An idea for Soraka's Astral Blessing.

Timber owl·Apr 22, 2014·6 votes·4,732 views

Since Riot wants healing to be more interactive, what if holding down W prolonged the healing effect on top of the initial burst heal, turning it into a sustained heal? The sustained portion draws on your own HP to prolong the heal. This fits with the theme of self-sacrifice in Soraka's lore, too.

For balance, engaging the sustained healing effect puts Soraka in a channeling state, so it allows for enemy interaction and the total healing done is more subject to gameplay. Also, it keeps her from spamming Q or silencing while the channel is engaged.

Another idea: What if this sustained heal, in establishing a link between her and her target, grants her the armor buff while it's active, as well? This way she isn't rapidly erased, while draining her own HP to heal her ally ADC, by the enemy ADC. It gives her time to react. And it kind of makes sense with the nature of the ability, anyway.

To me, the thought of holding W down for a sustained heal at the expense of your HP has a certain sense of commitment and sacrifice to it, because you are continually deciding to give your strength away for the sake of another, while watching your HP dwindle down. Opinions?

31 Comments

RiotMorelloApr 22, 201411 votes

I've always liked the "Infuse Healer" (probably the most balanced and interactive version of healing in GW1) a lot. The gameplay is apparent there, though it is a tough character to play well with a lot of opportunity for failure.

I like the mechanic, I wonder if Soraka players would like it?

Keikomatsui Apr 22, 20145 votes

I like it a lot, but I can see where it would go wrong. You'd either have to do the healing at a very high ratio compared to life loss or grant Soraka some serious defensive stats for the duration. But it would outline a different buildpath into more tanky HP items and less ap, giving her two directions to go (the Im gonna heal you so good build and the Im gonna starcall all over their faces build). I do think it would make crystal scepter super essential for soraka, but thats already the case anyways.

MorningbellApr 22, 20143 votes

Soraka is THE healer of LoL and healing is a very generous, non-selfish form of power. I think Soraka players are likely the type of people willing to risk themselves for their teammates.

ItemsGuyApr 22, 20141 votes

How about going the whole hog and making the self-sacrifice a unifying theme with her? It would add a risk-reward element to her kit, while also pulling her away from the odd, vague mish-mash she's currently working with right now.

Cro003Apr 22, 20142 votes

I like the mechanic as it would create more interesting plays with her. Creating more viable game-play options for Soraka is good and desperately needed. I get screamed at in normals when I choose her during Champ Select about 7/10 times I choose her... Changes to her should be geared towards making her more useful to her team. The OP's idea would be a great start and is a likely needed change.

It would be fairly easy to counter this channeling skill mainly by focusing Soraka or her healee.

The ratio of heal done to health consumed would have to be decently high otherwise it makes her look weaker if she consumes health to heal in this manner.

Her current heal is important and I hope it would stay and not just be replaced by this new heal. I would probably use her current heal more than this proposed ability because its less risky to use. But I would use it as it would have important uses for various situations.

However, I can imagine accidentally holding down the button too long...

Now here's a slight modification:

Channel Heal

Its a burst heal that heals allot at first (about the same as it does now), then heals a progressively lower amount over time while the ability is active, and drains her mana instead of her health. It now won't be as confusing or risky to use but still punishes her by draining her mana.

It works similarly to her current heal, but consumes mana the longer its pressed. She would most likely drain her mana with this, and thereby rendering her useless for further healing, CC, or damage in team fights. She would need to be punished for fully draining her mana supply to heal someone for the sake of balance. So her aggressive E and Q would need some changes to their base mana cost (for E, about 5% of her max mana to cast; not sure about Q right now).

Math Suggestion:

It's kind of like a logarithmic decay curve with health healed over time. Whereby the health healed starts high and decays over time and maybe drains her mana on a linear formula based on percents or raw value. This would mathematically create an optimal value which can be built upon, manipulated, and balanced. This should help provide the developers a starting formula to work with.

Nevertheless, a more general idea is to have at least one new champion, ability, or item create a Heal Over Time that scales with Level and Ability Power, etc, that could never heal more than Soraka's primary heal when maxed out.

Maybe even have an ability drain gold or even their life for a teammate...

HayabusaZeroApr 22, 20141 votes

Actually, i believe this is a great idea for Soraka's heal. The more health you sacrifice, the more health your ally gets. I would feel powerful and meaningful for the Soraka player, and it will be a nice way to even differenciate mid Soraka from support Soraka (since HP items would be more important for the last one).

