Understanding Sona

One of the most common complaints I used to get when I played Sona was how passive she was. Sona is normally seen as a vulnerable support due to the lack of a true cc before level 6, but this is only when you don't utilize all the tools she has. Her empowered autos fill 3 roles and must be decided upon quickly. General rule of thumb, W auto is best against bursty champs, e is better for those who run you down, q is best when they lack the engage.

Understanding support

Support is synonymous with these playstyles

• Find the best time to go in using a form of crowd control(CC) such as a stun or slow
• Make it not worth engaging due to mutually assured damage
• Pressure the enemy out of lane through draining resources (health and mana)
• Make pressure around the map
• Keep bot-laner safe

How does Sona fit into Support

At first glace, Sona seems only to perform one or two of these primary roles for support, but once you look at the whole, she fulfills each to a decent degree. She has some of the fastest roams due to her e providing a high uptime of movement speed, she has decent threats of damage from her q, and while w is expensive for little return it does help to protect the bot-laner. These are her normal roles from her basic abilities. These are assumed to be the roles she is playing almost all times.
Her situational roles are derived from her passive and ult. Her passive lets you choose between 3 options for an empowered auto: blue is for a burst of damage, green is for a reduction of an enemy's damage, and purple is a strong slow for 2 seconds. Blue lets her fulfill the draining of enemy resources (health namely) and mutually assured damage, green lets her prolong fights assuring damage and keeping the bot laner safe, and her puple lets her fulfill the role of an engage on a mispositioned enemy and also keeping the bot laner safe.

How to win lane

The key to Sona is learning when is the right time to do anything. To get you started, here is some guidelines

• Make space through these techniques:
  • Bait abilities that can threaten the adc, especially crowd control spells like hooks and roots.
  • Punish the enemy bot-laner for being out of position
  • Hit both enemies with one q if possible safely
  • Push up and threaten after getting the enemy to half the health you have left
  • When baiting abilities, make them think you are getting out of position yourself. Using e to dodge a spell is usually mana positive, so don't be afraid of using it.
• Push the advantages you get such as:
  • Did the enemy support miss an ability? Hit them or their adc to get a small punishment on them.
  • Do you have wave control? Use this time to set up vision, back, or roam.
  • Do you know where enemy jungler is? If you do, plan with your jungle to do a gank, objective, or invade.
• Roam if you are struggling:
  • Roaming provides solo lane exp to your laner, and Sona has some of the fastest rotations for a support in the game.
  • It's better to get less gold and lose pressure by roaming than it is to do so through death
  • Catchup exp allows you to not fall behind if you are perma roaming due to a very terrible match up

Tactics

Ult

Sona excells in the team fight due to her applying buffs to everyone, and AP Sona is no different. Your Q aura can have 100% AP ratio if you apply it to everyone on the team and applies your damage effects. All this is good, but Sona is known for one thing in teamfights, her ult. Here is some ult etiquette:

• If the enemy has an assassin or other chatacter that dives in and kills everyone, hold ult until they use their mobility tools or are dedicated to an action (katarina dashes in, zed pops over, kayne W, etc.). Sona's ult comes out in 0.25s, faster than almost any other cast time.
• Don't fish for a 5 man ult. It is a tempo tool. Use it for 1 or 2 picks guaranteed, or use it to disengage.

Positioning

Sona is a backline. Focus on geting as many people safely with your auras, use your powerchords to reduce a carry's damage, and just know that its fine to run. Given the movement speed of sona in the late game, you can easily ward right before a fight to check for any enemies.

Team Based

Sometimes, general advice only goes so far. Here's some more specific tips:

• Have you been stuck with the Quinn top, Cait mid, Kindred Jungle, and a Draven bot? You are the engage. Your ult is just to hold them in place while the rest of the team devours. If against melee bruisers, make sure to use powerchord e to keep them off and help your team kite.
• So you are on a team of all melees? Good news! No need to worry about being the team engage. This is when I would buy staff even without APCs, that movement speed is like drugs for a melee team. Bad news, they will let you die to an assassin even if you ult them.
• Let's say that bot, mid, jungle, and top all fed. How do you do turn this around? The answer is simple, just say to walk as a group and death ball. Sona is really good for this situation because even if no one is fed, enough buffs and debuffs can make even a bunch of literal walking talking pool noodles destroy anyone.
• You are in the most supportive team... not mentally they are still toxic, but they are all enchanters or wardens or catchers. In this case, you have to either step up or find who is going to.

P.S.

Dont forget that your power chord q with lich bane does a ton of damage, especially to turrets. 2 rotations in the late game is enough to decimate one.
Have a good rest of your day y'all!