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So, Soraka

UBcrawlin·10/19/2015, 6:54:56 PM·6 votes·1,898 views

Okay so maybe I'm missing something here, or I'm blinded by frustration. Soraka is a champion that seems to have borderline zero counterplay. From what I can tell the only way to effectively kill her is extremely long range burst that can burst through a relatively tanky build. I've played multiple games this week where Soraka and her adc were COMPLETELY and entirely shut down and essentially farmed as minions in bot lane only to seemingly hyper scale into a late game monster.

Soraka's laning phase is fine and weak if anything. The problem is her teamfight. She has absurd sustain for her team if you don't focus her. Now, any decent player that is reading this is getting annoyed that you're reading a post about someone stupid enough not to focus Soraka. I understand that she is an extremely high value target. She is nearly immune to poke wars between her q and w healing her self and her team. Hitting a Q on a group of enemy champions is not difficult. If you try to dps her team she will sustain her front lines far beyond your adc and mid damage.

If you have a burst oriented team she will ult halfway through your burst combo and you will find it extremely difficult to burst her team fast enough to keep her a nonfactor. If you have an assassin (the supposed counter to immobile high value targets) she will sit back with her aoe silence and drop it as soon as you use your gap closer making you completely useless. If you have a hard engage tank she will silence any follow up to the tanks initiation long enough to heal up any damage done by your tank who is now stuck in a close combat fight with Soraka's front line champions that are receiving endless heals. Morello's is a great item against heals, but only if you can get the team below 40% which is excruciatingly difficult against Soraka in the first place, let alone against her ult that removes grievous wounds BEFORE applying the ultimate global heal.

My first instinct was to take away her extremely strong teamfight presence by split pushing and creating a situation where her heals can not be applied to anyone in danger. This strategy is countered by her ultimate having an enormous heal on a global ability. My second thought was to bait her silence out and then engage while it is on cooldown. So I did that, only to find that her silence was only on a 9.6 second cooldown. Most gap closers have a similar cooldown which makes these type of engages very cyclic in nature. Even if you take zero damage "faking" an engage, which would be an accomplishment in itself, you now have less than 10 seconds for your gap closer to come off cooldown and for you to engage and kills soraka, through her q, through her ult, and through her team. So that is where my frustration with the champion is coming from, the ability for her to draw so much necessary focus while also having the tools to make focusing her extremely difficult.

That being said I'm obviously missing something and would like to hear about the way you guys have been playing against her effectively.

Additional thoughts following your input:

Blitzcrank can isolate a target from Soraka's team making it difficult and dangerous for her to attempt to save them. Her lack of hard engage tools also allow a stand-off situation where a blitzcrank can do well.

Long-Range hypercarries pose a problem to Soraka because they deal so much damage so quickly that she can't keep up. E.g. Jinx and Kog'maw

The meta seems to heavily favor Soraka because of the very strong top lane juggernauts in this patch. The prevalence of teleport also negates some of the potential aggression from opposing junglers because of how frequent top laners teleport to bot lane. This helps her to get to late game as well as supplies her with a strong frontline.

Her mid game seems to be her weak point where team fights are breaking out but she can't sustain her team as well as when she gets more items. This is definitely exploitable. It is a little annoying because players in solo queue don't know how to end games quickly until they get to very high elo.

46 Comments

Zorae4210/19/2015, 7:59:30 PM11 votes

She's terrible against hyper carry ADCs that don't care if they get silenced and can burst through her healing.

Unless someone else on the team has lots of hard CC, VayneDraven Jinx (and even MasterYi if he dodges her silence properly) get to walk all over her team and do more dmg than she can heal through. Especially if they have a Blitz pulling her ADC out of healing range.

IcyPepper10/19/2015, 9:27:48 PM2 votes

There's a reason her heal costs her own health to use.

If she grabs warmogs, it's usually a "win harder" item and she needs another health item beforehand to get it, so you at least know what she's doing. If the game goes on long enough for the support to get full build, eh...

Her Q should be easy enough to dodge, so if you can at least avoid that it cuts down on her teammates' sustain. On the bright side, she doesn't have hard cc like Leona does (well, if you just stand on her E tho...).

Honestly, if we wanted to "fix" Soraka we would have to "fix" equally frustrating champions. Soraka changes the game a bit by existing, just like how Blitzcrank does.

