Hi. Welcome to my first build for Soraka. She's one of my main support characters and I've played quite a fair amount of games with her. This guide isn't a carry Soraka guide. So if you're looking for a penta kill Soraka (and she is capable of that, I've seen my team members penta kill with her) you most likely won't find it here. However, with this guide, if you can play well, you're team members will love you as you'll come to find that dying is almost impossible for your team while you're around.
IMPORTANT: Please read this whole guide before you upvote or downvote. Also, there are alternative builds and runes, Note that different games suit different builds. So if there are alternative items that I haven't listed, please do not hesitate to leave a comment below and let me know.

Some terms you may not be able to understand whether if it's in the guide or in games. Here, I shall explain.

CDR - Cool Down Reduction
CC - Crowd Control (Abilities with stuns, snare, taunts, fear, silence etc. would belong in this section)
MR - Magic Resistance
Arm Pen. - Armour Penetration
Mag Pen. - Magic Penetration
AP - Ability Power
MIA - A term used when enemy are missing from lanes. You do not need to call MIA for junglers. They're meant to always be in "MIA" mode.
AD - Attack Damage

P.S Please do leave a comment and tell me if I'm missing out on any terms. That's would be nice and really appreciated :)

Pros

• Hard to lose team fights when you're around and ALIVE.
• Silence is OP
• The only support who can give mana
• You can grab assists while you're up top and the fight is at bottom lane
• Hard to kill late game
• Good support mid/late game
• Very flexible when it comes to runes, mastery, builds etc.
• You don't need to farm. You can sit in the bush and be lazy/talk on the phone like I always do.

Cons

• Easy kill early game
• Can't solo lanes (So don't go solo top when your team has a jungle)
• Can't be too aggressive early game. (Unless the other side is really squishy and your laning partner is very tanky. Good example would be Garen+Soraka VS Sona/Cait etc.)
• Most of the times, games don't drag on long enough (cause people on the other side surrender, or because your team surrenders) for you to reach Rabadon. The heal too much and watch people rage part doesn't get to pop up. No Fun :(

• Greater Mark of Scaling Ability Power: AP to boost your Astral Blessing.
  
• Greater Seal of Replenishment : Soraka's Infuse can give mana. One thing however, it doesn't give enough mana for you to spam your Astral Blessing. This makes these mana regen runes become useful.
  
• Greater Glyph of Cooldown Reduction: CDR is always good. Soraka's Astral Blessing sometimes feels like it take FOREVER to Cooldown. Sometimes, there are situations where you are just 1 second away from being able to save your team member from death with your Astral Blessing. This is why I recommend this rune.
• Greater Quintessence of Ability Power: Same reason as your marks. However, there are alternatives for your quints.

• Greater Seal of Scaling Mana Regeneration: This is okay too. Getting flat mana regen runes isn't a must. If you don't have flat mana regen runes, you might as well stick to this one instead of spending all that IP on flat runes.
• Greater Mark of Ability Power: You can use this one if you'd rather have flat AP runes.
• Greater Seal of Ability Power Greater Seal of Scaling Ability Power: If you feel that mana Regen is a questionable seal, then you may want to consider AP runes. This can boost your Heal early game. However, it will not boost the amount of Mana that will be given by your Infuse.
• Greater Quintessence of Health Greater Seal of Health Greater Seal of Armor: Are good choices too if you find that you have surviving difficulties early game.

The Marks, Seals and Quints are all changeable as long as it stays within the category of boosting your AP, adding on to your Magic Pen, more Mana Regen and improving your survivability
One thing that I wouldn't recommend you to do, is to change your runes to categories other than the ones mentioned above.

