Formerly OP #20: Old Soraka

You could win every trade in that lane and still lose it.

Old Soraka didn't beat you. She waited you out. Whatever damage you landed came back in one cast, your mana ran dry while her carry's never did, and forty minutes later you were still standing under the same turret wondering where the game had gone.

Formerly OP

Old Soraka

Seasons 1 to 3 · Ended Patch 4.17

You could win every trade in that lane and still lose it.

Losing to sustain is boring, and that's exactly why players hated her. There's no highlight clip where old Soraka outplays somebody. She stood behind her marksman, pressed a button every twenty seconds, and the lane quietly stopped being winnable. Dive her and she healed through it. Poke and she topped the target off, then stacked enough armor on them to make your next few autos meaningless. Give up and roam, and she erased whatever you accomplished from the other side of the map without moving.

She did this from 2009. Riot spent five years chipping pieces off this champion before admitting the design itself was the problem.

When She Ruled, And What Ended It

Soraka launched with the game and stayed a fixture of the support role through Season 1, Season 2 and Season 3. Her fall came in two stages, and only the second one really landed.

Stage one was Patch 3.14, late in Season 3. Riot retired her free magic resistance aura, flattened the resistance shred on her star shower, cut the healing on her armor buff and dropped that buff to two seconds. It slowed her down. It didn't change what she was.

The ending arrived on September 25, 2014, in Patch 4.17, Season 4. Riot rebuilt the Starchild from the ground up. What they deleted wasn't her healing.

The Three Buttons That Made Her Miserable

Her kit had five pieces, and two of them were background noise. Salvation [Passive] made her healing stronger the worse off the target was, and Starcall [Q] was a point blank star shower on a two and a half second cooldown that shredded magic resistance in stacks. Neither is what people remember. These three are.

Astral Blessing [W]

A single target heal with bonus armor stapled onto it, thrown from 750 range (farther than most of the champions who wanted her dead could reach). The armor is the part people forget. At its peak it handed an ally 125 armor, and against an early marksman that armor was an off switch. Riot spent years walking the number, the duration and the cooldown backward, and it stayed the best button in the bot lane the whole time.

Infuse [E]

Two completely different problems sharing one icon. Cast on a teammate, Infuse [E] drained a slice of Soraka's own mana and handed it over. Cast on an enemy, it silenced them and dealt damage, and for most of its life it cost her nothing at all to do that. Early on she could refill herself with it, and she could point it at friendly minions. Riot took both of those away and the ability let a mid laner shove waves for twenty straight minutes without ever seeing the fountain anyway.

Wish [R]

Global heals aren't unusual now. This one shipped in 2009 with a 200 percent ability power ratio behind it. A Soraka who built like a mage could undo a five man engage in a lane she wasn't standing in, and the team on the receiving end had nothing to react to, because there was nothing to see. That ratio got cut to 150, then 130, then 70, and the cooldown climbed past two and a half minutes. Riot kept pulling and somehow it kept being worth building around.

Why It Was Broken

League in those seasons ran on attrition. Health didn't come back on its own, sustain was something you bought or did without, and the reason a lane ever ended was that somebody eventually had to walk home. That walk was the whole game. It told the enemy jungler where the free objective was, it told the enemy laner when to hit the turret, and it reset every advantage either side had built.

Soraka deleted that clock for two people at once. Her partner never ran out of health, because of the heal. Her partner never ran out of mana, because of Infuse [E]. So the lane never resolved. It just continued, indefinitely, until somebody else on the map did something about it.

The silence is what stopped her from being merely annoying. Supports who only heal are a known quantity: you kill them first. Soraka answered that with a free point and click silence, which (in an era before mobility creep) meant an assassin who jumped on her got to press nothing at all. And the global heal broke the arithmetic everywhere else. Every fight your team took somewhere far away was priced against a champion who could contribute to it from her own tier two turret.

None of that is spectacular. She was oppressive in the most tedious way available, and no amount of number tuning was going to make refilling somebody's mana bar interesting to play against.

The Fall

Patch 4.17 didn't nerf old Soraka. It removed her.

Infuse [E] became Equinox [E] (a zone you drop on the ground that silences and then roots). The mana battery went with it and has never come back in any form, on her or on anybody else.

Astral Blessing [W] became Astral Infusion [W], and this is the genuinely clever piece of the update. The heal now costs Soraka 10 percent of her own maximum health. She can throw it almost on demand, on a cooldown measured in single digit seconds instead of twenty, but every cast walks her closer to dying. Its range fell from 750 to 450 (300 units shorter), which drags her into the fight she used to watch from behind. The armor left with no replacement.

Starcall [Q] stopped being a free aura that punished standing near her and turned into something she has to aim, on a real cooldown, that heals her back when it connects. Her passive became a sprint toward badly hurt teammates.

Read those together and the goal is obvious. Every change takes something she used to get for free and attaches a cost, a range limit or an aim requirement. She kept the healing. She lost the impunity.

Where She Is Now

She's fine. Better than fine, periodically. Modern Soraka is a real support with a real ceiling, and she spikes hard whenever the game rewards keeping a hyper carry alive. It didn't even take long for her to come back around after the update, and we wrote her up as a strong pick within a year of it.

What changed is that she can now be beaten by playing well. Catch her out of position and she dies, because the health cost on her heal means a low Soraka has already spent most of her buffer keeping somebody else upright. Force her forward and she has to choose between the heal and her own life. Old Soraka never had to choose anything.

The mana battery is the piece that's genuinely gone (it wasn't reworked or moved onto an item). There's a whole generation of players who've never once had a support hand them a full mana bar in lane, and they're better off.

She's been dragged out of the support slot more than once, and the strangest of those is still Soraka in the top lane, healing through a matchup she has no business surviving.

Nominate The Next One

Soraka is the first entry in this series whose crime wasn't damage. She never one shot anybody or took over a game by herself. She just made a lane impossible to end, which turned out to be worse. Look through the rest of the series below.