I was poking around as Sona lately and I noticed a few things.
One is that she's squishy. That, of course, is whatever... But on the item recommendation list there is no Tear of the Goddess. In fact there's a distinct lack of mana related items, even though I almost always end up running low/out of mana during intense team fights at the midpoint of the game.
Did Tear Sona fall out of favor or what what?
Succubús GF1 votesShe doesn't fully use it enough. And there are quite a bit of mana items on her recommended o.o
LadyRenly1 votestear takes a while to stack,honestly you're better off going sheen into lich bane
Julanus1 votesI haven't played Sona much since her rework, so take this with a grain of salt. :P
Anyway, prior to her rework, she had fairly short cooldowns. It helped her build up Tear stacks without needing to wait very long for abilities to come off cooldown.
Nowadays, it just feels like her cooldowns are a bit too long to really utilize Tear's passive without just "spamming" abilities when they're off cooldown. Unfortunately, that could mean the difference between winning a fight and losing one because your abilities had another 2 seconds.
Rushing an Archangel's Staff could help, moreso for a Solo lane Sona, but it'd probably stunt Support Sona's growth and delay much of the utility she could be providing with Locket's shields or Zeke's extra damage instead.
Similarly, the longer cooldowns kinda hurt her usage of Sheen (though removing the AP on Sheen didn't exactly help either). I always enjoyed going Lich Bane and/or Iceborn Gauntlet on her.
Funny enough, if you built both Lich Bane and Iceborn Gauntlet, you'd get Lich Bane's damage and Iceborn Gauntlet's AoE Slow. Wonder if it still works like that..
Wolfbanez121 votesROA works on her if you get a lead or not support
Aeolian Melodies1 votesWhile she does "use it well" in the sense that she fills a TotG very quickly, she does not "use it well" in the sense that it brings very little to support Sona. Tear alone is just mana, and while it helps Sona's mana whore issues, she can solve it with items that also brings her+her team more. AA staff is very expensive on a support budget.
Miku Lv991 votesIf you want mana, you can make Frost Fang and Mikael's and you'll have plenty and they do more useful things for her.
Tsen1 votesBack when I first started playing her, I bought tear every game though, lol. i haven't had mana issues with her with that mana mastery + frostqueen. If I do find myself getting in free spam, my go to items is probably 
into 
or 
. Tear is cheap and nice, but upgrading it into seraph's takes too much effort.
