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?

I played a normal game tonight that served as a painful reminder of just how toxic support currently is to League of Legends. I’ll spare you the long and drawn out replay and just say that my opponents had a healer and my team did not. Actually, scratch that. The things the healer allowed them to do were so utterly ridiculous that I need to explain.

My team was losing the early game badly, but with some farm and a little map control we were able to regain our footing. We took baron twice, knocked down two inhibitors and I thought we had sealed the game. Not so. As we went to push the third lane, three of my teammates and I got caught in a well placed Orianna ult/Veigar cage combo. I made it out alive but three of my teammates died. The enemy team had five up, all chasing down Fiddle. There was no chance I could stop them so I tried to quickly backdoor bottom lane. I got the turret down in a hurry and moved on to the inhibitor. Pantheon was able to bring me down from the 25 percent HP I had survived with. Despite the fact that we had two lanes down, the enemy team of Tristana, Veigar, Soraka, and a very low Orianna were able to soak wave after wave of turret fire and super minion aggro, tearing down a lane turret, two nexus turrets and finally my nexus.

It sucked, and they wouldn’t have been able to do it without the support. I know Riot has said support is going to get nerfed/changed, but I think we can take the Kayle remake and use it as a barometer for the change we’re likely to support over the next 3 months.

Originally, the Kayle changes were supposed to be a serious remake, altering the way that she performs healing and shielding significantly. What we got in the end was a passive remake and some number tweaks. Though she does seem to deal damage a bit better than before, she certainly isn’t in a great position. She heals decently as ever, though, and her ultimate can still be incredibly frustrating to play against. In short, Riot decided to leave her role virtually unchanged, a role that contains some of the most problematic elements in the game.

I think we’re going to see the same thing happen with the other support characters. Riot has agreed that healing is bad for the game, but I have yet to see even a suggested solution to the problem. Chances are, if Riot is going to do anything significant to healing it will happen to all the targeted healing in the game in one patch. Remaking one champion at a time doesn’t solve the problem, it just moves the other healers up the viability list. Unfortunately, I don’t think Riot can afford to significantly change the way support works. Tournament players are too used to it, and for the time being, tournament play is the most exciting thing happening in the LoL community.

What’s more likely is that we’ll see a long string of number adjustments for the support characters in game, reducing heals and increasing the resistance buffs granted by their spells. Reducing the duration of shields and increasing mana costs. Until the launch of Season Two, I think support is going to stay as it is – frustrating the hell out of blind pick players and encouraging the passive tournament play that pretty much defines high tier these days.

The forums provided a serendipitous thread necro for me to wrap up the Soraka Champ of the Week series. In the thread linked here, Xypherous lays out some of the design problems around heals, which I think is a decent place to kick off the Soraka discussion. Soraka is strong as most every other healer is strong – they all remove attrition from a game.

Healing is a really tough mechanic to balance for a game like League of Legends. In order for the healer to have any fun whatsoever, the heal needs to do something during the laning phase, which usually means giving it a somewhat short cooldown. Later in the game it needs to scale in some way to be remotely useful, which means AP builds can be both viable and infuriating. In short, heals don’t really work. Even if a heal could truly provide a judgement call for a player, heals just happen too often to really be balanced.

That’s essentially what I saw with Soraka. If my team was willing to sit back, not rush fights if the enemy ignites were up, or start a poking war, we won. We won easily, too. Even in games where I’ve built a Deathfire or a Guinsoo with Soraka, the wins have been decisive. There’s not much more to say about her.

If I could change one thing about Soraka, it would be Starfall. Though the spell is occasionally lulzy and provides a decent debuff, it doesn’t have a practical range for teamfighting. It’s decent for farming, but again, it suffers from a short range. I’d love to see Soraka get something like Lux’s Lucent Singularity, a skill that could slow in an area on the ground. She would probably need a slight heal tweak due to the increased lane power, but I think she would be more fun.

That does it for Soraka week. Check back tomorrow for next week’s Champ of the Week. It’s back to someone I’m not particularly good with. What can I say, I’m a glutton for punishment.

It should come as no surprise that supports are strong in League of Legends. They’ve made appearances in some shape or form in every major competitive event, often as the cornerstone of a team. My experience with Soraka so far has been, well, that she’s strong. She’s pretty amazing at keeping a team healthy, helping them push, silencing the AP carries, even soaking a little damage. There’s really not much to say beyond that without breaking into a discussion of healing and its place in the game and why it’s so strong/such a design problem. I don’t want to do that yet. That’s going to be the end-of-week wrapup.

For now, I’ll say that Soraka is kinda fun to play in a solo lane. I recently played in a five-man premade consisting of Soraka, Nocturne, Malzahar, Leona, and Tristana. I took solo top against Mordekaiser so that Leona could bring her amazing CC to support Tristana. It went surprisingly well, though I did die to a tower dive from Vayne and Mordekaiser – pretty tough to stop that one. By going top, I also got to have a little more fun with the farm, which was really nice. Most of my reluctance toward playing Soraka (or any support) is the passive gameplay. It just isn’t fun. I much prefer to see my character grow in strength over the course of the game – it’s what drew me to the MOBA genre.

For the rest of the week I’ll be testing some strange builds and rune setups to see where I might sneak a little more fun out of the character. Check back this weekend for more focused thoughts on healing as a whole.