LVL 5 PORO10/19/2015, 8:43:29 PM1 votes

Soraka can be incredibly oppressive in the laning phase but 99.9% of ADCs dont know how to play with her so a Soraka lane is usually a farm fest. That said, I think shes pretty balanced.

magic pole10/19/2015, 8:51:30 PM1 votes

soraka lane is oppressive as hell.

cheerfully awaiting nerfs. For all you naysayers, she will be nerfed. Wait for it

Ipols10/19/2015, 9:01:30 PM1 votes

Man put some paragraphs in there, my eyes are bleeding

Br4ndon10/19/2015, 9:08:22 PM1 votes

As a Soraka main my suggestion would be to play strong dive champion/comps against her. High burst also helps a lot.

Soraka just cant handle people diving on her. Burst champions that hit multiple people like talon or jinx are extremely strong against her. In fact i havnt won a single game this year against a talon as soraka.

Don't be afraid to ignore soraka to kill the ADC or APC if you have multiple fed people on your team. Soraka simply cant keep up with the damage or it happens too fast.

Kat Head10/19/2015, 9:10:04 PM1 votes

Soraka is simply to good at what she does. She heals for to much to often in and out of lane. She basically counters and invalidates an entire role in the game (assassins not named Rengar or Talon), and completely shuts down or has to much synergy with Juggernauts. Her aoe silence is crazy strong. She is so boring to play and to play against, sona has to expose her self to be relevant. Why can Soraka sit in the back completely safe while carrying her team ?

I know healing is supposed to be her thing, but she is just to safe atm. Something in her kit has to change, or something in the meta has to change to counter her HARD. She needs kit changes to be balanced, if her heal received the nerf it needs or her silence received the nerf it needs she would suck, I am not advocating for soraka to suck.

Krys Star10/19/2015, 9:17:19 PM1 votes

Your post is really hard to read... The cluster of words and lack of spacing is a strain on the eyes. :x I think Soraka is balanced, just she's very frustrating to play against because of her role: healer. She does her job well, which is keeping her allies alive. She has no hard cc, no damage, and no peels. She doesn't bring much to a team other than keeping her allies alive and following up her allies' combos with her silence if she can. They could maybe reduce the healing on her W at early ranks, while also giving her a scaling health % cost instead of flat 10% since it's her laning that is obnoxious.

740+ games as Soraka and counting.

Sypher The Poro10/19/2015, 9:26:14 PM1 votes

I see a lot of people saying stuff about how she's getting more popular, and others saying she's good in this meta. And yes to both.

Season 4 was the League of Assassins, games were fast with lots of flashy plays and people dying left and right. Soraka was horrible here due to either herself getting bursted, or the adc/mid carry getting bursted before she can heal them. However, in the current meta fights tend to take longer due to an overall tanker team with the Cinderhulk addition and Juggernaut changes. Soraka forces you to either A) Kill her first while allowing the Darius to wreck your team or B) Try to blow up the tanky Darius before Soraka can heal him to prevent a lost teamfight.

People used to complain "Oh, I see Zed every game he's cancer" because in the last meta he was incredibly good, where as this meta it's all about the long haul where Soraka excels.

The best way to counter her is an AP Carry with high AoE build Morell, or ignite the target your team is trying to focus down as soon as the fight starts. Take a good pick comp with people like Blitz or Xin that can either pull Soraka to you or force her team away in order to focus her down. Soraka pays a pretty hefty price with her healing, so even with a tanky build the 10% HP per heal hurts her a ton.

LaySF10/19/2015, 10:01:07 PM1 votes

Block of text - did not read.

Krinu10/19/2015, 10:28:36 PM1 votes

Disclaimer: Soraka main here.

Soraka's a healer. With how buggy her E is and the essentially nonexistent damage on her Q, that's all she reliably can do. As a result, even minor tweaks to her ability to her ability to heal risks skewing her performance very heavily.

Is she too powerful right now? Possibly. In fact, I'd even say probably... but that has more to do with the meta than any major innate balance issues. Soraka's main vulnerabilities are burst damage (either to her carries or herself) and her own very squishy and immobile nature. Juggernauts are relatively slow fighters with a lot of health and long staying power in fights. They can't chase down Soraka easily, they make a great front-line for her because she has time to patch up their wounds before they die, and they're not going spread grievous wounds around.

Any nerfs that are applied either need to be surgical (3AD!) or large but compensated with some de-specialization. I personally would prefer no nerfs at all, and let the meta shift take her of bringing her down, but if the meta gets stuck I can understand why they'd want to make a change.

