UNDEDRGOING REWRITE FROM SEASON 13

Sona is a deceptively hard champion to play. You may look at her auto-targeting abilities, comapre it to Akali, and laugh at that statement. I would counter by asking this: What does Sona do when things go wrong?

Akali has her Twilight Shroud invisiility to escape nearly any scenario where she positions correctly in neutral, the 2 dashes from Shuriken Flip allow her to displace her champion across the entire screen to escape enemies and doge abilities, and her ultimate Perfect Execution are 2 screen-wide dashes, with the caveat that the first must pass through an enemy champion (aka forced cross-up, oh no). What does Sona do? She ****ing eats it all, or she has the hands to dodge everything with movespeed alone. Her optimal play is to hit the enemy with Aria of Perseverance Power Chord if they have gapclosers, Song of Celerity Power Chord if they don't, and eat however much damage they deal.

If it's a Fizz, ggs. If it's a katarina, ggs. If it's a talon, ggs. If it's almost any skirmish type champion with a decent gap closer and enough damage to burst you before your W passive AA can land, ggs. It's not that you are helpless into these champions - far from it - it's that once you ENTER into a bad scenario, there is almost no way to LEAVE it. This is the essence of why people say positioning is important on Sona as the punishment is not your E or your W, it is your flash or your life.

Accepting this and working around it, and eventually working to overcome it, is what separates a bad Sona player from a good one. A better Akali quite literally deals more damage than a bad one, same for ashe, darius, ekko, most of the champions in this game have ways that you can use and abuse their abilities to their very limits. Even Soraka can land every Q, constantly poisition and reposition to use W on perfect CD, save ultimate for the *perfect* moment to pump out as much healing as possible.

The best Sona in the world only ever heals 90 + 30% AP and shields 105 + 25% AP. Good Sona's deal more damage, but you don't pick her for the damage (unless only choosing between enchanters). Good Sona's die less, but that only means the enemies have less gold. The output of this champion is capped at (90 + 30% AP) + (105 + 25% AP) every 10 seconds minus ability haste. This seems limiting, seems like you'll never climb, feels like you can't carry every game. And you can't.

But if they let her go even one step further, she would be ****ing insane.

In short, Sona is the complete package. There will never be a game in which Sona is lacking tools that others may have. Soraka heals more, but has ZERO forward potential and pressure. Janna has that forward pressure with her reworked/reverted damage capability and ms, but her defensive tools are high-commitment and unreliable, not to mention lacking in magnitude and sustain, and are single-target for the vast majority. She has to use her abilities in that one, defining moment to have a true impact. Karma is better in lane, but falls off in usefulness to her team beyond a high-cd AOE shield lategame. Lulu is basically extra item slots for Kog'maw and Twitch aside from polymorph. Milio is a nice enchanter pick into engage supports, but suffers from Nami syndrome in that he's been relegated to working with specific teammates. Seraphine is overtuned as of 14.16 but has no guaranteed pressure against enemies with movement abilities. Renata is useful into engage and pairs well with champions like Kalista, but is giga-useless in many drafts and her power is so conditional as to ruin the champion's reliability. Nami has great skirmish potential if the enemy lets her hit bubbles and of course has been game-breaking with Lucian, but is sadly being relegated to Lulu 2.0 because of this fact. Yuumi is... anyway.

Taric is perhaps the only champion that comes close to matching Sona when it comes to generally applicable utility. However, he is also teammate reliant and only truly thrives in more organized play, where communication around the use of his abilities, especially his ult, is paramount to success. Not to mention, a forced 2.5 + reaction time delay to his most powerful ability ensures there is always room for the enemy to counter him. There will always be hype clips where the enemy nautilus allows Taric to autoattack him for an entire teamfight, winning the game, but those moment's don't get you any more LP than autoing their nexus any other way.

GigaSona

No Tear/Frail Max Output

Aery - The only option. Aery is required on Sona as it interacts with her best items, Ardent Censer and Staff of Flowing Water. Some usage tips incluse not using Q when within aura range of your ADC when poking, so you get the damage instead of an unused shield, and using Q and E to juggle your item buff timers on key members of your team.

Manaflow Band - The only option in the first row of sorcery. Anything else is just trolling on the most mana reliant support in the game, and the other runes have the dog**** winrate to back that up. Every game. In really bad matchups or insane poke matchups, or if you got double killed and lost your lane, your Q will just be used as a manaflow stacking tool to save mana for your W.

Celerity - Good on Sona as you will spend the entire game past a certain point with a movespeed buff, and will spend half the game before that with one. You are in the lowest movespeed bracket in the game besides dismounted kled, and movespeed is incredibly important on your champion since you apply your auras by bodyslamming your teammates one at a time, not to mention movespeed is incredibly important in you staying alive in this dash-infested game.

