RIP Soroka the QQ has begun.

I don't mind the idea of healer supports, or 0cs supports, at all.

What I don't like is that you have a support who gives the carry and herself massive healing and infinite mana. Any bot lane with a Soraka in it is going to be boring as ****.

or just get tristana or mf and laugh of that heal when you engaged on 'em

I had a long talk with a designer about the problem today - might as well share some of his thoughts...

One of the things that some people can forget is that it's not just the support bottom, but it's the ranged AD carry too. You'll see Ashe, Graves, Caitlyn, Vayne, maybe Corki, maybe Tristana, etc. typically going bottom and farming up. The key thing about ranged AD's is that they scale with gold a lot faster than they scale with levels, and so as a result, bottom lane is perfect for them. The exp loss of the duo-lane doesn't matter as much, but the free-farming matters a ton to the point of ridiculousness.

We've tried a lot of things to solve this one, but ultimately, we haven't found a solution we like yet. One solution we tried was adding in 5-6 new support items that were essentially "must haves" in order to play the role. We tried nerfing support mana into oblivion to force them to buy mana items to have any effect in the late game. But all of them ended up with the same result: get a different champion in bot lane with your AD carry. Because anything that takes away the gold from the ranged AD carry isn't worth it.

The natural next step is to try to smooth out the AD carry curve. Nerf AD items hard, give some AD on level ups, etc. But the end result there is that you make the same decisions, just with another role. Throw down an AP caster that scales really well with itemization, or an assassin that likes the security. In either case, you still make the same investment.

We're not going to solve the support problem by nerfing supports - we've tried that, and the result is people just go to some other "support" that's not really a support (Support Plank) and continue to not farm. The ultimate problem is that you want your AD carry to farm. By choosing support, you're investing in a late-game carry. It doesn't even need to necessarily be an AD carry, but they do exacerbate the problem.

Most players get frustrated by supports when they're in bot lane without a support. It's pretty hard for 2 carries to beat Soraka+1 in lane because of the sustain factor. But we have to handle this situation with care because of how much swing it has over the metagame. Most solutions to this problem are pretty sweeping changes that impact the game pretty hard.

ty for post, Red.

Well I'm somewhat glad the infinite sustain is seen as a problem. Oh, and to be honest I'd rather see things like GP support rampant then an infinite sustain one. That might just be me though.

Oh, I don't mind the support + bot meta at all. I'm just sick of facing, playing, and playing with Soraka because it turns bot lane into a zero-risk farmfest for her side.

Every other support has to have some modicum of mana conservation. Soraka can freely heal whenever it's up, then get a bunch of mana back while also giving it to her carry.

That's all. Taric is fine, Alistar is fine, Sona is fine, Janna is fine, all the "classic" supports are fine... but every time I'm in a lane with Soraka, no matter which team she's on, it's incredibly boring because no matter what the non-soraka side does (short of outright killing them), you're not booting them out of the lane, so why bother trying? Just farm until a jungler ganks (which won't happen much thanks to wards) or someone loses a tower.