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DJ Sona - The Perfect Playlist (6.21)
Build Guide By Gnug315
14
4
1,129,938
Views
39
Comments
14
4
1,129,938
Views
39
Comments
Sona Build Guide By Gnug315
1,129,938
Views
39
Comments
Sona Build Guide By Gnug315
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Sona Guide
DJ Sona - The Perfect Playlist (6.21)
I used Mobility Boots and Sorc Shoes for all of S5, and my winrate went up when I switched to survivability. I would never overlap CDR as I hate wasting gold / losing out on other stats. I have noticed players using them, but imo since hitting max CDR is so easy with great items, why put it on shoes. But it's probably a pretty close decision.
1. Mikaels overdoes mana regen, but items like Tear/Athenes are part of your core build. In the scenario described above, you want to get mikaels straight after finishing Eye of the Watchers and boots. In that case it generally acts as a replacement for a mana item, and acts as a way to keep your ADC alive.
2. You not having success with the item is an anecdotal evidence fallacy, just like personal winrates. These things do not necessary have to be correlated, you may not have been using the items correctly or had random better luck after switching boots.
As for "I also need AP and survivability": AP for heals/shields/etc. is completely useless if your ADC gets oneshot by hard CC champs that could have been avoided by mikaels. Keeping your team alive is #1 priority, Mikaels can offer this in certain situations while AP maybe cannot.
If keeping the team alive was the #1 priority, I should play Soraka or Janna instead of Sona, or ask everyone to stay in base until we lose. It's not that simple.
My shields and heals need to be big enough to make enough of a difference thruout the game, and damage is also a large part of Sona's influence. Losing overall power for an occasional clutch save from Mikaels isnt worth it in my experience. YMMV, esp. at a higher ELO.
There are so many variables and built-in variance in LoL, it's always hard to be sure of anything. All I can do is give my best guestimate. I regularly try out alternative items on my smurf account, and occasionally make adjustments to my build.
One thing that starts happening around p2 and above is enemies take a close look at your build and punish you for it. Thus, you can get away with a pure AP build up until enemies are smart enough to reliably target and delete you on one rotation, which is why I added a bit of survivability in order to progress further. Perhaps in your ELO Mikael's starts to shine, but this is not my experience. Another poster talked about Mikaels earlier in this thread, and I agree with him.
I will delve deeper when I reach Master :)
On a side note and with all due respect, I've played at every rating between bronze and master so "perhaps in your elo..." arguments are invalid. You can theoretically get anywhere (perhaps except top challenger) with any semi-build as long as you master it, but that doesn't mean it is the optimal build. I think your build lacks in more than one aspect and I have reasoning for it that goes beyond personal experiences. What you do with that is up to you, it is your guide in the end. Here you have my suggestion:
Build
For skill order, I tend to put 3 points in Q before level 6 to get as much laning pressure as you can (W heal doesn't do much in lane as it's very mana inefficient), and once laning phase ends I start maxing W for the heals. Generally that means I leave Q at only 3 points and max W earlier for teamfights/skirmishes where Sona's damage isn't as relevant as in lane.
For masteries in particular, I'd leave out the 6 points in ferocity and trade them for summoner spell cooldown reduction. Flash is instrumental for Sona and 3% damage increase really isn't that much compared to 50 bonus health at level 1 of 8% bonus to self healing/shields.
Again, what you do with this is up to you. Either way, I'd recommend you to take a close look at this and reconsider some things here and there. You can find my credentials here (http://euw.op.gg/summoner/userName=VYN3RTJE) and do check out the following as well: http://probuilds.net/champions/details/Sona just as proof of my knowledge on Sona and supports overall.
For full disclosure and because you don't have comment to vote enabled, I downvoted your guide but am willing to reconsider if you are able to either give me solid reasoning for your build or reconsider some things here and there.
I have the following comments:
It's hard to write a guide that covers all possibilities: own and enemy teamcomps, enemy builds, vastly different skill levels etc. My guide is a meant to be a general healthy build that's optimal, or close to it, in basically all situations.
In my personal experience, Mikael's has underperformed. Maybe I'm bad at using it. Maybe it doesn't shine until enemies are competent enough to recognize and exploit it's lack. I can't say. I will try revisiting it.
Here's the thing, tho. I'm a one-trick pony with probably around 1500 ranked games on Sona (on 2 accounts since 2014). I'm currently around the top 1.5% of LoL players and LoLSkill has me at #355 World Sona (top200 being my best yet).
