Can we see early game utility buffs to Sona yet?

only zhule·Jul 27, 2017·3 votes·392 views

Yes i know Sona is a powerhouse late game, with super low cooldowns on her basic abilities and a pretty big wheelhouse of power in her passive, but her early game is painfully bad. No hard escape tool, low base movement speed, under whelming offensive and defensive tools, no hard engage/disengage... She basically spends the first 10-ish mins as a liability against most champions. Even after hitting level 6, she's still not that impressive, sure you finally get the ability to set up plays with your ultimate, but she honestly doesn't feel like she really "gets good" till level 11 or higher. It just seems insane to me that you need a lot of CDR items + passive CDR + a lot AP/ heal boost to finally be more then a one trick, per fight, support.

4 Comments

hi hi its zy zyJul 28, 20171 votes

honestly a base ad increase or base movespeed increase is all she needs. due to the nature of her rework, her q damage is COMPLETELY negligible and is focused entirely on the following auto, which promotes interaction in lane (which is good, it's just that right now she does so little damage early besides the auto refresh passive that procs thunderlords decree every 20 seconds that it's not worth trading as her anyway). if you buff her ability numbers, her lategame becomes out of control while her early game isn't weak enough for that tradeoff. she really just needs something in the way of base stats to keep her earlygame from being less painful. movespeed would make her slightly less campable, as she's currently the premier victim of dives due to her only cc being a conditional slow until she hits level 6. a change to her w costing less mana early and scaling to the same cost later could also be helpful (think 70 at rank 1 but still reaching 100 at max rank). but an increase in numbers would be... a lot bigger than it seems because the numbers will be activated so much with the spammy kit.

only zhuleJul 29, 20171 votes

[{quoted}](name=bad sona ults,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=cgik4ywE,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2017-07-28T22:30:32.327+0000)

honestly a base ad increase or base movespeed increase is all she needs. due to the nature of her rework, her q damage is COMPLETELY negligible and is focused entirely on the following auto, which promotes interaction in lane (which is good, it's just that right now she does so little damage early besides the auto refresh passive that procs thunderlords decree every 20 seconds that it's not worth trading as her anyway). if you buff her ability numbers, her lategame becomes out of control while her early game isn't weak enough for that tradeoff. she really just needs something in the way of base stats to keep her earlygame from being less painful. movespeed would make her slightly less campable, as she's currently the premier victim of dives due to her only cc being a conditional slow until she hits level 6. a change to her w costing less mana early and scaling to the same cost later could also be helpful (think 70 at rank 1 but still reaching 100 at max rank). but an increase in numbers would be... a lot bigger than it seems because the numbers will be activated so much with the spammy kit.

This is actually what i want on her, a little more base movement speed would go a long way in helping her survive without giving her "easy outs" to being all-in'd. It's so heart breaking that even being a little to far forward is super punished, not because someone stunned you/pulled you, but because almost everyone is faster. Thus champons can land that extra auto, or ability that was on a 10 second cooldown when the fight started, and there's not much you can do.

I also like you touch on one of the big things about Sona, that being that her damage is really kind of poor in the early game UNLESS you get the auto+ Q + auto reset + bonus damage from Q aura. (Also as an aside, it feels like item 3303 line doesn't proc as often off the combo. Like i use to get auto 3 proc from hitting, now i often only get 1 and sometimes 2 of the triggers.) While i totally agree that giving more power to the ability (assume it doesn't just equal out in the end) is just asking for Sona to become unstoppable if/when games go long, it would be heavenly to finally get a little more power in the early game.

hi hi its zy zyJul 29, 20171 votes

spellthief's got a lot of buffs as we all know (8 gold then 15 gold instead of 5 and 10 and the movespeed passive) but in exchange for that it can only proc once per second (which is why morgana's w is not a reliable proc for it anymore and hitting two champions with one sona q will only grant one proc). it was a stealth nerf that was never really mentioned by riot but it's pretty noticeable. it hurts morgana than any other champion though because of her reliance on w for that proc, but now it will almost only give her one proc and two if they stand in the puddle for more than a second. i think that currently ancient coin gives a broken amount of gold so to help spellthiefs keep up they should either nerf coin or remove that second of lockout on getting your proc