There are no particular Skill Sequences necessary for a support Soraka. Your Soraka has no need to do huge burst like Annie or LeBlanc.
However, if you really want to juice a skill sequence out from me, I'd say you can:
Infuse+ Starcall: Silence them so they can't do anything to you at all and just QQQQQQQQQQ!!! But please do fall back when your silence has ended for safety reasons.
P.S, do this too much and the your enemy team will hate/focus you first. So I really don't recommend you doing this too much unless you really like annoying the hell out of people.
Astral Blessing+ Wish: Use these two together, whoever dies is a noob. LOL. No. Jokes.
If you use these two together, usually people won't die. Especially when you get to late game. You can Astral Blessing someone and wait till they're about to die, use Wish and after you used your ultimate, your Astral Blessing should be ready again to heal that dying friend of yours once more. If you do this well, during late games, you should be able to heal round about 1700 for 1 of your team member and round about 700 to the other 4 team members in team fights. The amount of healing you can do does change depending on which build you use. That maths that was done for you before is based on the standard build with standard runes. That's like a mega large shield from Sion placed onto your team members if you ask me =D

8/0/22 - Standard Support masteries. You can replace Good Hands with Meditation if you insist.
21/0/9 - I wouldn't really recommend this one. It gives u a lot of AP, that's true, I can't deny that. But you won't get the benefits for your Clairvoyance, Teleport, Clarity, Flash. Neither will you get as much Cool Down and EXP. You will miss out on that huge chunk of 15% CD for summoner spells too. Meaning you won't be able to flash as much :(
0/21/9 - If you find it almost impossible to stay alive with Soraka.. Yeah, Ok. But you won't be as supportive that's for sure.

Starting Items for Normal Game

You want to start off with your . BUT WHY? Like, I mean, it looks so ugly. Well, it gives you a bit of survivability, providing that you're using the standard rune set and barely has ANY survivability at all. Also, it is so that you can build it into a , your main source of money. As a support, you require ZERO FARMING. (Yes, I play her when I feel lazy).
During early game, you are to sit in the bush and be a lazy fat unicorn. Do nothing except for harass, help your ally remain in lane and also grab 4~5 CS. (CS means creep scores).

On your first return trip:
I sincerely hope that you've returned not because you're dead, but because you have enough money. During this trip, you should be able to upgrade your ugly looking into your turtle shell, . Also, grab some wards if you have left over money.

Starting Items for Ranked

In mid game, people start to get mean. Junglers come out of no where, and your enemy players show up in the most unexpected time and places. As a support, you need to be friendly and WARD. I cannot stress this enough. Your team members are not always going to call MIAs for you. Actually, a lot of them don't and just because they didn't call it, doesn't make them a noob. You need to learn to ward yourself if they clearly show no interest in calling MIAs at all. During this phase, your enemies will start to get kills, your team members should be able to grab some kills too. AND YOU, should be able to lob a couple of assists from your team members. Use this assist money for wards and your build. If you don't know where to ward, there will be a section below to teach you. However, if you really really really really can't afford a ward, (by this I mean, you've grabbed 0 assist, do not have your money jumping turtle shell/philosopher's stone, has died about the 10th time during your game and you're at base with about 5g in your pocket) if this is the case; you are allowed to ask your team member to buy wards. However, please make sure you are able to supply the next set of wards. You're here to support with wards so that they can use their money on their builds and deal some insane damage.

During Teamfights:
Please. STAY BEHIND AND HEAL. You're not the tank. You get survivability items so that you won't die in order to give your team continuous support. If you want to rush up to the front and take all the damage there is out there, you might as well play a tank. The only time you would probably rush out is the time when you want to Infuse and silence some loud-mouth champs on the other side. Please run back once you've accomplished your mission to silence. Who to silence? Use Infuse on champs on the other side with CC ( Shen, Rammus with taunt for example) or champs on the other side who deal a huge amount of AP burst damage. (A fed Akali if you can catch her outside her mist, LeBlanc who does some OP burst and most importantly, Annie with both huge burst and CC). As for who and how to heal, you should have already read it in "Soraka's Ability" and "Skill Sequence" section. If you haven't, now's a great time to do so.

