I do not see why you would pick up heal over flash. With a flash it is useful throughout the entire game, not just the beginning. Plus with a full support build that you are doing you can heal yourself and not have a wasted summoner spell. I also don't see why you wouldn't grab starcall around lvl 4 if the enemies aren't pushing you too hard. If your partners aren't really bad you should be able to grab that, get some minion kills with it and lower MR by a healthy amount. The extra gold will get you that precious deathcap much sooner and the MR will help your annie our any magic users get a kill denying the enemy team even more exp and gold.

1. Snow ball character: a character that starts off weaker than most characters, but grows faster, to be stronger than most champions late game. Soraka is this character because her heals are generally weak beginning game, and won't be able to save a team's life. however during late game with mejai's (a snow ball items) soraka is much more powerful than if she were to of folowed the normal development curve of most champions. By late game, a well played soraka can heal up to 800 on astral blessing and 1200 with wish, this is the main reason i stack AP, for heal, since soraka...is...a healer..

2. when playing with a high elo or not, you might have a team with you that you can properly communicate with, by doing this and having common sense you can avoid most confrontations that would end in your death, and if your doing your job as a healer and your team is doing their job well, you won't lose team fights and wont need the escape mechanism, the other two summoner spells are much too important to be replaced with a item that only benefits your self and not your team, soraka is a support, the more you help your team the better.

3. The summoner spell heal is mostly for early game inccedents and more imporantly getting an extra , single button click 400 heal on you (compared to a W click then either F1 or click on yourself) it can be the difference between life and death for your team mate or your self witch, to me, acts as a escape mechanism by allowing you more life and more time for your team to help you (team coordination explained above)

4. Sure that works but the only problem is while you are watching your friend in mid to check on his status to see if hes just backing off or getting getting chased , your team mate in your lane might be just about to get jumped, ganked, or focused and their initial response to why you did not heal them (because you didn't even have an eye on them) is "WHY NO HEAL SORAKA??" Soraka's need to always be prepared.
having a live feed in the corner of your screen , glance down on your mini map to see if they are getting chased or can run away with out a heal, you still have an eye on your team mate on your lane, this is where it gets tricky and need to multi task well, but i told you playing soraka well wasn't easy. You can run away if your about to get focused and still be able to heal mid if they happen at the same time. Soeakas need to be prepared.

5. Some people need to be told the obvious lest they will make this mistake and blame others for not telling them . you know there are people out there that will do this, and i'd rather be safe than sorry.

6. Yep it does, but my argument remains the same, you have an annie by your side and the tank has already ran in trying to deal cc over the enemy tank , you run in, not completely focused on heals because you are now concerned on lowering mr, you call in a star call, for 8 magic resist prepare to use another annie starts to attk but any good team will immediatly attack the support when they extend at all what so ever, ( i actually played a game where a garen just ran past my entire team just to try to focus me) so now your dead, (the cc from the tank + dps focus) your team is now short a support and annie has no one to keep her health up when she gets focused, she kills someone beccause of your magic resist lowering (if that) but annie is now dead without a healer, so its a 4v3 and your team dosnt have their main dps or a healer, but the enemy team has lux, sheilds up her dps pops some stuns and your team is now dead. The importance of your heals can be the difference of a team fight....and not those small 300 heals most sorakas dish out, i mean the AP NUKING 800 heals and an ult for 1200. If you would of just stayed back, not only would you either have a level higher in infuse, or astral blessing, or you would be more focused on healing , add that armor bonus plus that precious health, you'd still be alive and probably win that team fight.

7. I was explaining that last hits are more important for a carry, this can be over looked during the laning phase but when you carry and you stumble upon the same minion rush and tons of gold for either of you, let the carry have it, read the rest of that paragraph it'll explain why your team benefits more with them having the gold, compared to soraka.

