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Sona's balance problem

The Tank Man·12/11/2017, 3:44:43 AM·5 votes·1,159 views
Patch 6.14 notes

tldr buff ult nerf auras

Sona has received minor changes in an attempt to balance her, but the big reshaping of her kit was in patch 6.14, which made her ult give her basic abilities cooldown reduction.

Things have been quiet for Sona over the past few seasons, so the sheer volume of changes here may look intimidating. In actuality, they all lead to one simple outcome: “Sona plays more music.” Let’s begin.

Sona shares a problem with many supports: it feels like she’s not doing much, even when she’s doing a lot. To tackle that problem, we’re playing into her unique game of musical buffs. Here's how it works: as fights unfold, Sona cycles between abilities, sending pulses of utility to nearby allies. Spellcasting activates Power Chord, offering Sona choices in how to neutralize her foes. These strengths grant Sona flexibility as the maven of extended engagements.

Here's where the feel-bad problem lies: Sona’s cadence is too slow to fulfill that fantasy. Dead air between beats creates downtime for both auras and Power Chords, relegating Sona to the background track. A remastered Crescendo passive solves that problem as Sona levels up, combining with cooldown reduction to cut her basic ability cooldowns by up to 67%. Understandably, we're adjusting the rest of Sona's kit to ensure she doesn’t go off the rails. Overall, Sona’s left with clearer purpose: transform fights into endless streams of song (and utility) as she scales into late-game.

I may just not appreciate the stuff about music because I play league with the sound off, but apart from that the problem the patch tried to address was that "it feels like she’s not doing much, even when she’s doing a lot". Unnoticed power is an issue because people want to feel like they're contributing to winning and want to be noticed for what they're doing, but supports, especially aura supports, often suffer from abilities that do a lot to make their team win but aren't very noticeable. I agree up to this point, this is a problem.

I don't think they dealt with the problem of sona not feeling like she does a lot despite actually doing a lot correctly though. Sona has insanely strong scaling with her auras because they get down to such low cooldowns, but because her basic abilities offer small, subtle, and supportive power they aren't recognized as the crazy strong teamfight carrying auras they actually are. But rather have power shifted to more noticeable abilities, sona got even more abilities giving subtle power.

As context about sona, I think her ult is her most iconic, flashy, noticeable, obviously powerful ability. When you think of big sona plays, you think crescendo. But as far as her actual power, I think a lot of it is in her auras. I'm pretty sure I could get to diamond 5 on sona without ever ulting (well, that was before nerfs, I'm not sure about now). Her auras are actually super strong because she can spam so many of them and outscale that way. How her basic abilities feel doesn't reflect that strength though. Her ult, on the other hand, feels and seems extremely strong and has very clear cases of "wow, sona just hit a great ult" where it's very easy to see the connection between what sona did and why sona won.

So if you accept that her ult is her obviously powerful ability and her basic abilities are more subtle sources of power, it seems wrong to address the problem of not feeling strong by increasing the quantity of basic abilities. Since her ult is the ability with clear skill expression, that should be how she is made to feel stronger.

The aura cdr on ult should be removed and compensated for with power that feels like power.

For one thing, sona's kit isn't really in line with other supports because she outscales them but to compensate has almost no hard cc early game. Her ult is on a 140 second cooldown at level 6, and that's it. As a result I often just mentally afk early/mid game on sona and do nothing because a) I'll outscale later and b) there's nothing I can do now. So sona's ult should be on a lower cooldown early (maybe just make it 100s at all ranks).

Her passive is another form of skill expression although I don't think it's as obvious, especially her w is extremely strong but often unnoticed. But even so it would be something else to make it feel like "sona just did something" when sona does something. So maybe when sona ults her next power chord could stun or do double its normal effect.

It would also be nice to make her ult a bit wider or start a bit farther back or something, because sometimes the current ult can miss people right next to you.

I'm not sure exactly what changes would be good or the specific numbers, but I think the main thing is they give power to her ult rather than auras spam, because her ult is what feels like it does a lot, not her auras.

5 Comments

delalb12/13/2017, 5:48:45 AM1 votes

The ability to spam abilities is what riot is trying to define Sona's identity. So they wanna keep it somewhat in this way.

So they will keep basic abilities to be spamable n being powerful especially late game, while keeping crescendo somewhat in a weaker state.

So they will try to balance her abilities values, instead of mini-rework.

Moreover, Sona's abilities already has too many kits off one ability: it has effect, aura n powerchord, while ult lowers her abilities cd. That would be way too much if u keep on adding extra stuff on top of what she already has. That's unfair to other champions.

chipndip112/13/2017, 7:38:23 AM1 votes

The entire foundation needs to be scrapped, TTM. Like, dead serious.

  • The ult is super basic, but super influential. It's basically just a fat STOP button.

  • The auras may or may not be super influential (they are, obviously), but they don't FEEL like it and it's hard for people to realize that you're getting something started with them. They ramp up in the later stages of the game, but until then they're REALLY crummy.

  • The active abilities, save her W, are basically horse shit.

  • Her power chords, although nice to have, are outdated. What these power chords bring is actually cool, more or less. The application is done clumsily...at least for 2017, moving onto 2018.

The problem we have here is that Sona's ult is considered super strong because it's highly effective AND super easy to learn how to use. With an ult like that, Riot's not gonna want to give Sona a stronger basic kit.

The OTHER problem is that Sona's auras are always split 5 ways, even when there's 1 to 2 people around. So you give someone a shield? Your shield is gonna HAVE to be crap because that shield could be many more shields at the same value. Give someone a little AA buff? That, too, has to be crap because it easily could be 5 AA buffs.

THEN there's the issue where Riot encourages a 325 movement speed Enchanter who just had her armor and defensive spell nerfed to walk within a dash's range of someone to use an auto-attack. Hell, before all this, we already saw a Kog'Maw and a Lulu just straight decimate a Sona off of a Kog'Maw's W during Worlds. Like...the hell? I've always said and will always say this: 550 range makes NO sense for enchanters to be fighting at. Changing Janna to that? Makes no sense (like, the dumb passive doesn't add enough damage to make it worthwhile). Sona still being like that? ALSO makes no sense. You're just asking to get wiped.

Honestly, Sona can be a offense-prone, aoe enchanter that loves team fights. I love Sona for that very thing. HOWEVER, the auras? Gotta go. The automated spells? Also gotta go. The ult? ...I actually kinda like the ult...but it COULD go if it had to. League in 2018 doesn't embrace this play pattern anymore. This is just me being honest.