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Soraka is SO CLOSE to being great...but needs a little more.

ModCaptainMårvelous··5 votes·965 views

So, I think the Soraka rework did a lot of good things. I enjoy playing her a lot and I feel a lot less like a passive heal bot. However, I don't think she's as good as she could be. Now, what I'm proposing are some rough changes, but bear with me:

#Her Passive: "It's too late, he ded"

Number one problem I find with Soraka is her passive is...not that great. Yeah, the idea of the Bananambulance is amazing but there are some huge, key problems with it:

  • Early game, your allies will generally not want to be low HP. If they're <40%, they're probably going B
  • Mid-game, it has a bit of relevance
  • Late game, absolutely useless. If someone is below 40%, they probably already got bursted and are dead/out of the fight.

With this in mind, let's try this another way: Let's make the Banambulance more panic-y.

Change 1: Her passive at level 1 only gives the MS rush at 30% HP Change 2: Her ultimate now has a passive effect. Every rank increases the passive threshold by 10%

Roughly, this translates to 30/40/50/60 at levels 1/6/11/16. In this change, now Soraka is a bit more mobile and able to react. More so, teamfights she'll be more able to whiz around and heal targets. Likewise, now Soraka's passive has a little more use throughout the game, growing stronger with each rank of her ult.

#Her Heal: "Slowly committing Suicide"

Next is the heal. Soraka's heal has decent cooperation and tradeoff, but there's one major problem: Soraka will always outheal what she can restore with her Q. The simpliest thing would be to lower the cooldown, but let's take some stabs at making this interesting:

  • First idea: Soraka's W can be cast on herself to heal equal to hitting 1/1/2/2/3 Champions with Q. However, the mana cost is tripled, the cooldown is vastly increased OR both.
  • Second idea: Soraka may cast W on herself, healing herself for 10/20/30/40/50 or so. However, this is multiplied for every champion over 40% HP in nearby vicinity
  • Third idea: Add a heal component to E. Landing the snare will heal you, the silence/field itself will not.

The first idea focuses on Soraka and her Q. It ties back into the concept of Soraka being offensive and defensive. The second, Soraka is rewarded for keeping her allies high in HP. The more healed allies, the more Soraka can focus on keeping herself alive. Finally, the last idea includes rewarding Soraka for comboing her abilities. Q slow. E snare. W Healing. All together, it makes for a pure combo that rewards Soraka with Hp to continue healing her allies.

So what do you guys think? Good? Bad? Needs work but heading in the right direction? Right skills, wrong implementation?

10 Comments

Gareth Tankin2 votes

My only issue with her is the snowballing. I like can't play Soraka in low ELO stuff anymore unless I'm with an adc I know.

You can just get shoved out of lane too hard, Soraka has delayed/awkward disengage, is bad at mitigating adc dmg and her healing gets worse and worse the more items the enemy gets. So if you get behind in lane in allot of matchups... if your adc doesn't know how to play with new raka... you can be completely and utterly fucked. That's no fun.

JustMyBassCannon2 votes

I like the idea of her ultimate increasing the low HP threshold for her passive.

For her heal, she could use a much simpler mechanic; as it stands, her current self-heal on her Q actually generates enough HP to deal with self-damage from healing your teammates. However, I do think that Soraka's heal should either cost less HP (7-8%) or be based on Current HP instead of Max (like every other %HP cost spell).

KidSpectre2 votes

New Soraka definitely needs SOMETHING. She feels undertuned, to be honest. I spend most of my time chasing after teammates--who often RUN AWAY FROM ME AS I'M TRYING TO HEAL THEM--and most of the time, I end up just trading my life for theirs, if not just outright dying for the double.

One observation: Soraka has very powerful zoning potential. No one wants to let her get healed by star calls or get silenced/rooted by E. She can even do respectable poke damage should she land her Qs. In practice, however, this doesn't work for the following reasons:

  1. She needs AP to do any significant healing or damage
  2. Because her Qs are so slow at range, she needs to be close to the action to land them reliably
  3. Her heal is very short range, so she ALSO needs to be close to the action to heal
  4. She needs resistances to survive living on the front lines to poke and heal

Here's the rub. She needs AP to heal and do damage, and she needs resistances to survive long enough to heal and do damage. But she is exclusively a support now, on a support's income (Riot made sure of that, and they did a good job of it.) She can't afford to survive AND be a relevant source of healing late game. It isn't happening. Soraka would need the dedicated peeling normally reserved for a carry. (Or, be ahead. She doesn't have these issues when ahead. But if behind, she can't keep up.)

NakedGranny1 votes

Newraka doesn't have healing problems.

She just doesn't have anything at all.

