League of Legends champion profile: Soraka, the Starchild

Lanes Soraka Players Love

Sona – She is the classic poke support, and as Soraka you live for that. Any damage Sona throws at you is easily healed, allowing you to farm later into the game to your mid game power spike.

Kog’Maw, Jinx – these are classic scaling ADCs who tend to want to whittle you down more than all-in during the lane. Any damage they deal out, you can heal right back up.

Janna – one of the most passive supports in lane, you can actually poke her down with your Q and she has little way to retaliate against you. She also can’t regen your poke, so if you’re playing with an aggressive ADC you’ll actually have the initiative to whittle her down for an engage if you choose.

Lanes Soraka Players Hate

Leona, Thresh, Blitzcrank, Pyke – any of these matchups exploit Soraka’s biggest weakness, that she’s incredibly squishy and immobile. If a Leona engages on you, a Blitz hooks you, or a Pyke goes on you, you will die instantly.

Draven, Lucian, Miss Fortune – Like the support counterparts we just listed, these guys would rather all-in you than just whittle you down. As long as they have some form of engage with their jungler or support, you’ll be easy pickings for them.

Nami – On the other hand, the Tidecaller does just about everything Soraka wants to do, but better. Her heal can be self-cast, her CC is immediate (and a knock up so it can’t be cleansed or reduced by tenacity), and she can empower herself or an ally to make those trades hurt. Yes, you will out-heal her, but one errant bubble and she can lay some pain onto you.

Tips for playing Soraka

• When getting ganked, try to use Equinox so that it cuts off the jungler’s quickest/most direct path. In short, make them either walk around the zone and delay their gank, or force them to eat the root. Remember, they can’t dash or flash once they are in the zone!
• Remain in the backline during fights, using your passive’s bonus movement speed and the extra MS granted by hitting your Q to get in and out for heals. While moving forward to heal your front line is risky, you can do so if you use your E to zone the enemy team from a dive onto you.
• While self-healing items like Spirit Visage and Warmogs Armor seem tempting to let Soraka re-heal after helping her teammates, remember her W cost is a percent of her max health, so it won’t be allowing her to give out more heals. Instead, it’s better to itemize resistances (armor and MR) to protect your limited health pool.

Tips for playing against Soraka

• It’s always best to focus her down in the fights. Soraka loves drawn out fights where she can dole out the massive heals to her wounded teammates. Kill her first to prevent that from happening!
• The Equinox is her only defensive ability and it has a long cooldown. Wait until she uses it and then engage.
• Because her W has such a short range, you can poke down an ally and bait her to get close to them for heals. Wait until the Starcaller walks up and then dump all your cc and damage onto her before she can heal her ally.

Champion Difficulty: 2/10

There’s not much in the way of skill to Soraka’s chant (I say to the loud protests of Soraka mains). She only has one skill shot on her kit in her Q, and only one ability that she can misuse (her E) but doing so will only be to her detriment, rather than the whole team’s.

Her goal in fights is fairly linear, survive and heal the other players. You don’t need to focus too much on hitting your Qs in fights, other than to get the bonus heals for teammates, though you need to be cognizant of which opponents might be looking to go on you. Otherwise, it’s pretty simple to stay back behind the tanks, heal them as best you can, and drop your E when someone dashes onto you.

Similar to champions

Janna, Nami, Sona

Have any tips for new players trying to learn Soraka? Let us know down in the comments below!