I’ve never been much of a support player. It just doesn’t appeal to me. I like to farm. I like to take buffs. I like to gank. I like to set up champion kills. I don’t like to stand in lane watching my Clairvoyance cooldown tick away. But there’s no way to deny that support can make or break a game, and playing against a good support can be extremely frustrating. Lucky for anyone matched against me this week, I’m not a good support. I bring you this week’s Champ of the Week: Soraka.

Soraka is probably the most straightforward support champion in the game. She doesn’t have any crazy AoE disables, any shields, any CC other than her silence. She just heals, and heals for quite a bit. I have two problems when playing Soraka that I’m hoping to remedy this week. First, I put too much faith in her early healing. That cooldown is long and without any AP the heal is fairly weak at lower levels. As mentioned above, I really like action, so standing in lane and waiting for my carry to get farmed gets really boring. That’s when I tend to overextend or try to harass too much and get my ass killed.

I also need to work on her build. I know a lot of players like to get an Aegis, but I often feel like it comes too late in the game to be truly useful. It’s a good item, I just hate looking at my spells 25 minutes into the game and seeing the base heal amount on all of them. That said, an AP rush usually isn’t in Soraka’s (or her team’s) best interest. I’m going to focus on playing builds that maximize my team efficiency and maybe one or two that can add a little flavor to her playstyle. I see a Deathfire in my future.

Check back later this week for more reports on how I fail as a support. If you have any suggestions, drop them in the comments. I will need them.

Today’s Pro Tip covers some strategy for playing against and beating Soraka. As it stands, Soraka is the best healer in game and often one of the first bans. She’s also the character many players turn to as the key to victory when she’s in a game. Soraka is beatable, though, and while she does bring nice heals to her team, she also doesn’t bring very much damage, which can give your team the upper hand in a team fight.

The most important part of beating Soraka is picking against her. You need to have characters with a good mix of CC and preferably an anti-healer like Katarina and Tristana or a silencer, like Cho’Gath, Malzahar, and Garen. Soraka is also a weak AOE healer – once she blows Wish, all of her teammates but one are left to their own devices. Combinations of Malphite, Amumu, Fiddlesticks, Annie, and Anivia bring a lot of pain to a team. You should also consider taking characters with dashes and jumps that can help you get past the front lines and on to the DPS or Soraka herself. If you don’t have a dash, consider taking Flash against Soraka so you can surprise her with a stun or heavy nukes. Durability is also an option since a Soraka team is short a damage dealer. They will have trouble bringing down more durable teams, but make sure you still have enough DPS to get through her heals.

While most people think Soraka is hard to lane against, she can’t do much more than heal. Soraka relies on her lanemate and creep waves to provide the damage to keep you at bay while she farms. If you can separate her from the creep wave by zoning, you have a very favorable situation. Pick toons with strong lane harass/durability and preferably some range to force her to constantly heal herself. Kat and Tristana are obviously strong against Soraka in lane, but toons like Corki, Ashe, Garen, and Mundo can also do well. Spend your lane time ducking in and out of brush to harass and last hit minions. DO NOT PUSH. Pushing Soraka to her tower means she gets to free farm and level those heals you hate so much. Focus on sending her to base at least once before she hits level five.

In teamfights you either have to burn her down or drop big AOE damage on the opposing team. If you can’t do either of those, wait for an opportunity in which you can. Soraka doesn’t bring much DPS to the table, so you should be able to head off into the woods and round up the buffs, hopefully baiting your enemies into the tighter confines of the forest. Jungle fights are best against Soraka because it forces her to be close to you. In case you need to focus her, make sure your dashing/blinking champions are with you. They can get to her and get the CC started while your team gets set to take down the rest of the enemy team.

Above all, stay focused. Soraka capitalizes on teams that overextend by dropping heals at the last instant to alter the course of a battle. Focus your targets, use anti-healing wisely, and you should be able to bring her down without much trouble.

Part of the reason I like to game is that it makes me think critically about a situation in the face of a load of variables. With a game like LoL there are almost infinite combinations of heroes and matchups, and with the different build possibilities there is always a new strategy to consider. That said, LoL does have an active meta game, meaning the popular strategy/build method for victory is constantly changing because of new patches and new heroes.

Right now people generally think healing is the flavor of the month ticket to victory, but a couple people on the forums have laid out interesting counter arguments. One guy on the Test Realm said it’s not the healing so much as the kiting, which gives a team with a healer the ability to make the most of their healing power. An adjudicator also posted in the general discussion forums claiming that “poking” is the problem. Poking, as he puts it, is using a team’s ranged harassment abilities to wear down the opponent from a distance, forcing them away from towers and allowing your team to push. Characters like Ashe and Ezreal are great at this, though Ezreal is probably the best because his whole skill lineup is based on harassing the enemy team from afar while healing your own team.

Whatever you want to call it, the problem remains the same. Teams with healers are successful because they can stand out of the range of fire and heal the harassment that normally brings a target low enough for your team to initiate a fight. Add to it the fact that two of the best healers in the game, Ezreal and Janna, have the best ranged harassment in the game and you’ve created a situation that far too heavily favors any team that features those two toons.

The good news is that Zileas agrees that this is a problem and says that Riot’s focus in the next two patches will be addressing the ranged harass/healing combos that are so grossly overpowering other strats right now.