Items for Mid Normal Game:
During Mid normal game, by now you should have your boots and your Spirit Visage if you're lucky. If not, at least a Kindlegem would be nice.

Items for Mid Ranked Game:
You should have your boots now and you really can't ask for anything more than that. People play carefully in ranked games making kills hard to get, meaning barely any assists. If you get a good team who knows when and how to get dragon, then you might be able to get your Spirit Visage.

In late game, your job is the same. Heal, silence, ward and grab assists. In this phase of the game though, one thing you do not want to do, is to push too far. Especially if it's past the first turret of the enemy side, or past the second turret if your first turret has been destroyed. Also, from this point of time on, you want to make sure to keep Baron and Dragon checked up. Some teams if they are having some good kills and scores, can take baron down at around 20 mins into game.

Items for Late Normal Game:
You should have your Soul Shroud by now. If not, your Spirit Visage should at least be completed. If you're lucky, you might be able to grab a Needlessly Large Rod for your Rabadon's Deathcap

Items for Late Ranked Game:
Same rule applies, you should have finished your 2~3rd item by now. If not, then you'll probably have to do some farming, jungling and grab more assists. Make sure to participate in teamfights. Teamfights are more important for you than farming or jungling and backdooring shouldn't be your job either. Leave it to Master Yi if you know what I mean :)
Stealth characters start getting pretty OP from here on, or maybe even earlier if someone fed them. Ask your tank to get oracles, you with oracles isn't that much of a great idea. You will get focused and you DON'T want to be focused because you can't handle all that damage. However, if your tank doesn't seem like he's interested in getting one, then you'll just have to get one yourself.

Most of the time, you want to stick to your happy standard build.
Your Standard Build



What's good about the standard build?
: One thing you should always remember when you're changing your build is that MAX CDR IS 40%. It will not go beyond this number even if you use more CDR items, runes, masteries etc. If you do the maths, you will get 10% from masteries, 5% from Runes, 15% from boots, 10% from Spirit Visage, 10% from Soul Shroud and another 5% from runduin's omen. That's 55% you may say, true, but a lot of the times, you will need to change your boots from Ionian Boots of Lucidity to Mercury's Treads. They have too much CC for you to handle and are all focusing you because you are too supportive for them to handle. So take away that 15% from Ionian's boots. You're only grabbing those boots first because you need that CDR in the beggining. Once your Spirit Visage and Soul Shroud is out, you may change if you wish to.
- As support Soraka, you're good at nothing except for heal pretty much. So you want to heal yourself more to STAY ALIVE and HEAL EVEN MORE. Fact is, that small chunk of MR and CDR is always good too.
- Lots of Health to stay alive, CDR is always good, that aura is just too good. It helps not only with your mana problem but also your team member's mana problems. It just means you can get even lazier and have no need to Spam your Infuse all day long.
- This is like, boost your heal to 500 and heal your team members for 500HP every second. Let's say Caitlyn's Ace in the Hole hits one of your team members with 1000 damage. With your Astral Blessing you just took half of that away AND you can do it again 8 seconds later but Caitlyn has to wait another minute >=D
- This offers again more health, more AP. But it's passive is like.. OH EM GEE. With your QQQQQQQQ slowing people (also reducing MR), no one can run away and no one can catch your team members.
- Ever heard of the saying? A support with Omen is always OP. Remember how I talked about Rylai's before? Activate this just to make things worse and watch everyone run like they all have exhaust on them. It's funny.