Sir ArmaMalumApr 22, 20142 votes

While I can't claim to play Sor often I love this idea. It can be tuned in very interesting ways. The sustained heal could possibly prolong the armor buff, and/or can give sor an 'ally only' mechanic that benefits support sor immensely but doesn't help solo-lane sor much if at all.

As a quick brainstorm, may I also suggest an in-combat modifier to this? Possibly hits/damage received by the recipient increasing the amount healed or something along those lines. I know out-of-combat sustain has been a sore point lately.

Linna ExcelApr 22, 20144 votes

I've always liked the "Infuse Healer" (probably the most balanced and interactive version of healing in GW1) a lot. I like the mechanic, I wonder if Soraka players would like it?

In bot lane, particularly the current meta, that would be giving a free kill to the other team (soraka) and make it a 1v2. In solo lanes, it'd be absolutely worthless.

Worst idea ever.

Plus in PvP even if you had an infuse healer you also had a crapton of other healing and self healing options as well as a second monk with defensive spells. Totally different context because GW1 was an 8v8 pvp game.

Here's how I think I'd fix Astral blessing right now:

Give it a small AoE heal passive that triggers whenever you use another spell.
Change the active heal to give your target AR/MR/Health per second for 3 seconds.
Overload it for enemy cast. Maybe make it a life leech or mana leech skill. Maybe make it a few seconds of AP/AD debuff. Maybe have it deal damage and GW to the foe. Or if her E is a silence her W can be a root or a stun.

Overloading the W for enemy cast might give her more interactions and pressure her not to be a full on healer.

RiotMorelloApr 23, 20143 votes

I think that's a pretty absolutionist look at it. I think this adds one piece of known gameplay to the healer: the way to beat them is to kill the healer, who is vulnerable in windows.

That model may be what we have to do to ever let her be a healer. It's definitely an option.

HellioningApr 24, 20141 votes

If that's the case, you're going to have to A) make her much tankier and B) make her completely useless in solo lanes. Are you sure you want to do either, given her popularity as a mid/top bruiser instead of a bot support?

Linna ExcelApr 24, 20142 votes

Beating the healer is one thing, the healer having to weaken themselves by losing a big chunk of life is something else.

Again, going back to GW1 infuse was one skill of 8 on your bar. You didn't have to take it. You also had 7 slots to fill with things for healing yourself back up or defend yourself with. Ideally, your monk would be in the back line to use this, not in the middle of things like you want an active Soraka to be.

I have to be pretty absolutionist for this idea because frankly these are 2 different games. An 8v8 furball is a little different than 5v5 split up over the map.

Soraka has no escape, no CC, and without her W (on which would be CD) no defense. It's not like she'd have 7 other skills to fall back on. I'm not even sure how you'd implement it to keep the people who like taking her into a solo lane happy. I'm one of those people who like taking her solo.

And let's be honest, in a team fight where you've got 5 enemy champs with pokes, and CCs, and engages, and nidalee spears, and flashes, you can't have a champ that loses a massive chunk of health, and healing power by extention. She's only have one heal.

TBH if you did this, Nidalee (and maybe a few other champs) would instantly be a hard counter to Soraka which goes directly against riot's prinicples. I started a CB thread (or was it GD) awhile ago on how you can't just do that. So if you nerf soraka's healing to be a lose X amount of life, you have to nerf nidalee's spear the same patch. I know a lot of people want nidalee's spear to be changed, but still...

That's a huge amount of rage you are setting yourself up for in just one patch.

Here's the most important reason not to do this. Soraka is a sustained submission fighter. She wins battles by trying to draw them out as long as possible where she gets the advantage (stacking MR shred). A change like this would completely destroy how she fights.

It basically would put her into a fight with only 3 usable skills (Q,E,R) while other champs have 4. The more she'd use her W with this suggestion, the more of a liability she becomes. This is completely against how she plays and how she needs to play in order to win a fight.

Pros might be able to use this effectively, but sub gold she'd be either A. Trash or B. uber passive which we don't want her to be.

Qing is hard enough bot because some ADCs hate it when you push the lane. Or take their minions. It's also her best offensive skill for bot, and I love it as is and don't want starcall, infuse, or wish changed. And now you want her healing to be a liability as well? Even if it was only 10% that's going to lead to a lot more deaths or back than before.

