Counter Guide

How to Beat Soraka

Matchup Guide · Evergreen · 3 Counter Picks

Soraka pays for every heal she gives out with her own health, so the way to stop the healing has been in front of you the whole time.

She's the only support in the game whose main tool is also her main weakness, and games against her are lost by teams who treat those as two separate facts. Throwing damage at the person she's healing is the losing version of the matchup, because that's the exchange she's built to win. Throwing it at her is the winning version, and it doesn't take much: she's slow, she has nothing that gets her out of trouble, and every ally she saves costs her something she can't get back quickly. What decides the lane is who the damage is pointed at.

Matchup Snapshot Soraka, the Starchild

Where You Meet Her Bot lane

Damage Type Magic, and it isn't the point

Why She Is Frustrating The lane you won keeps coming back

Mobility None, and she's slow on top of it

Biggest Threat Astral Infusion [W]

Hardest Counter Rell

What a Counter Needs

Grievous Wounds, bought in lane rather than saved for later
A way to reach a champion who can't move and can't leave
Damage that arrives all at once instead of over ten seconds

Patch 26.18 Matchup Data

Who Beats Soraka on Patch 26.18

Best Picks Into Soraka

Rell799 games54.3%
Vel'Koz937 games52.5%
Zyra1,168 games51.8%
Nami2,508 games51.4%
Yuumi1,567 games51.2%

Picks Soraka Beats

Pantheon1,131 games43.1%
Janna811 games44.9%
Pyke1,955 games45.5%
Swain1,130 games46.5%

Win rates are for the champion listed, playing support against Soraka. They come from Nerfplz's own ranked solo queue games on Patch 26.18, Silver and above, 53,306 Soraka games in all. Only matchups that show up in at least 1% of those games are listed.

Soraka Overview

Strengths: What Makes Her Dangerous

She undoes a lane you were winning. Poke doesn't accumulate against her. The trades you won are refunded between waves, and, somehow, the tower you were meant to be pressuring never gets pressured.
Her ultimate saves people who are already dead. It arrives from anywhere on the map, and it turns a clean pick somewhere else into a fight your team is now losing on cooldowns.
The silence stops an entire plan. Equinox [E] lands on the moment of an engage, and a support who can't cast anything for a second isn't engaging at all.
She makes an ordinary carry difficult to kill. Nothing about the carry changes. The amount of damage required to finish one does, and most teams don't adjust for it until it's too late.
She heals herself off your champions. Every Starcall [Q] that lands on an enemy champion heals her, which means she can pay the cost of the ally heals over and over (provided nobody's putting pressure on her specifically).

Weaknesses: Where You Get In

Every heal costs her health. Astral Infusion [W] isn't free, and there's no resource other than her own life. A Soraka under pressure has to choose between saving her carry and staying alive.
Healing reduction is close to a hard counter. Cutting the healing changes whether the trade she's making is worth making at all (and the component costs almost nothing).
She can't escape anything at all. No dash, no blink, and she's slower than most of the roster while casting. Any champion who reaches her has already finished the job.
Burst beats throughput. Damage spread over a fight is what she's built for. Damage delivered in one window is what she has no answer to, because the heal arrives afterwards.
She can't stop a tower falling. Nothing in the kit contests a siege. A lane that trades the kill pressure for plates and dives is taking things she has no reply to.

Countering Soraka

Based on the strengths and weaknesses above, beating Soraka comes down to champions who can accomplish at least one of the following:

Point the damage at her. The carry is being healed. She isn't, and she's paying for it.
Buy the Grievous Wounds component in lane. Waiting until after the first item is too late. The healing is what turns a lost trade into an even lane, and the cheap version of the item is enough to stop that.
Trade for the tower rather than the kill. She can undo a health bar. She can't undo a plate, and a bot lane that takes the structure has taken the thing she has no answer for.
Commit all at once or not at all. A slow grind is what she's for. The engage that kills somebody in two seconds is the one where the heal lands on a corpse.

If you're already locked into the matchup without any of those tools, these strategies still work:

Playing a Bad Soraka Matchup

Push the wave in and dive rather than poke. She's one of the softest targets in the game, and standing under a tower doesn't change that as much as it should (she can't get away from anybody who arrives).

Ask the jungler to look at the support rather than the carry. Almost nobody does it, and it's the single most effective gank in the lane, because it removes her from the fight for the whole recall as well as the kill.

Play for the mid game rather than the lane. Her contribution is all throughput, and a team that fights around a single moment rather than a long skirmish reduces the number of moments she gets to matter.

Best Soraka Counters

Three ways to beat somebody whose plan is to outlast you: reach her, out pace the healing, or take the things it can't restore. One counter each.

Rell Reaches Her

The engage arrives from further away than she can react to and it doesn't need her to be out of position first (the usual condition for punishing a support who never moves).

Once it lands, the matchup is over. There's nothing in her kit that gets her back out and nothing that stops the follow up.

Vel'Koz Out Paces The Healing

Plasma Fission [Q] and Void Rift [W] both reach 1100 units against the 800 of Starcall [Q], so Vel'Koz sets the distance the lane gets played at. Every third ability that lands on the same target adds true damage through Organic Deconstruction [Passive], and a heal that arrives after a full combo arrives too late.

Astral Infusion [W] also costs Soraka her own health to cast. A lane where she's taking poke from 1100 units is a lane where every heal she throws makes her easier to kill.

Caitlyn Takes What She Cannot Heal

She wins the lane by turning it into a siege, and there's no amount of healing that puts a tower plate back on a tower.

It's also the version of the matchup that stays won. The lead is in gold and structures, and none of it is refundable.

Itemizing Against Soraka

The first two are the matchup and the last two are ordinary insurance:

Executioner's Calling and Oblivion Orb are the same purchase for the two halves of the roster (physical and magic damage), and one of them has to be bought in lane, because against her the healing reduction counters the champion herself. Mercury's Treads shorten the silence and the root. That's worth more than it sounds, since both of them exist specifically to interrupt the moment you decided to go in. A control ward is doing real work here as well: she's the easiest member of the enemy team to catch alone, and the only thing standing between your team and that kill is usually that nobody could see where she was standing.