What she lacks is actual CC. Why play Soraka when you could play Nami or Janna and actually save people? There's no point in killing yourself to heal damage when the target is going to die no matter how much you heal them for. If you can land Soraka's Q, you can land Nami's Q and actually do something meaningful other than "not suck quite as much". If you can time Soraka's ult, you can time Janna's ult and reposition the teamfight as well.

Soraka's E is the weakest, most hilariously useless ability in the game with bootless champs being able to walk from one side to the other without being even close to rooted. In fact, they have to be slowed by 50% to be unable to escape it -- and a 50% slow is just about unheard of these days.

Supports are not their healing. They are their CC. Soraka is now the weakest champion in the game (worse than pre-rework Eve) and will never be any better than that because Riot thinks just the fact that she can heal makes her anti-fun. What about the fun of the Soraka player? If you want to play Spectator mode, there's actual honest-to-god spectator mode for that.

Marthian1 votes

Have you actually tried her. There are plenty of Soraka players that think you are wrong.

A Silence AoE is still very strong even if it doesn't root. If you see their support getting into position for a kill, you throw a AoE silence zone on them, and they have to reposition, giving you ample time to escape to a better position. Similar case with junglers. If they use a dash to get in close, throw it on them (before or after). If you have a J4 that ulted a bunch of champions, her silence aoe is devastating right in the middle.

And there are much more "useless" champions than Soraka. They reworked her heal because it was just too good. And she didn't risk much to use it (unless you went ap tank and went in the middle, and laugh as they hopelessly attack you and you starcall them and heal more.)

JedenVojak2 votes

A Silence AoE is still very strong even if it doesn't root. If you see their support getting into position for a kill, you throw a AoE silence zone on them, and they have to reposition, giving you ample time to escape to a better position. Similar case with junglers. If they use a dash to get in close, throw it on them (before or after). If you have a J4 that ulted a bunch of champions, her silence aoe is devastating right in the middle.

This is not directed at you since you seem like a nice enough fellow, but I positively hate her new silence. It is really really horrible. Soraka's old silence always worked and was a guaranteed 2.5 second silence against the person YOU NEEDED TO SILENCE - ADC's can be silenced and still kill you, but the support who stuns/pulls/knocks you up is the one that's gonna get you killed by the adc. The new silence is a 1.5 second aoe that enemies literally just run out of - if you throw it on them at a range to prevent them jumping on you, they just run out of it then jump on you.

She's also slow now. Given how short the range on her heal is, that speed nerf was a real bad decision.

And there are much more "useless" champions than Soraka. They reworked her heal because it was just too good. And she didn't risk much to use it (unless you went ap tank and went in the middle, and laugh as they hopelessly attack you and you starcall them and heal more.)

Her heal was not too good, not by a long shot; it healed less than it does now, and it was on a 20 second cooldown.

They reworked her because she became popular as a mid lane push-farmer and people didn't know how to counter her. Her Q basically hit everything in a 500 radius around her, but champs who could burst her down or put out enough sustained damage at range could very easily force her out of lane.

Fashion Mage1 votes

I like the change for the passive. All her heal really needs is a range increase, but a way for her to heal herself out of combat would be pretty nice (kind of seems like the new GA on the PBE was specifically designed for that very reason).

ceaselessphantom1 votes

When I play her with solo lane gold I can easily out heal with q the costs on w. Regardless she will never be able to do that on a support income. It would be very broken if she could constantly heal a team at that rate without losing health.

Really I doubt the idea of having a dedicated passive healer in lane is ever going to work out. Unless you want to take away her silence so she can not prevent all ins.

Long Dong Wukong1 votes

Nah, she's really good if you can play her well enough. No one on your team dies, ever. And her E combos with any other CC and prevents flashing.

I think she's strong as is. The only thing I'd give her is for her entire Q to slow and not just the center. That's it. She has a very strong pure support kit.

Ale non è male1 votes

New Soraka is not underpowered, it's just not a universal pick that you can get in almost any situation like the FoTM supports because of her weaknesses. The passive is fine and the Q-W interaction is reallyinteresting, the problem is that you are even squishier and against very aggressive poking lanes and bot lanes with the abilities to make flashy plays(see grabs/hooks) you are in a bit of trouble if they are smart enough to focus you in fights and delete you fast enough that your damage dealer(s) isn't(aren't) capable to deal damage back while they focus you In team fights if Soraka is forced to use the ulti to save her life she lose a lot of her power. Her E could use some love as it has a too long CD(either reduce a bit its base CD or going with a CDR mechanic tied with Starcall where the CD is reduced by 0,5 sec for every champ she hit with Starcall), imho, but overall she is fine

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