I don't think infuse is really that much of a problem. If Soraka wasn't on the team then the other players would just pick up another life regen item.

Considering that Soraka does almost NOTHING but heal/infuse I don't really think it's a problem.

Starfall is also fine to me, it's not particularly threatening but it can add up since it has a short cooldown and it also includes a debuff.

I also think you can almost always skill it up early with some planning. If you are playing with a fellow caster you can usually skip out on ranks of Blessing for Infuse/Starfall grabbing just 1 rank early on for a little extra regen. A ranged hero shouldn't be taking an overly significant amount of damage in lane. If you have a melee hero you can usually rely on a lower rank of Infuse to keep you and them topped off for mana and then focus on Starfall/Blessing.

That's been my experience so far at least.

Putting a mana cost on Infuse doesn't really cahnge it that much, it just means that every X infuses you have to cast it on yourself instead.

I haven't seen infuse be too much of a dominant factor; usually we just gank them if they just hang out in a lane too long. If all we do is harrass them then sure their infinite mana will be annoying, but if we have decent regen we can duke it out in the lane. I'm firmly in the soraka is underpowered camp; her starcall especially is useless. Soraka is one of those heroes that when i see, i think "easy kill". If starcall is just improved or her passive is changed up, she would be more viable.

Soraka is imo currently crazy strong and weak at the same time. Laning phase she is godly. She must partner but that lane is borderline unkillable early game. Also, with a proper laning, like Lich, she can really let them farm to hell and back with infinite mana and their low CD nukes. This means that the game can technically end very fast.

Her problem however is that she scales to end game in a piss poor way. Nobody really need her mana that bad after a while, and her general heal turns to **** also. Her ult is the only useful thing as far as I see it after a point. And at the same time while you had massively stronger power early from her spells, you are now underpowered due to her not being able to do anything except try with her heal and wait for her ult heal to cooldown.

Another burst heal would help her a bunch I think be because the HoT just doesnt cut it with current late game damage. If anything the armor needs to scale with AP as well as the heal. If you could boost your allies armor by like 50 that would mean another 5-10% of reduction in most cases, which is significant.

id also like to point out that Soraka probably gains the most of her strength from getting the Locket item. This item basically outperforms her built in heal but it stacks with it so its nice. But Im pretty sure she cant increase her heal capability anywhere near the power of that Locket alone with just AP based items, which is weird.

I've had a lot of success with her, I don't think she is too weak. One needs to drop the fact that you arn't going to rack up kills, and you are not going to be offensive, but I've def. turned the tide of a gank many times with her healing and even reducing the magic resists of their whole team making AoE more effective. I usually go for items that give survivability and auras for my teamates so I'm hard to kill and they get a benifit

She also has 0 escaping ability. No slow, no speed boost, nothing. The heal(s) are nice but they're usually only going to prolong a gank not prevent it unless your teammates comes in. This makes her a pretty easy first target.

flash for the win. And her heal HoT will keep her up with the + Armor buff. If you have defensive items you can last a good bit.

But yeah if you get caught by 4 heroes then your toast, so don't do that. Just shadow a carrier once the lane phase is over with. She's great bait.

And if you're faster than them, you can keep hitting them with starfall until someone else joins the fight, so the gank squad is a little softer, but obviously suriving should be your top priority.

I think soraka is a good consept but her skills seems out of synergy. Her only purpose is to give armor+heal and refresh mana. Her ulti is like a second heal summoner spell, and not really that good.

If something should be changed the mana refresher should be removed or changed. I belive a mana-regen+ap-power spell would fit her well. This will give her a way to support both tanks and spellcasters.

The starcall is useless imo, would be nice if she could get a realy good debuff or nuke.

They could also take an interesting twist on the Omniknight style of play and for every mana point 'healed' the same damage is done in a small radius around the target. But that too would probably make her imba since many people already fine the skill very strong. (Her ult could also do this I suppose).

I like your creativity! but her ult isn't as useless as everyone suggests. It stacks so well with ability power that I'm healing for around 1k by the end of a decent length match. 1k x 5 heroes is plenty to turn the tide of a battle. (sorry for over posting but she's my fav. champion so far)