's also really frustrating to be forced into buying health (either because I need the effective health or because it's on an item with another effect I need, like a sightstone) and watching my ability to sustain in lane plummet.

So how do we fix this? Well, there a couple ways. First, let's look at the constraints:

  1. We want to keep (and ideally reinforce) the gap between Soraka's ability to be a mage and her ability to be a support. Champions that can do everything with a single build are generally overpowered as hell.
  2. We want to ensure that she doesn't end up able to sustain healing forever, because getting out of that paradigm was the point of adding health costs to her W in the first place.
  3. As a lesser priority, I'd personally like to see her ability to play a secondary mage brought back up to the point where it isn't a complete joke.

Fixing the "health is bad" problem is actually quite simple with an addition to her passive: "Passive health regeneration and healing gained from Astral Infusion's passive effect are increased by (bonus health / (529 + (78 * Soraka's level))%."

While the math looks ugly, all this does is increase her regeneration and astral infusion healing by the percentage amount of bonus health she has, so that they fill the same amount of her health bar. Since her Q and health regeneration aren't intended to counteract combat damage - she isn't Garen or Mundo, and won't end up with that kind of regen any time soon - but instead used to offset the cost of her W when used on allies, giving a boost to those sources of healing seems like a reasonable way to make sure she isn't punished for building health.

The second part - making her mage aspect not suck horribly, and preventing her from doing both things with a single item path - can actually stem from the same source. If you adjust bonus health so that it isn't terrible, it isn't that big of a leap to go from there to bonus health being actively good. Imagine that, instead of an AP scalar, Astral Infusion's heal scaled with her bonus health. Combine that with a nerf to her Q and E baseline damage and a boost to their AP scaling, and suddenly you have two build paths: A support-oriented path that builds stamina, support gear, and maybe a mana item alongside a mage-oriented path that focuses on the traditional AP/penetration setup.

I don't know. I'm mostly rambling now. What do you folks think? Is this actually an issue, or is Soraka fine and do I need to go crawl back to solo queue with the rest of the filthy casuals?

3 Comments

SlytherinUmbreon2/10/2015, 9:30:52 PM2 votes

This is a very long and intelligent post. Too bad nothing reasonable is going to happen to Soraka because Riot hates passive champions and thinks healing is unfun. "Soraka is only slightly stronger then we'd like, has a slow, a heal with a massive cost, and an AoE silence-wombo-root that has a base power of 140-460 + 80%AP and provides over 3 seconds of CC on a single ability if landed. Better nerf her heal." -And for the record, I'm not saying equinox is broken. I just find it absolutely ridiculous that A) Riot chose to nerf Soraka almost immediately after her rework and B) of all of the things... They chose to nerf her health regen to indirectly nerf her heal while such an overloaded ability was literally RIGHT next to it... Rammus Ok.

MercX2/10/2015, 10:03:06 PM2 votes

Not sure if i'm understanding the math right there. Using Bonus hp as 1500 at lvl 18 i get a .78% increase which would be .0078 increase which doesn't seem to be much at all seeing how 1500 bonus is one of the most reasonable for a support to be bale to get unless she's 'fed'. Could be that I have trouble interpreting it though.

But alas, Riot has no intention once so ever to buff soraka. She will literally only get more nerfs as the season continues. Riot has hinted numerous times that if it were not for the fan base, she would be completely removed from the league. Her skill cap is very much indeed pretty high now and has very high risks with low returns outside her silence and ult where almost no risk is present and the return is decent.

One of the things that Soraka lacks is the incentive to build AP like the other supports. While she has a nice AP ratio, the odds of getting her AP is not good due to her forced support role. One thing that could be added above would have been the decrease of %age to her W cost in relation to the amount of AP she has. So at X ap the health cost is 9% instead of 10 or it increases her base HP regen. Important to make it base not not bonus regen. She lost that support perk she had when they made her what she is today.

The one champ that you barely get AP, cant build HP but yet all her abilities revolve around the 2.

Krinu2/10/2015, 10:44:18 PM1 votes

Herp. That's the multiplier, not the percentage. Multiply that by one hundred. So, using your example, with 1500 bonus health and an 1855 base health at 18, she'd have: (1500 / 1855) * 100 = 80.8% more regen/selfhealing from her Q. It's literally just to keep the "amount of health bar" restored the same.

As for the healer thing... the only reason healers don't work is because they turn games from a complex mix of trades, sustain, and positioning into a very simple game of "who can out-DPS the healer." With her rework, however, she can't just heal until the cows come home, so trades have an impact. She's healing, yes, but a better description would be that she's moving damage from her carry to herself.

If anything, I'd like to see that emphasized. Instead of having her be a "healer" have her be a "health pool" for her carry when she's being a support.

Hmm... that would actually be pretty fun. Have her Q and E scale their damage better with a lower baseline (to allow an AP build to be a mage and to prevent her support poke from being absurd), while have her W (and the heal from her Q) scale with her health pool.