What happens after that bothers me more. Lots of items to analyze on a statement that justifies each change in a bugfix that has zero playtest to actually assess the impact it will have (specially as the skill's effect working correctly would still be accounted for in her power budget), but I'm short on time right now. I'll leave the rest of the post for anyone interested.
So after fixing this, we took a step back and asked, what will this do to Sona's balance? Given that Sona is already borderline "always pick" we were quite worried that she'd gain must-pick status after this fix. We asked what we could do to Sona to make her less powerful at high Elo and competitive play, where she is already most dangerous and the fix to Diminuendo is likely to have the largest impact. We also wanted to not hurt Sona's performance too much for other players, and she's not as relatively strong there (but still strong).
Looking at what makes Sona strong in competitive play, we identified that her early game burst is a major source of power, especially for competitive play. While it's important for champions to have comparative strengths and weaknesses, Sona is a bit too strong in this dimension, even beyond providing a unique strategic niche for her compared to other supports. In short, we think we can make some reductions here while preserving her unique strategic niche and playstyle. Here is the changelist:
- Base Power Chord damage changed to 13/20/27/35/43/52/62/72/82/92/102/112/122/132/147/162/177/192 from 8 + (10 x level)
(This refers to the base, which is still doubled by Power Chord: Staccato.)
These numbers were chosen to hit her early game the hardest, and only provide minor reductions during other parts of the game.
We also identified that late game Sona can become really quite durable, more so than we would like. So we also targeted this as an area to remove power. This was where feedback from players was most valuable to informing our decision, as I asked for and specifically received a lot of input on which durability mechanics on Sona were most important to / noticed by players. Keep in mind though, that reductions here are largely offset by the bug we're fixing, so the overall reduction in durability isn't that big.
Aria of Perseverance
- Bonus Armor and Magic Resistance to self and healed ally reduced to 6/7/8/9/10 from 8/11/14/17/20
- Changed aura bonus Armor and Magic Resistance to 6/7/8/9/10 from 3/6/9/12/15
We wanted to compensate for some of these reductions by increasing Sona's early game durability, which is comically low on live.
- Base Health increased to 450 from 410
- Base Armor increased to 11.3 from 9.3
These are reverts of an earlier nerf we did to Sona's durability in lane, which we no longer feel is necessary.
After testing, we were finding that we hadn't actually lowered Sona's late-game durability perceptibly, between these changes and the bug fix, so we also added this:
- Lowered the duration of Power Chord: Diminuendo to 3 seconds from 4
4 seconds is just a really long time for most debuffs, and we didn't feel that this needed to actually last that long to still have a major impact.
We've been giving Sona a lot of attention in playtests and will of course be watching her performance closely following the patch. I personally really enjoy playing Sona and I'm pretty confident that the last thing that these changes will do is make her unpickable. Ok, I hope this provides some context for upcoming changes, thanks for reading!
