If I wanted to main Soraka

Start with Ancient Coin. Let your ADC play like a 2v1 and you are a heal bot. Get sightstone and CDR boots ASAP. Then build Mikaels. Then you have your Ardent Censer and Warmogs. Somewhere in there, you upgrade your Coin to the Talisman.

The buffs to the Ancient Coin make it good enough to build first. The healing from it is also nice for your lane sustain.

Note, that you do not want to get Locket since Soraka is never in the middle of the fight. You are outside the fight, so you won't hit many champs with the aura or the active of Locket. As others have stated, it's not usually a good idea to get HP with Soraka, but Warmogs is an exception. The passive heal on it is VERY nice for Soraka.

As for the skills. Start Q for early poke. Max W first. Then Max Q.

During gameplay, you keep your carries alive. Laning phase, keep that ADC alive. When team fights start, keep alive whoever is doing the most damage. Also, watch your teammates health bars during the game, and use that Ult to keep someone alive in skirmishes. The global-ness of that ult is a GREAT resource that opponents usually won't be thinking about.

Max R>3Q>W>E>rest of Q Start frostfang item but never upgrade it. After sightstone/laning phase, sell it for the coin.

Sightstone -> Frozen Heart (for the CDR/Mana mostly) -> Mikael's (yet-another-heal)

Ardent cleanser if ahead. If behind get a Banner of Command. Use it to splitpush sidelanes. Then get the talisman from coin.

Don't use your ult if they're going to die anyway. I prefer using it only offensively and occasionally letting a teammate die (that I could have saved) so that I have my ultimate for the next teamfight. Obviously the later into the game it is, the more defensively I use the ultimate (anyone dying from being caught out could lose the game with 40+ second death timers)

Get really good at landing your Q's in lane. If you can land it in the center at rank 3 you can do 200-250~ damage. The poke is something the ADC's can't handle until they get a vamp sceptre.

Once your Q damage falls off you want to max W and focus on sustaining and using your Q only to slow the enemies.

She's my most played champ this season.

http://vgy.me/GGGfet.png

This is a really good Soraka guide imo (the match ups are lacking, however): http://www.lolking.net/guides/308138

In particular this peice of advice:

you should never be trying to build health on purpose, only get health when items you want just happen to have it.

Max W first, and whether you max Q or E afterwards is up to you (although I think people tend to max Q first more). Prioritize AP, CDR, and utility. I'd say building a lot of movement speed on her is a relatively effective way to keep yourself safe while building AP, since positioning is the primary defense for glassy champions. Armor and MR are fine on her, but they won't save you if your positioning is bad, and often times you won't need much armor/MR assuming your positioning is great (there are times when they're necessary though). HP should be avoided whenever you can, but a little bit from stuff like Sightstone or Banner of Command isn't anything to worry about.

coin is very good on raka right now. after talisman + sightstone I'd recommend rushing Banner of Command or Mikaels. After that you could pick up a Zhonyas or the Banner/Mikaels that you skipped.

After trying a few different starting configurations with Soraka, I seem to have the most luck and success with the Ancient Coin support item path and all 30 mastery points in utility. Always W as my first ability at level 1. After getting Q then E at 2 and 3, I concentrate on maxing W.

Soraka is one support where you definitely don't want to upgrade Sightstone to Ruby Sightstone since whenever you up your health that means you get a smaller % of your health back from landing Q hits or using potions while it still takes the same percentage away every time you cast W.

I usually start building Chalice of Harmony after getting Sightstone and Nomad's Medallion for the magic resist + mana regeneration and eventually upgrade it to Athene's. Cooldown reduction really helps you since it will allow you to use your E and R more often and you actually don't need a huge amount of AP to do some pretty serious healing. Tack on some more AP and cooldown reduction with Ardent Censer and you're really in business when it's teamfighting time.

I usually go with Boots of Swiftness. Mercury's might not be bad either, but even with your passive you usually need all the help running quickly around the map that you can get (thus 30 points in utility). Being able to get quickly out of harm's way is critical too. Get stunned or knocked up and you're dead since, for all your ability to save your ADC, there's very little you can do to protect yourself.

