Shurelia decided to lift the veil on the upcoming support/sustain changes this week, offering some of the numbers Riot is currently working with to reduce the passive farm-off in bottom lane. As with any change in LoL, it’s tough to say exactly how it will play out, but I think it’s pretty easy to see that Soraka is being hit hardest by the changes.

Soraka’s healing AP ratios have been cut roughly in half, she no longer receives double mana from Infuse, and the cooldown on Astral Blessing is up to 20 seconds from 10. To compensate, she’ll be getting bigger range on Starcall, a Shred bump, and a slight AP ratio bump. Honestly, I don’t know how Riot intends to keep her in game like this. A 20 second heal? Granted, that will help reduce sustain, but this seems like a push to remove Soraka from competitive play.

Weirdly enough, Sona seems like she’ll be hit the least hard, even though I consider her one of the primary culprits for too much sustain. She got a slight base heal nerf and an AP ratio nerf, but she now grants double her passive aura to herself and her target for 3 seconds after cast. That’s a pretty nice armor/MR boost, even if the heal is being cut down.

Taric caught the Soraka treatment with his heal. The AP ratio is down by nearly half and the cooldown was increased from 12 to 20 seconds at max rank, though attacks against enemy champions now reduce cooldowns by 4 seconds versus 2.

One of the big issues I see with these changes is the way it will affect squishy DPS. Healing, as toxic as it was to the game, was one way to keep squishy teammates in the fight. Without it, I think we’ll see the softer champions playing even more passively, the little that they may be seen. It’s hard for me to not see the changes as a slight tanky DPS buff, which they really didn’t need.

You can read the full list of potential changes at Shurelia’s forum thread. What do you think? Is this a good change for the League? Does healing just need completely overhauled?