8. AP a bad investment on soraka?? Her heals rely on her AP if you want to actually do anything that would make your enemy even want to focus you besides the extra 300 gp. i dont know what else you would invest in, AD soraka? shes a support. Mana soraka, your runes and infuse can more than take care of that, cdr soraka, if you can deal 300 heal in hald the time i can heal 800 in my build...its still not worth it, besides with my build i hit the 40% cdr cap. Please i would want you to tell my why AP building on soraka is a bad idea...i would love to know your logic. For the healer.
Because you have mejai's you will be more heal NOT dead.you might even save your teamates life by healing them becaue you dont have to worry about you getting focused and losing stacks because you were too close to the enemy. soraka isnt ganna do a lot of damage with her auto attack to a tower, that risking a death with mejai's is worth. xin zhao will double you damage the next push in half the time without risking your life.
AP does not factor into tower damage, you cannot do ability damage onto towers...I might be wrong but i Serverly doubt that, again i might be wrong in this but ive never had star call hit a tower, and ive never been able to target a tower with infuse...and if you want to target it with astral blessing then i hope its your tower and im pretty sure it wont work even then. The only ability i know to do damage to towers is rammus's ult and attk speed enhances like xin zhaos E or Yi's Ult.
AP = ability power, incase that was the confusion
.

9. if you were to use a champion wrong you would be doing all the easy things and taking the short roads which lead to an unsucessful soraka, Like i explained above there is a lot of multi tasking and descerment involved in being soraka as well as speed and accuracy with hotkeyed heals , noticing your allies heal , keep up the advance or knowing to back off, cving the correct point in a team fight to keep from getting ganked, silecing the right champion or knowing to not silence and either keep your mana up or a friendly's. Along with the life health feed for knowledge across the map ( explained above) So inorder to play a champion right , it requires to do the hard road and all the little extra things you can do to make soraka the beast she is (literally).

To be honest i did a rough calculation in my mind because during the last part of my guide i had to rush because i was going on a trip to Tennessee. I didnt expect me to be that much off, but ill admit a mistake when i make one. and i apologize for this. however i would not remove it either way. The money from greed could be the difference from buying a rabadons cap or Being SOO close to buying it but have to wait till your next run because you dont have time to wait you need to go out and heal, when that 30% AP increase would be very useful.

Hope these answers your inquiries, i encourage you to comment and vote more albiet bad or good, i'd like any feed back and would love to discuss it with you. I'm very intrested in why people play soraka not building AP then go for heals...that is one thing i look forward to understanding...but i wont untill someone gives me there insight, bad or good, i'd like to know what your thinking. :)
Best wishes
-Me

Heal in SS?

Well by the time I reached this part of the guide I was convinced you weren't completely sure you even understood the purpose of a support character, especially when you refered to Soraka as a "snowball champion".



Well, Soraka master, show me your marvelous ways of playing her. I hope I can get to high ELO following this build. :)



:(

This may seem trolly, but good god surely you must see what is wrong with those statements. You take a high cooldown-lower-than-0-ap-level-5-astral-blessing healing skill over an escape summoner? The people you play against (and with) must be awful.

With your "soraka pros do this:" section:



F2-F5 to jump to positions on map for lane awarness and being aware of your map in general allows you to tell from movement if they need healed or not. If I see someone on my team pushing back behind tower when minion wave isn't close to it I know they are being targeted. If I see the enemy jungler in lane on someone with flash / escape spell down, I know they will probably need healed. Even if they could have lived, security is key.



Why did you need to say this? I mean, that's ****ing common sense.

Totally not responding to the guide in chronological order.



You neglect to realise that it lowers MR. That's the entire point of the spell in teamfights - give annie -30 MR for all the enemies, she's going to be a lot stronger.



?_?



You build nothing but AP and you refuse to hit a tower? What a waste.

I mean, AP is generally a bad investment, but when you are even too ***** to hit a tower for 300+ damage with that AP..



?_?

Surely if you play someone right it would be easy to play. Playing a champion wrong would be hard cause you're using them incorectly. Soraka is the easiest support champion in the game, hands down. All target based skills, 2 AoE non-targeted spells, large range, good mobility and escape (provided you build well and take good summoners).



You hit level 18 by the 2 hour 13 minute mark?

Little advice: it's probably only going to be worth a couple of wards by the end of the game. That's still good, but just saying, your maths, way off.

Maybe I'm *****ing but ugghhh reading this was just silly.

Pretty solid build, though wall of text... Make it easier to read and I'll give you +1