CasterGilgamesh10/19/2015, 11:07:12 PM1 votes

soraka main here

  1. she only has healing
  2. she cant do anything by herself
  3. her CC is very weak
  4. many other supports Offer more CC and Peel now these points i made are very important. Soraka's only CC is a slow and a Silence and a Root now hear me out her Slow takes a some time to get to a certain spot and not only that but you get a notice ahead of time giving plenty of time to dodge and it deals very small amount of damage.now take Bard who has a slow thats much stronger plus higher damage and if he hits two things it stuns both targets.then soraka has a Silence this silence is easy to walk out of even if the target is slowed now she also gets a root which is good but the target needs to be CC'ed down to keep them in her feild long enough for them to get rooted which means its very unreliable in both laning and team fights.now take per say Blitzcrank he has an AOE silence that deals a lot of damage to peel for his carries plus he gets a knock up and a pull letting him chain CC one target to the ground. soraka GOD like healing letting her create a miracle where other supports would simply have to leave there carries BUT she loses 10% of her health to do so plus her ult she also needs to be close to her adc to do this meaning the other team can focus her if they chose to but they never do...this is their fault since they don't understand soraka is a kind of "carry support" she is the center of a team honestly people should be devoting a whole team comp just to help soraka stay alive.but lets look at janna Janna she is almost the perfect disengaged support who has an ult that blows away all enemies that get onto her adc plus she heals all her team in it AND she can be good in any team comp soraka needs a team comp that has a strong front line since anyone with half a brain knows to focus her since she has to build AP to matter. overall i dont understand why people see soraka as over powered since she is probably at her most balanced this season lol she was nerfed and reworked so that she cant solo lane at all and cant jungle
TotalJerk10/19/2015, 11:51:05 PM1 votes

Soraka's shitty mid game is exacerbated by being behind, her heals simply can't keep up with high damage champions at that stage.

UBcrawlin10/20/2015, 2:27:15 AM1 votes

I'm going to clean up this post a bit and break it into categories. I was a bit rushed when writing and didn't proofread/edit anything at all.

Athenes Lulu10/20/2015, 6:36:43 AM1 votes

Laning phase is oppressive, teamfights not as oppressive but still a stupid pain to deal with.

It's like you forgot to kill the enemy Jinx/Vayne/Trist/etc and they magically win teamfights. Raka's target priority is similar to that of a hypercarry.

Laning against poke lanes as Raka is the easiest shit anyone can imagine. Just spam W, make her ADC the tank, look, he is now immortal. Laning against all-in lanes varies, even though Blitz gives her the hardest time. Grab Raka > ??? > profit.

But hey, she's actually fine because she has defined strengths and weaknesses, and if she or YOU get countered, that's what junglers are for.

It's just the nature of her kit that makes shit either stupidly annoying to go against, or stupidly easy to do so.

ltmetal10/20/2015, 9:44:00 AM1 votes

Soraka's primary weakness is a lack of escapes. The way you beat her is by pulling her or a teammate out of position with someone like Blitzcrank or LeeSin . It's also important to punish her if she uses her silence aggressively, but that requires the Soraka to play poorly.

That being said, she is able to easily itemize for escapes. She can get item 3092 item 3069 item 3143 item 3157 all at reduced CD because she's going 21 in utility. She also has easy access to 270 second summoner 4 and can keep her item 3117 bonus much more easily than many other champs, since she doesn't enter combat by healing an ally. I think a nerf to this safety is in order.

A flat reduction to her movespeed while increasing the range at which her passive kicks in would make her more easily hit by long range CC abilities like the Blitz grab or the Xerath stun while still making her able to move around the map relatively easily.

Mannysmoker10/19/2015, 7:00:52 PM1 votes

I wouldn't say oppressive but TahmKench lanning phase is oppressive, Soraka just allow the adc to play reckless and have little to zero consequences but still is manageable..

Stonington10/20/2015, 10:13:14 PM1 votes

Would you guys kindly fuck off with your Soraka slander? Just focus Soraka and win.

SpartenA799110/19/2015, 7:45:56 PM1 votes

The thing is that for the soraka to come up and put the silence in the right place, means she is coming out from behind her team. Thats when you want to pick her off. She can't heal herself besides the ult. Plus the max range q is easy to dodge. (all coming from a soraka main)