Riot says soraka is good, yet i've never seen anyone really do anything game changing with her, which leads me to believe she's just incredibly hard to play?

She is an incredible support hero, and with the right amount of AP she might do some damage, but it is hard to see a Soraka owning because her main spells are for healing, not damage.

Soraka is very strong early game and is sometimes used for pushing strategies, but she becomes nearly worthless past 20 minutes or so. She was hit by too many nerfs.

Wrong, Soraka is still strong in the end game. She can't save you from getting instantly nuked down, but she allows your team to continue pushing after a team fight by healing/mana restoring your team to full. This is her biggest strength. It's very difficult to break a push that has a Soraka behind it, and her ult gives her whole team an advantage over yours in a fight.

@OP: Soraka is frigging easy to use... cast heal, cast wish, stay in the back and don't die. Repeat. People just don't play her much because support Soraka is rather boring and you never get kills or items. But she doesn't need items when played as a heal/manabot.

No, muusbolla, you are wrong.

She is nearly worthless in combat situations late game. Her ability to keep your hp and mana up between fights does not compensate for that.

It doesn't matter if she can heal you up after fights if you lose the fights. With her on the team you will probably be losing fights later in the game unless you have managed to dominate very hard early game. This can happen with a combination of having Soraka and outplaying the enemy team, but with even teams it's not gonna happen and that's why we don't use Soraka in high level games.

Soraka's biggest strength especially in endgame is the ability to keep allowing your teammates to push non-stop due to her healing/mana restoring abilities.

Two things are the usual factors that stops a push:

1) Too many deaths on the pushing team

2) Pushing Team starts running out of HP/Mana and is forced to retreat

Soraka essentially negates the second factor, and reduces the chances of the first factor, thus giving the other team as little breathing room and time to organize as possible.

Just go lich and soraka pew pew combo

I agree... Plz buff Starcall! It sucks so freakin hardcore!

A drunken half-retarded monkey could play Soraka.

Addendum: Soraka is good because she sets up some stupid good early game combos by buffbotting other heroes. There is nothing remotely difficult about playing Soraka; she is in fact the easiest hero in the game to play by far. As a purely passive character, however, she is only as good as the other characters and players on a team; in a premade, Soraka is a good place to hide a bad player, while in a pub she's essentially worthless.