Transcendence - Bait, but taken when building no ability haste ( Boots of Swiftness into Ardent Censer). Ability Haste is blighted on Sona because of her Power Chord's passive, making it less valuable per-point on her than anyone else. This provides only a little more utillity than an ability haste shard, as the 20% REMAINING cooldown "reset" is laughable on a champion with such spammable abilities. Legitimately worse than an ability haste shard, I would rather you take Absolute Focus and the shard than transcendance and an AP shard. Winrate is always on par with celerity because 10 ability haste on Sona at level 8 will not be the deciding factor in games, so the choice between it and Celerity is largely moot. But still, if you are building no ability haste items taking this rune allows you to without throwing off your ability timings.

Gathering Storm - The better option. Take in at least 80% of games, and there's really no reason to not take it in 100% of games. Unlocks an entire win condition for your team. Every winnable game will go to twenty minutes, at least any game Sona can actually affect, so this rune will give you the extra stats you want to affect the fights that matter. On average games will not go to fifty minutes, but sometimes they do and you get 2500g worth of stats in one rune.

Scorch - The worse option. Take ONLY if the extra piddly little damage MIGHT actually affect something, instead of just making you feel better. Take when you have very volatile bot matchups where the first kill decides everything. Note: This is hardly ever true, and if you think it is then you shouldn't play Sona since you don't have the right mindset for her anyway.

Presence of Mind - This rune fills a gap in Sona's capabilities as a champion. The ability to not build Tear of the Goddess and to never run out of gas in an even teamfight is extremely valuable, and should be considered in games where you expect to survive teamfights.

Legend: Tenacity - Helpful into the right enemy team compositions, and the best vaccuum option for a second rune in the precision tree. Paired with Boots of Swiftness, you can expect to be far slipper than the enemy expects. Reminder that slow resist affects the AMPLITUDE of slows, and tenacity affects the DURATION of slows. 50% slow resist will make you half as slowed for the same duration, 50% tenacity will make you fully slowed for half the duration. They do not affect each other, but most sources of tenacity and slow resist stack multiplicitavely. So for example, if you take the 10% tenacity rune and have Legend: Tenacity, instead of 30% tenacity you get |1-(1-0.2)(1-0.1)| = 0.28 or 28% tenacity.

Cut Down - Luxury, but still relevant into the right enemy team compositions. Indirectly buffed with the removal of health from Seraph's Embrace, this rune can be taken alongside it and Bloodsong with a 3 points into Q leveling order. Usually ends up doing about similar damage to Summon Aery, but you dont take that keystone for the damage. I stick with tenacity myself personally, but if tenacity has little to no value in the game you're in then choose this one instead, or just switch to resolve secondary.

Conditioning - Buffed with the removal of Armor and MR shards as well as the addition of all of these health-based shards, this rune will put in an amount of work you couldn't believe. If this rune had a "damage mitigated" counter, it would be taken every game. Key component of GigaSona.

Bone Plating - DO NOT TAKE. This rune is BAIT to the maximum degree. The enemy controls when you have it up, it WILL NOT change ANY outcome of fights in situations you would want to take it in. The Draven and Nautilus will just ****ing kill you anyway if you walk up and get hooked like an idiot, bone plating or not, and you make yourself weaker for the entire part of the game you picked Sona to affect. Your entire laning pattern is short auto trades using Q and W to win the auto trade with simple numbers, but this rune is the antithesis of that playstyle. You have to fully commit to 1 point in Q actual spectator while you watch your ADC try and play the lane alone to get any use from this rune.

Revitalize - Obviously good, but worse than you may realize. The shielding done tracker on this rune is completely fake, it tracks all of the times you spam your W shield and nothing hits it. Go off of the healing done tracker and substitute the same number for the shielding to get a more accurate read on how impactful the rune was. Five percent more healing and shielding is pretty luxurious in the long run and probably won't change the outcome of most situations until lategame, and is completely pointless if you are out of mana at any point so you should be building at least a Tear of the Goddess if you go resolve secondary. You aren't Soraka pumping 100% of her output into a single teammate so the 10% increase on low health targets translates to little actual value, because you won't be able to use that 10% on multiple teammates at a time (in most situations). Again, theres nothing wrong with this rune, it is just overvalued sometimes in the comparison between it and Presence of Mind. If Presence of Mind and Conditioning could be taken together, I would do so every game over revitalize.

