Soraka Build Guide by Hanjaro

Summon Aery adds onto Soraka's protection, providing her with an extra shield and a small bit of extra poke. It's generally the only rune you want to take with Soraka, she's played as a defensive ambulance, she wants to be backline protection for her team, so the other two runes are generally useless.

Manaflow Band is the only viable rune in this column for Soraka, it helps with your mana regen - which can quickly ramp up when you're consistently casting your abilities in lane to defend your ally - your W costs mana as well as health, and poke down your enemy - your E has very high mana costs.

Celerity increases Soraka's movement speed, which has good synergy with Salvation, helping her ward quickly and efficiently, keeping up with her team mates, and making sure she's not late to teamfights. Transcendence is an option with the ability haste it provides at levels 5&8, and reduces our basic ability cooldowns on takedowns, which allows us to cast spells quicker.

Once again, focusing on an early lead in laning phase, Scorch is your go to rune. It helps give your ADC a little bit more breathing room when poking enemies down, and it's the best rune in this tier for early laning. Gathering Storm is a good option as well, but it focuses more on post 20 minutes - if you have carries such as Ryze, Vayne and Kassadin, who scale high into late game, you might want to consider taking this over Scorch.

Generally the best choice in Resolve, it also helps when facing heavy engage comps, or bursty assassins. Can help you live if you get caught out mid - late game as Soraka is extremely squishy.

Revitalize is another main reason for taking Resolve, it increases all our shielding and healing by 5%, and increases the heal on our Astral Infusion when our target is below 40% hp, by an extra 10% - this synergizes very well with Wish.

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Boots of Mobility > MOVEMENT SPEED These have good synergy with Salvation and Celerity, enabling Soraka to ward efficiently, and keep up with her team, even outside of low health allies. Mercury's Treads > TENACITY/AP RESIST If the enemy team has a lot of CC, or a lot of AP damage, you can trade Mobi's out for these. They offer +25 magic resist, along with reducing the effect of stuns, slows, taunts, fears, silences, blinds and immobilizes by 30%. Ionian Boots of Lucidity > CDR A good choice to take if you need to be getting out extra abilities, and need the extra CDR, although you do generally hit the CDR cap as support, so they do pair well with Transcendence for the extra AP.

Moonstone Renewer > UTILITY/SUSTAIN Soraka's core item, providing us with a bit extra damage, ability haste and much needed mana regen. It also provides a smart heal to the lowest health ally when you affect champions with abilities while in combat. Each second spent in combat increases this healing effect up to 150%. This also empowers our other legendary items with 5 ability haste.

Redemption > CDR/HP+MANA REGEN/SUSTAIN Redemption offers an aoe heal in an area, adding an aoe health sustain for Soraka's allies, a core pick up on her to increase her utility and sustain - she can only heal 1 ally at a time with Astral Infusion. It also offers HP and Mana regen, meaning you can stay in the fights longer, recall less, and you can help out even while dead. It also offers an extra 10% healing power, which synergizes with your Summon Aery, Astral Infusion and Wish.

Ardent Censer > DAMAGE/UTILITY/CDR If you have a team comp that relies heavily on fast auto attacks such as Vayne, Twitch, Kog'Maw etc. Ardent Censer is a great pickup to maximize your carries damage output while shielding them, it also offers you a bit more burst and mana sustain.

Mikael's Crucible > SURVIVABILITY/CDR/UTILITY A good pick when facing an enemy team with hard CC that you need to Cleanse on allies, such as Impale, Dark Binding, Cocoon etc and grants the target a small heal. Increases your Mana and HP regeneration, and 20% shielding power - good synergy with Summon Aery.

Staff of Flowing Water > UTILITY If your team has many AP users, Staff of Flowing Water can be using for granting them up to 40 ability power, and bonus movement speed for 3 seconds after healing or shielding them. You also gain mana regen, ability power and heal and shield power.

Warmog's Armor > SURVIVABILITY/CDR Warmog's Armor is a bit of a niche pick up on Soraka, it's generally not an item you want to be aiming for, but it helps regenerate your health while out of combat, so if you're at late game and you're participating in multiple small skirmishes, without being able to recall to base, it's a good pick up. It increases your health by 800, so you can survive a little longer, and heal your teammates longer.

You're going to want to take Starcall first, giving you the ability to slow enemies, incase of an invade, and used to poke down enemy's - and sustain you - during laning phase.
Soraka's laning phase is pretty safe, using Starcall to poke down the opposing enemies from range, and sustaining yourself with rejuvenation when you hit an enemy. The slow on Starcall can help slow down an all-in, or a gank from the enemy jungle, you also gain movement speed, and grant the effect to an ally when you use Astral Infusion on them.

You can help push the wave with Starcall, although you should make sure you don't need to use it pending an all-in!
You generally don't always want to go for an all-in at level 6, depending on what lane you're vs, you don't want to get bursted down by something like a Brand or Nautilus. Keep an eye on your allies portraits as well, you can change the outcome of a fight from across the map, netting yourself assist gold, just by pressing R!

Keep your brushes warded, and try to take vision control of the drake pit, Soraka is very squishy, along with most ADCs, so you want to keep good vision around your lane so you can see incoming ganks.
Soraka is pretty good at outrunning enemies with low mobility,
but if she gets caught, she's very susceptible to burst damage.






Outside of laning phase, you're going to want to be setting up a lot of Stealth Ward wards around objectives, such as Baron Nashor and the drakes. If your team is ahead, and it is safe to do so, you can set up deep vision in the enemies jungle, allowing yourself and your team to get important picks, that allow you to take the previously mentioned objectives.

You want to mostly take your focus from poke to healing during this stage of the game, even when ahead. You will want to focus peeling your ADC from the enemies main damage threat with Equinox and Starcall's slow. If you can, try to hit it on an enemy to gain the rejuvenation buff, which you can then apply to your allies, granting them a HoT (heal over time) and movement speed.

Keep your team healthy with Redemption, and you can disrupt a teamfight, and enemy channels, with Equinox - it's an aoe silence, use this to your advantage! Someone like Lee Sin may engage, you can place the Equinox under the ally champion his Sonic Wave hits, and it completely negates his all-in, and can potentially get himself killed.
You want to be using Wish when your allies hit below 40% hp, but this is not a necessity - you want to make sure everyone stays alive, so use it before if you think they're going to get burst down before you can hit R.

Astral Infusion and Wish both apply Ardent Censer's buff, as well as Summon Aery, use this to your advantage. Summon Aery can proc multiple times to the same ally if they're granted rejuvenation.

You can interrupt a Katarina's Death Lotus, removing a lot of her damage, stopping her ability to jump out, and hopefully netting your team an easy kill, and an easy teamfight win.

The main thing to be aware of, is making sure your teams threats stay alive, while removing, or zoning, the enemy teams threats.

Control Ward's are a staple part of any support, both to deny your enemies vision, and to provide your team extra vision. You should make sure to buy one at least every time you back, preferably to have 2 on you at all times.

I hope you enjoyed, and learned enough from my Soraka guide, to play her as well as the pro's.

If you enjoyed my guide, you can check out my other guides here, in which I've covered more styles of supports, incase you want to branch out on supports such as engagers ( Nautilus, Pyke etc!).

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