Depending on who's on the other team, you may want to consider changing your build. That's the fun part of League of Legends. Things change.
- If you're doing well early game, you may want to grab this before you grab your boots. That CDR is just too good if you can get it to max stacks. Seriously, if your team is doing well, max stacks from assists shouldn't be a hard task at all. However, this is a snow ball item and you lose 1/3 of your stacks every time you die. So unless you're sure that the other team is filled with noobs who can't even kill a Soraka, then you can take this item.
- Here's the situation. They have too much AP carries who are ripping your team apart and your team members obviously haven't realized that the shop sells items that provides magic resistance. That's okay. Lucky you're not a noob like them. Get this and with your passive, you'll save townsville once again.
- This is a nice item. It helps not just you, but also everyone in your team survive. However, note 1 thing. Its aura unfortunately will not stack. So if you see that your tank is getting one, then you won't need to grab it.
- Helps with mana problems and also gives a huge chunk of AP. Why not?
- This is almost good for any champs in League of Legends who finds survivability a problem. This little buddy will prevent AP characters from doing the full combo on you, gives health and mana and also the Catalyst the Protector is like a huge plus in laning phase. If they have a Karthus on the other team, THIS IS THE KEY TO DESTROY THAT UGLY SKELETON. I HATE HIM.
Pretty cool passive, nice CDR and lots of armour. This stops champs like Tryndamere Xin Zhao etc. from ripping you within 2 hits.
Adds on to survivability, good for almost any game, this revives you so you can heal once again and they've probably spammed all their ultimates on you before. Now you're UNSTOPPABLE.
For ranked games, push turrets while people are dead, activate and RUUUUUUNNNN!. Well, that's what I do. LOL
If you want to grab this, you better do it early. This isn't that bad for Soraka actually. Lots of health, mana and AP. But seriously, grab it early so you don't waste its passive.
You only want to use this to counter champs who are doing WAY TOO MUCH damage. By this I mean champs who barely has any survivability items. Or champs who rely on survivability items such as Frozen Mallet, which doesn't give any MR at all. This can actually be countered by champs on the other side if their MR is over 100, has a decent amount of lifesteal and arm pen items like Black Cleaver and Last Whisper. Fact is, even if they do, 100 MR is about at least 2 MR items. (P.S MR items don't add on to AD) That's 2 items, meaning 2 items less damage (that could possibly be a Bloodthirster and a Phantom Dancer for exapmle) just to counter your Thornmail. They won't be doing as much damage and you should be able to heal yourself and get away or even tank the damage and let your team members wipe that greedy thing away from the face of Summoner's rift.
I rarely play games with Warmog unless I don't have tanks on my team and I suddenly stopped feeling lazy and wanted to tank. It's not the best, but is usable on Soraka.
If you have lots of AP champs on your team, the aura of this item will make your healing job a lot easier. Like seriously, AP characters are all pretty squishy, and this item is like, OH I GET TO BE LAZY ONCE AGAIN. It also gives you some AP boost for Astral Blessing and some spell vamp for your Starcall. Not a bad choice at all.
Lots of AP, heavy armour and a active ability that you really have to use your brains for. Fact is, you don't want to use it when you're in a 5v1 situation. You're probably going to die anyway. Use it when you're focused so people can stop focusing you. Let them hit you for a bit, it would be even better if a couple of them spammed their ultimates on you, only to come to realize that they wasted it on someone they can't kill. By the time they've all diverted their attention, the "self-stun" effect should be gone and you'll be able to heal again. You may want to ask, That's so ******ed. If I activate it, I won't be able to heal? That's why I said to activate it after you've taken a couple of ultimates/combos from AP characters so that your team members won't die so fast and can make it till your zhonya effect is over. Don't activate it if you're not focused. One thing to note. Please don't activate it before the teamfight just because you're scared while you're on your way running to your team members. You're going to make your team members suffer if you do something funny like that. (Just a short story of mine, I used to do that ALL THE TIME and send my friend raging to bed every night. He was so mad. LMAO)

So. Like I've mentioned before, I've said to talk about warding and CV.

Red Circles: Places you should Ward.
Light Blue Crosses: Places you should CV
The Orange Numbers: They only exist to help me talk more in depth about each place for warding/CV.

