I understand what you're saying, what I'm saying is that Healing isn't all you do, Exec's doesn't even render your heal entirely useless, and not very many Champs can Execs the whole team (Twitch w/ Ulti, anyone w/ Tiamat but that isn't terribly effective, couple others).

I feel this is a bit over-dramatic, Soraka/Taric/Alistar/Heal Summoner Spell work very well currently and I would recommend continuing to take Soraka w/ Promote-Rally and encouraging someone to go Ali w/ Promote-Rally in the same game, and perhaps you'll have a different take on the situation after that. A five man push with those two and most everything else (throw 3 of Kayle/Nunu/Trynd/Taric/Blitz/Morg/Nivia/TF/Corki/Sivir/Singed/Nasus/Malph/Mumu/Sion/Teemo in there) and 5-man early and you're spelling a lot of success for yourself.

I played soraka for a few games till one of the guys i was playing with told me to stop it and get a real hero because we need dps and that he can replace me with potions anyway.

Point is that i can play soraka only if we have 3 heavy dps-ers who can replace me and so we won't lack dmg coz of me.

Try laning with kat to see how it's breaks ur heart when u have to choose between pushing ur lane a little with ur 1 ability or healing urself because ur hp is **** and that b.itch can spam her skills like hell.

The main point is that for instance choosing a setup of Soraka tryndamere katarina alistar and Ashe and the same setup and you replace soraka with veigar and you've got a better team alltogether because you've got an AOe stun a ****load of damage and a brilliant pushing power. And this is a single example.

Executioner's Calling only hurts 1 skill per those characters (except maybe Taric but who uses his ult primarily for the healing - it's for pushing and too mana intensive to heal a player.) Meanwhile a ward or oracle's disables 1 skill per stealth character, which just happens to be a skill they are based upon entirely. I think Exec's is fine.

don't let carries farm, simple as that.

you should l2p.

heal the characters who don't have the debuff.

oh yeah, don't feed the carries because if they do 600 it's all your fault because +55% crit damage is totally balanced.

You guys are telling me healers are fine and they have other roles except healing and yes I do agree with you silence is nice and stun on taric is nice as well but take a look at the top 500 list posted by pendragon and look up what champions are those people playing. You barely see tanks at all mostly it's tryndamere katarina shaco TF twitch or [insert random carry here]. It's easy to say something is balanced when you don't play it at all. I looked up 20-30 guys for the lulz and notice neither of them played healers with 1-2 exceptions. So how come the champion is ok if no one wants to play it?

Come back-up these statements when you've played 20 matches in a row and you actually did make a difference against competent people with Soraka ok?

Going to disagree, Soraka would be superior there. The only type of lineup I would say replacing Soraka would improve the team would literally be when the entire team is support and completely devoid of CC / damage. Soraka sustains pushes and carries, she's a beast, I absolutely love having her on my team. Her and Kayle + a carry is really gross to be around.

Bottom line of this thread is Support is working just fine, I think there are a lot of other things that deserve priority balancing (TF/Corki/Trynd, Cleanse, health/rally/promote stacking, new maps, improved matchmaking, store pricing model etc.)

Ok, if you sampled 20 people and 2 of them were playing healers, that means 10%? A healer on one team in every game? Seems like they are pretty useful if they're getting that much play, considering the general "elite" player mentality is to play carries and wreck everything.

Perhaps healers are not as useful as I originally claim at high ELO play, but from what I've seen health/heal stacking dominates all unorganized play. Maybe the very high ELO players that organize together can coordinate a burst down of it better, and thus use the higher damage heroes. :/ Still though, there's a healer in every high-elo game according to your sample, obviously some of the better players think they're useful.

Trynd is kind of a tank also, he can soak a *lot* of damage.

TF is broken and universally banned in tournament play for this patch (so I'm told), so for non-tournament MM I wouldn't be surprised at all to see him highly in use for High ELO players; they'd be handicapping themselves not taking him, right?

U f*** ******!!! U are playing with all the gay carries and yet u score like 2.-13 with them and u tell ME that soraka is ok ??? HOW THE HELL??? U can't even handle a f** arrow with NO RANGE LIMIT and u think u can play soraka and give me advice on how to play her??

Go wipe ur nose brat and l2p TF before asking for him to be balanced.

Now taking replies from people who actually play the listed category of champions.

Ok i have been reading all the posts here and i noticed the comment about oracle "not helping much". I play eve, shaco, and twitch almost exculsivly and let me tell ya oracle completly changes the way you need to go about things. Secondly, Healers have saved my butt on multiple occations much as i have saved their's. Not to mention a silence ability is key to dropping trynd (who is in almost every game seeing as he is commonly considered OP) If u silence trynd he can't use his ult which makes him ALOT easier to deal with.

i think it would be a mistake for any game to look to WoW for "class balance"