That's not a whole lot of room for Soraka players to actually play the game. Over in GD fearless is asking Sona players how to make her more rewarding. If you do this change, 6 months from now either him, Vesh, or Rickless is going to be coming into the forums and asking the same thing about soraka.

While I'm thinking about it, you do realize that part of Riot's problem with healing is you aren't give players any tools to interact with them right? What options do other players have in LOL? We don't have domination mesmers, that's for sure. We don't have any champ who can sap X of your mana/energy and do damage to you based on how much you lost. We certainly don't have a lot of viable options for keeping grievous wounds to stick to a champ.

Part of me thinks you guys are trying to fix Soraka the wrong way. When you should be adding levels for more interaction, you are simply pulling the one you have and wonder why people are angry the only real healer is getting nerfed again.

Hyrum GraffApr 22, 20141 votes

Soraka main chiming in:

I play soraka mainly as a solo laner (or I farm the botlane, with a support). If this were implemented, I'd probably start playing support raka, too (supp raka is currently waay too passive for me).

On the other hand, I really hope that raka will remain viable as a solo laner. My worry is that the channel will add some power into her kit, and she'll have to be nerfed elsewhere to compensate, which would make her unviable in a solo lane.

MandaariApr 22, 20141 votes

What about creating a small HoT zone? It has clear counterplay (zone the champ out). If you make the HoT frontloaded and decreasing over time you could tweak the risk/reward by tweaking how much it's frontloaded.

RiotMorelloApr 23, 20143 votes

The best usecase for this is sustain/out-of-combat healing and recovery, since it has low ability to have good combat impact but high ability to be used when safe.

N49Apr 24, 20141 votes

What if Astral Blessing had an hp/5 aura passive that was efficient as sustain, but went away until the cooldown ends if you used the spell to heal anyone? The cooldown being something really long, like, 40 seconds(reducible through combat?).

Basically, her sustain case would become weaker, and completely cost free, both in mana and attention span, opening up those resources for offense.

The obvious counters would be to "poke harder" or burst the target down during a grievous wound effect.

MandaariApr 24, 20141 votes

Then it looks like you're looking for an ability that boosts lifesteal/spellvamp so that it forces you not to be passive.

Perhaps a small HoT with lifesteal or spellvamp attached would be good. The HoT provides something for the case that you can't trade, but it wouldn't be at a mana cost efficient magnitude. That's the same line of thinking you were going for Nami I think.

Also slightly off topic but related to heals. I wanted to incorporate a lifesteal/spellvamp buff into a Nidalee rework that I was thinking of. I also was thinking of shifting some of her healing power into killing blows with Takedown. Sound like something interesting enough to warrant making a discussion about? I'd like to hear your and/or Repertoir's critique if I make it.

Sire HippingtonApr 22, 20142 votes

I think it would contradict with her starcall playstyle, haveinh a spam skill and a probably long time channle skill as base-mechanic on the same champ won't work well i guess.

RiotMorelloApr 23, 20143 votes

I agree - this couldn't be done in a vacuum, and would need a whole kit that supported that.

Blaine TogApr 24, 20141 votes

Infuse healing worked in GW because of how jumpy health bars are there: it's extremely common for someone to drop from 100 to 10, then leap back up to 100 before dropping to 50 and back up to 90. Infuse healing allowed the Monk to quickly turn the tide if one of their allies was being spiked, but then switch to another heal ability to restore him or herself before the enemy managed to switch towards them.

LoL, conversely, is much more about attrition. You have to be pretty far ahead to 100-0 someone before anyone on their team has a chance to cast a spell (or be a mid-lategame Fizz or LeBlanc ;) ), and once someone's dropped to 10% health, it's going to take them a while to get back to 100%.

It would be a lot harder to make Infuse healing work in a MOBA paradigm precisely because you would have to give the character another heal to allow them to then save themself. Soraka technically has two heals but she can't exactly cast Wish every time she uses Astral Blessing.

RiotVeshApr 22, 20145 votes

My initial thoughts on this ability is that it would cause some weird decision making when it came to trades and positioning. With the bursty nature of bot lane right now, I don't want to accidentally incentivize Soraka players to drop their health to really low levels and end up dying/feeding when they are just trying to do what the kit tells them to do. This style of ability might also be hard for the player to understand when they have done a successful choice/cast. There are other ways that solve the sustain problem besides shifting health from one champion to another (ways to make the W just straight up better in combat and weaker in the sustain case).