More in Depth (If you're bothered to read =D):
1 - CV here if your jungler is not interested in Counter Jungling. Use it to see what items they each have first and also to see who's going on which lane. Or even use it as a signal of "Hi" if you're really that bored :)
2 - You only start warding the enemy jugle after the first couple of turrets are down so that once you've warded and is unluckily being caught, you have more escape route without running into enemy turrets. Normally, you let the junglers ward the jungle before mid game. You Clairvoyance here if your jungler suggests you to do so. Just so that they can steal the buff and be a meanie. This only applies mostly for players with basic jungle route though :P (Basic Jungle route = Blue buff -> Wolves -> Ghost -> Red Buff -> Golem for most of the time).
3 - Some champs such as Caitlyn are annoying and likes to hide in brushes. CV here so that you know whether they're there or not, and also so that you can actually hit them without going into the brush. A lot of the times actually, when you CV the brush, you can scare the champs out of the brush and then you can go in, sit there and do nothing.
4 - Top is always solo if your team has jungle, so don't worry about it if you have jungle. If you don't have jungle and you're going top lane with a partner, ward it. If you're soloing top lane for some bizarre reason which I clearly do not understand why when you're playing full support... but still ward it anyway.
5 - I'd say, the most important place in the whole entire map to ward. Baron Nashor spawns 15:00 minutes into game and respawns 7:00minutes after its death.
It's be best to ward it from the position I've circles because you can also prevent ganks with it. But if you can't because enemies keep passing through the river, you can go to the terrain on the purple side, just behind the Baron and ward baron over the terrain.
6 - You're not soloing mid, but if you happen to pass by while your mid carry gets ganked quite a lot. If you have spare wards, do them a favour.
7 - Ward the sneaky brush there. People like to hide there and gank.
8 - Ward enemy blue to steal their blue buff and gank them if they're there. Again, the same rule applies like 2. No need to ward it early game.
9 - You will be bottom lane if you have a jungler and even if you don't you still might end up at bottom lane. Ward it. It saves lives.
10 - Same rule apples as 3
11 - The dragon spawns at 2:30min into the game and respawns 6 minutes after its death. You don't need to ward it right away if you're playing normal game. If you're playing ranked, I suggest you ward it ASAP once the time has hit 2:30 minutes. Keep it warded to steal the dragon and gank the enemy team.
12 - Same rule apples as 6.
13 - Just like how you like to steal the enemy buffs, they like to steal your's too. Usually they don't do it until late game. So you can start warding the buffs in your jungle about late game.
14 - It's the same brush as 7, just on your side that's all. Still ward it though. Like I said, it's a huge brush. Enough to fit 5.
15 - Same applies for this place as 13

If you play support Soraka not because you're in a lazy mood but because you like her, you may want to "zone" your enemies for your team member. You don't need the farm anyway and you're not a lazy person like me. Why not do your team member a favour?
I didn't make this video. All credits to Shurelia. The good thing is, she used Soraka for her zoning tutorial. This should be helpful :) (I rarely zone for my team members though, since I'm in premade teams most of the time and they understand that I'm one lazy player. LOL)


Play Video

These are questions asked by readers and are actually questions that are important enough that I think I should put in my guide =D

1. Why only 1 5GP10 item? Where is that Philosopher's Stone?
I did mention you can get different items according to your game. Personally, I get enough assists so that philosophers are not necessary for me in normal game. But you may want to getting both Heart of Gold and Philosopher in more important games like ranked games or if you can't get enough assists.