There is a very good chance that the 354 Sonas currently above me have not played this many Sona games. They are not all one-trick-ponies. They have played other champs and can transfer skills onto Sona, but they are not as intricately familiar with her as I am. So why are they ranked above me? Because they are better at LoL than I am. They make fewer blunders and mistakes. They choose the correct map focus more often than I do. They are playing the game better than me. As you mention, one can probably get away with subpar builds all the way up to challenger.
There is a decent chance this is what is going on here. There is a decent chance that my build is better than theirs, because I have 10x the experience on Sona.
Obviously there is also a good chance they just know better. But it's not a guaranteed fact.
Anyway, I just wanted to venture that possibility :)
So, all I can do is give my recommendations best I can, take feedback into account and continue to test and think about Sona stuff, and update my guide when I change my mind. Something I did recently, and am happy to do.
I'll try the 0/18/12 again. As you can imagine, it takes a ridiculous amount of games before my neural network brain can tell a difference in strength between these options. Statistically I would probably need thousands of games with each build in order to fall inside a standard confidence interval, and by that time the whole landscape has changed a hundred times and the data becomes useless anyway :)
It's hard to write a guide that covers all possibilities: own and enemy teamcomps, enemy builds, vastly different skill levels etc. My guide is a meant to be a general healthy build that's optimal, or close to it, in basically all situations.
Maybe, I'd just make an item header "situational" and in the guide itself you can explain why and when the item is good/bad. It is very difficult to make a balanced final build that takes all these things into account, but in the guide you can go into detail without problems.
Here's the thing, tho. I'm a one-trick pony with probably around 1500 ranked games on Sona (on 2 accounts since 2014). I'm currently around the top 1.5% of LoL players and LoLSkill has me at #355 World Sona (top200 being my best yet).
There is a very good chance that the 354 Sonas currently above me have not played this many Sona games. They are not all one-trick-ponies. They have played other champs and can transfer skills onto Sona, but they are not as intricately familiar with her as I am. So why are they ranked above me? Because they are better at LoL than I am. They make fewer blunders and mistakes. They choose the correct map focus more often than I do. They are playing the game better than me. As you mention, one can probably get away with subpar builds all the way up to challenger.
There is a decent chance this is what is going on here. There is a decent chance that my build is better than theirs, because I have 10x the experience on Sona.
Obviously there is also a good chance they just know better. But it's not a guaranteed fact.
Anyway, I just wanted to venture that possibility :)
Here's my take on this. First of all, I think lolskill is a bit iffy because any diamond 1 player is better on any champion than any diamond 5 player if you give them a few games to learn the champ (perhaps unless it is a REALLY high skillcap champion). I'm rank 138 on Sona, 216 on Nami and 390 on Karma, but I bet all challenger players beat me on these champs if it comes to it.
Anyway, there is one thing I've noticed with many one-trick's: they tend to play a specific playstyle that is almost exclusive to them, and does not always translate well onto other players. To take a personal example, I used to unetrick Lulu some time back and I would build her as a support, run supportive masteries etc. even though I played her top/mid. It had a lot of inherent weaknesses (i.e. I chose windspeaker's over thunderlords which hurt my laning phase and late game damage) but I knew how to deal with them and actually use it as an advantage one way or another. The supportive playstyle I used meant I could never get common pro item builds to work for me, for example I was never in position to use Lich Bane, thus I felt it was useless for me. However, it was actually a really good item for her at that time because it gave her the damage she usually lacked, while only giving up very little utility due to her inherent scaling. My point with the anecdote is this: your 1500 games on Sona do not mean you may have found the best build for her overall. It can mean you have found the best build for your playstyle, but chances are you have developed a very unique playstyle and have adapted the build to specifically deal with these weaknesses and strengths.
On that same note, quality > quantity, 1500 games on diamond 5 level aren't worth nearly as much to judge the viability of a build as 100 games on master level, just because weaknesses are exposed much more easily.
With much lower CDs we're gonna need more mana. Early Tear provides a ton and can be upgraded (last) into a fine item, so gonna look at that. Else probably a combination of Ardent & Athene/Morello.
I just want to know what's good and what isn't good on her when it finally comes to live, since I'm spamming her to climb right now. Obviously its a ways away from now but I like to be prepared :)
Well the new Athene's moves Damage numbers into Healing numbers but then also adds a mana regen problem, which can be somewhat mitigated by taking Meditation mastery instead of Merciless, tho that's not a great trade.It's fine but not a clearly obvious choice anymore. Maybe it depends on enemy comp - you want more healing vs poke comps than allin comps.
I'm mostly interested in Frostfang + Lost Chapter start into Eye of the Watcher and Morello, but it takes so much testing before results aren't explanable by variance alone. Or theorycrafting / crunching numbers, which isn't my strong suit :)
Will test some more before updating tho..