Early Shards - These shards are best taken into even or winning lanes where you have some semblance of angency in how the lane will go. They give you the best shot at coming out of the laning phase even or ahead, which is more valuable than taking scaling shards and coming out of lane behind. Taken in most games, the ability power is far more valuable than ability haste early due to the combination of Power Chord's passive, Sona's mana issues, and the general game flow of early laning. However, the ability haste shard can be taken when building Boots of Swiftness and especially when building Ardent Censer first, as you will have literally zero ability haste from items if that is the case. Also a decent time to go Transcendence, but I personally just dislike that rune in most scenarios.

Scaling Shards - If you aren't gonna win the Samira Nautilus lane anyway, might as well go all-in and prepare for the lategame. Lategame GigaSona, for when you know you will have little agency and your team has a scaling win condition. Taking these shards usually means you are maxing W and using your Q as a manaflow machine with 1 or 2 points max in it, in which case the AP will not be missed. Take if you know your jungler is powerfarming or if botlane is super weakside, and laning phase is just a fifteen minute hellscape you need to survive until you fight third drake or baron and come back. Always taken with Conditioning and Revitalize with Seraph's Embrace, W max, Dream Maker, etc. A perfectly fine way to play, and a personal favorite for some situations. Buying Tear of the Goddess early is recommended with these runes, as it "unlocks" the value of ability haste far earlier on your champion than otherwise.

Core - Always Build 2/3 99.9% of Games

Seraph's Embrace - Gives 105 AP (80 base + 25 mana-based from on-item mana and Manaflow Band), 1000 mana, 20 ability haste and a huge passive shield. Expensive and non-support focused, but very powerful and will allow you to both have no mana issues in lane as well as scale like a monster into midgame fights. Go 3 points into Q if you plan on going this item first, as you'll be a midgame damage threat.

Staff of Flowing Water - This item was made for Sona. It has everything you could ever want on it. Good at basically all points, there should be a staff in your 3 item build in the vast majority of games. Exception is if your team makes zero use of the AP (usually meaning they REALLY want Ardent Censer instead). Seraph's Embrace into Staff of Flowing Water is a common and powerful build, and will have you be a large damage threat due to all the AP you're stacking.

Ardent Censer - Another amazing item, this will blow the game open if you have an autoattack based jungler and ADC. More situational than Staff of Flowing Water, as Sona doesn't derive too much benefit from the passive herself in most normal sitations. Skipping T2 boots and tear to rush into an ardent censer will allow you to completely outvalue the enemy in early objective fights. Again, look at your team before building this item, as unlike Staff of Flowing Water the stats it offers are not as universal, but they are more powerful when they *are* desired.

Boots

Boots of Speed - Best boots in the game. But actually, if you see the builds of the top Sona onetricks in the world, you'll see that they actually delay their boots by a LOT. Many don't buy T1 boots until they've build an *entire* Archangel's Staff, or at least Tear of the Goddess and Lost Chapter. I've watched grandmaster Sona OTP's wait for an extra 30g in base to buy Dark Seal instead of Boots when they back with 320g. "But Rhestyyyy, when I don't buy boots I die in lane because I'm so immobile!" Skill issue, unironically.

Boots of Swiftness - The best boots choice in the vast majority of games. Only don't get if the enemy truly has NO slows to speak of, the slow resist is a bonus you get on top of the increased movement speed. The ability to gapclose and outrun is paramount on this champion. An EXTREMELY common scenario is you chasing an enemy running away with Song of Celerity Power Chord, and the kill is 100% gotten or lost depending on how quickly you can catch up to the enemy. Boots of Swiftness and Celerity are perfect for these situations, as well as the opposite where you are running away instead.

Ionian Boots of Lucidity - 15 ability haste really isn't that important at the end of the day, especially on Sona who obliterates its value as she stacks her passive. Justifiable in some games where your build will have little ability haste (i.e. if you skip Seraph's Embrace).

Other Items

Moonstone Renewer - An item best built third or fourth. It adds another multiplier to your healing and shielding, akin to heal and shield power, and is great for giving your numbers a multiplier lategame for those baron pit deathball fights.

Redemption - An alternative to Moonstone Renewer, for those situations where you KNOW that the active will provide more value than the alternative. Sona isn't that great at healing up her entire team quickly, only healing one person at a time, so it can be a huge help when facing game-altering levels of attritional poke like Xerath or Jayce, or if you have divers like Briar who you can't accompany into the fray but who could use a balance-altering boost.

Mikael's Blessing - You know if you need to build this one. For if the whole game is decided by one Morgana binding, or if Twisted Fate is cracked out of his mind and your ADC didn't bring Cleanse. Also, don't neglect this item versus Nasus as he relies on Wither to not be shredded on the approach. Use Mikael's Blessing to cleanse the wither then hit him with either Song of Celerity if he can be kited or Aria of Perseverance if he can't.