2. If your support why do you have 6 items?
6 items, I suppose you wondering about this questions because I need space for the wards? Most of the time, you won't even hit your 6th item. You'll probably just hit your 3rd item and that's about it. You'll have plenty of space for the wards. (And this is why I only get 1 5G10SEC items, I only need up to Soul Shroud. The rest is just like butter on bread and can pretty much change to anything else, I only placed it there so that people know what's best to continue building on to if they feel the need). By the time you hit your sixth item, it'd probably be about 50 minutes into game. At that time, most turrets are down and people stop wandering all around the map because they don't want to get ganked. With CV, you should be able to see where they are easily without wards. I've had a section about where to CV, so it shouldn't be hard. You need to be able to know where they are. A very simple example would be, if the whole team is missing, you would CV the Baron. If they're not there, then who cares? Stealing buffs isn't a must. Getting Omen and activating it in teamfights is like debuffing all that blue/red buff they've got on them with also a huge chunk of HP to keep you alive. And if your team has red/blue buffs on themselves, it's pretty much equal. I'd say Omen and CV beats wards for this time. Well, at least that's how it is for me personally, I don't know about you, please don't get offended =( But then and again, whatever you're comfortable with =) If you feel the need for wards over Omen in late games, I suggest you perhaps take out that Zhonya and leave it for wards.

3. Why sacrifise supportive items to replace them by tankier items on soraka? From experience she should be AP or Support nothing else.
By support items you mean items with Aura effects if I'm right. (Correct me if I'm not). As I mentioned before, the items after Soul Shroud are changeable. You can replace it with items such as Abyssal Scepter that supplies aura effects. I only get some tanky items because Soraka gets focused a lot of the times. Also because of the CDR. The aim of this build is actually to MAX the CDR so that your heal is now 8 seconds instead of 16.82 and your wish is now around 50 seconds instead of 100. (Which is how it is at the beginning if I remember correctly). You would be able to heal twice the amount of healing you can do comparing to when you didn't have CDR. There are times when you are maybe just 4~5 seconds away from saving your allies and it's those moments that this build is trying to focus on. Also, aura items aren't as important because a lot of the times, the players on your team would get MR or Armor items themselves. Then and again, you can change the last 3 items if you wish.

4. Why play support Soraka as CDR when there's AP, isn't "heal more" better than "heal fast"?
The reason to this is because of Soraka's AP ratio, I don't know the exact AP ratio for her, but I do remember that it's pretty low for her heals. (I've tried to support with AP builds before with 2 Rabadons, RoA etc.) Last game, which is a game I played yesterday, I hit 219AP and it only added on 73AP for my Astral Blessing, if I remember correctly. So today let's say u had 500AP you would only get about 225AP added on for you heal. To get up to 500AP, you probably won't have a lot of CDR, if you went for CDR+AP items, you'd lack survivability (Good example would be your Mejai, Morello's Evil Tome, or maybe Deathfire Grasp which provide AP and CDR but no survivability and you get focused down within two hits). If you went for AP+Health, you'd lack CDR. Now do the maths, for full AP you would do 350+225=575 for your heals in 16.82 seconds. For CDR you would do 350+350=700HP for your heals in 16.82 seconds because you can use your heals twice instead of once. Also, if your enemies change targets, you can save their new target (which is your other ally) because you can use your heal again. If you manage to get the full build on standard build, you can get about five, almost six hundred heal HP, double that amount of heal in 16.82 seconds. AND, You add on your ultimate. I'm not saying full AP is bad, don't get me wrong. It's actually pretty good because Soraka has a pretty high ratio for her Starcall if I remember correctly and it only has 1 second Cooldown. You can just QQQQQQQ all day. But like I've said in the intro at the beggining, you're here to support your team with heals and not carry with your Starcall damage. If you want to learn how to play a full AP Carry Soraka though, I can suggest you to go to this link. http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/ap-soraka-no-my-horn-doesnt-poke-through-my-deathcap-104646

Special Thanks to jhoijhoi, she has made a wonderful guide on how to make a guide. The links for her guide are here if you're interested in make a guide yourself too :)
http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/making-a-guide-101506?page=1

This is the first guide that I've written and it'd be really nice if you're willing to leave a comment to help me make this a better guide :)
Feel free to ask questions and give suggestions if you feel that it's necessary.
Once again, thank-you for reading this guide and I hope you'll enjoy playing with this Soraka build! =D