That said, the idea of health sharing/selflessness is cool. I thought about trying out a damage link tether for awhile that shares damage the ally takes and gives some of it to Soraka. Not sure if she's the right character for this kind of ability though.

Samflash3Apr 22, 20142 votes

Imagine if she could latch a chain of healing but passing through it breaks the tether.

Linna ExcelApr 22, 20146 votes

No, I don't think she's a damage sponge. She's a healer and preventer of damage as far as her W goes instead of soaking it up for someone else. You'd need the take an ally's damage ability to be put on a true tank and not a healer/mage.

RiotVeshApr 22, 20142 votes

I tend to agree with you here. Taking damage for allies is much more of a tank/protector thing to do. Plus Braum just does this in a better and more interactive way.

Vortex IVApr 22, 20143 votes

Something that'd be better used on a fresh new champion imo. Riot needs to stop spending so much effort worrying over butchering supports.

ILoveTiramisuApr 23, 20142 votes

I didn't like about channeling because, you need to spam Q. However, Heals for time stacks better with with passive and even with armor buffs.

I think another problem of Soraka is actually her Q mana costs at rank 5. 70 mana is too much.

Papy MougeotApr 22, 20141 votes

That's not a bad idea, that doesn't solve the problem imo but it's a good start.

Timber owlApr 22, 20141 votes

I was going off a post from Vesh (I think that was his name). But what's the problem, in your opinion?

Papy MougeotApr 22, 20141 votes

Yeah no I actually think it's just a good idea. Worth to test imo.

BearsAreScaryApr 22, 20141 votes

I think this kind of change would make Soraka more interesting and powerful, but I think it could easily be abused. It's a really neat idea, but in practice I think it would simply be very frustrating to play against and, more importantly, take Soraka back into the territory of being a "life and mana battery" instead of someone with combat casting presence.

Allowing her to heal significantly more than she currently does (regardless of her Q strength, which I think is in a good place as a support) will make her optimal play shift more towards building tremendous amounts of hp and mana regen. Currently, a Soraka support has decent heal and infuse numbers, but used on an ally they are low enough that she must always do the dance of "do I sit back and heal - or do I poke and fight?".

Playing Soraka, you're always forced to make awkward choices if you want to play passively - wasting the armor buff on W, asking yourself if you should try to poke with Q so you can reduce your W cooldown, choosing to use E on an ally or enemy - and that's good. S2 super-passive Soraka was undoubtedly really strong, but also bad for gameplay as a whole (and honestly just made her unsatisfying to play).

So creating the choice between a "combat Soraka who trades off stats for other stats" and "passive Soraka who sits back and pumps allies full of power juice" is definitely a good direction, which is why I like your idea :). My argument is just that when players are faced with this choice, regardless of power, I think that 90% of the time higher level players are going to go with the passive option simply because of how strong it is to give HP to allies. Lost a trade and at 200 hp while Soraka was at fountain? She'll show up and donate a bunch of it back to you so you're good to go.

Suggestion: Maybe add on a requirement to this "infusion" heal where she must be in combat? Engaged in combat in the last X seconds, have at least one Starcall stack, be in proximity of an enemy champion? I know these aren't the best solutions, but adding some kind of combat requirement for this channneled heal will help prevent it from being abused.

TL;DR Soraka's heal/infuse are low enough that she is forced to be a combat mage in lane, buffing her ability to heal will make spamming regen and playing super passively a "better" way to play her (which makes her boring). Maybe add some kind of combat requirement? Good idea though!

Radix ZeroApr 24, 20141 votes

This would be a interesting mechanic on a new champion. If you were to rework Soraka kit to work around this heal then she just wouldn't be the same champion anymore. Karma anyone? After reading this suggestion my first thought was why would I pick Soraka as a healer over Nami? With Nami I would get the heal as a burst and it would free me up to use my other abilities to help my team, it wouldn't leave me standing still in the middle of a team fight like a raw steak in the middle of a lion pit.

Also if the heal costs my health to cast, would it also cost mana? If it cost mana, how much different is converting my mana to your health vs my health to your health?

Does the heal have a set channel duration? Or can I cast it for as long as I have health?

Is my gameplay interaction going to be silence one person, hit starcall, and then hold down 'W' until the end of the fight?