I made a very specific rune page for Soraka because I was finding my normal support page was not working well with her: rune page 6 "Soraka". Basically, the uniqueness of this page is in having 2 health regen. quints + 1 movement speed quint, along with some extra defenses. My masteries are the usual support masteries: 9 in defense and 21 in utility. Soraka is, as others have said, a heal-bot and because her heal costs her own health now, health regen is essential on her. Also, Soraka can no longer heal herself by a lot (Starcall heals very little compared to her old W) and she no longer has her magic resist passive nor the armour on her W, so I added some more defensive runes and 1 movement speed quint to keep her safe.

I build Talisman and Sightstone on her first, then Locket is usually the next best item on her. Then, I start going with situational items:

• If you need more magic resist, is good.
• If you need more armour, or is good (based on the situation is better against AD burst, whereas is better against auto attack reliant ADs).
• If you don't need extra defense and you want bigger heals, go with .
• If the enemy team has , which is messing with your team's AD(s), then get .
• If your team is auto attack reliant, then get .
• Get if the enemy has lots of crowd control.
• You can also get , if you want to add some more crowd control to your team comp.

I'll try to adsorb all this input.

Enough is never enough. So keep them coming even if it is to pack more insight what is already been said.

build AP and armor/mr but not hp (only hp should come from sightstone and maybe an aegis item) Higher AP lets you heal for more on your Q and you heal allies more.

Mobi boots + Homeguards with your passive can get you to a dying teammate insanely fast to save them.

start Q>W>Q>E; Max R>W>Q>E

Keep your eye on ally health bars when your ult is up, a clutch wish can save your top lane and turn a fight mid to get your team ahead. Keep tanks and carries alive as much as possible (E for zoning or to get a silence on an assassin that jumps on your carry, Q to sustain yourself and poke, W to spam heals)

I like on Soraka as it is pretty much fits 100% with what she is doing and gives AP. Generally my ideal build would look like

(the active is highly underrated)

The Ancient Coin line is your best support item, especially after the buffs to it's gold gen and to Medallion's healing. The region and passive is a big enough factor here.

General skill order R>W>Q>E, you might have some success going for more ranks in Q early on if you're playing more pokey with it.

Archangel's Staff(/Seraph's Embrace) is a great item, It's the cheapest 120+AP item in the game, and you don't have to give up any CDR for it. It also gives you a nice bit of health regen with that one utility mastery.

You have two main stats to go for, firstly CDR, and secondly AP.

Soraka's strength lies in her potential to burst heal, the potential for which scales with CDR. CDR also helps your only active self sustain in your Qs.

AP gives you everything you want, stronger heals, stronger self-heals (and also more damage).

For defensive items you want resistances without health when possible because your long-term healing ability suffers from stacking health (unless you go Warmog's but I'll leave suggesting that to someone else). That said, Spirit Visage breaks even by itself at max level, without factoring in the health region it offers, and every bit of tankiness helps.

So generally, if you want defensive items, and maybe are the items you generally wanna go for.

Other items:

doesn't offer much AP, and it's mana regen might well be superfluous, but move speed is always great, you need to cap out your CDR somehow and if at least two of your allies can benefit from it, the passive can be quite nice now that it's buffed (though I haven1t tested it myself <.<).

If your team needs the Aegis aura, and you're considering , don't. Get instead, it gives you less health, a good amount of AP, equally good MR and health regen and the only thing you'll be missing is that shield, it's minion buffing capabilities also ought to help your siegeing out a bit. Mainly though it's the stats, 60 AP is decent, and while 400 health is kind of a lot 200 is not.

might also be worth considering for it's good defensive stats and low health gain, but I've never actually tried it.

and are both there to solve the mana problems you never really had if you went for AA's. They also offer CDR though, Athene's offers quite a lot of it and Mikael's is a decent MR item coupled with a decent heal/cleanse (if you're ever considering using Mikael's heal for the heal and not the cleanse, heal yourself with it instead, if the target isn't a tank you'll benefit more from it because it basically heals you for 20%).

For masteries I prefer 9/0/21, for the 10% starting CDR without having to use runes I don't have yet. Also makes it easier to cap out my CDR, since I only need 20% after Talisman.

On a final note about summoner spells. It might just be me sucking (quite likely) but I've found that if i'm ever caught out as Soraka, then Flash wouldn't really save me. You'd be better off picking ghost if you want mobility, and use it to reach critical people in time. Personally i prefer + Heal helps keep me afloat and exhaust is really nice to have as support.

Also, R+W+Summoner Heal+Mikael's, ultimate burst heal combo.