Talk:Soraka/@comment-24623301-20140303161241/@comment-24055932-20140317003352

Played it in a ranked - you are highly versatile, being able to decide to go Full AP, Sustained AP or Full Tank, and by that having a great variety of possible functions and roles you can fill in, depending on what your team needs.

Her strong q harass combined with a frequent heal featuring armor and a silence allows you to outplay alot of the Topplayers, working best against Toplaners with a limited burst or champions who rely on making combos. A fine example is Darius - your harass outranges his harass, he got an insane burst, but a low consistent damage which allows you to outsustain his damage, and he relies on pulling you to him in order to pull off a combo, which you can easily deny by silencing him and walking away.

In teamfights you aswell can rule:

Your silence, on the right champ and at the right time will technically work as fine as a Polymorph, disabling e.g. the AP Carry once he enters the fight (e.g. if you see LB w in, silence her, and she is just stuck in the middle of the fight, unable to deal damage or get out). AD Assassins aswell won't harm your adc, as you can heal him while giving him over 150 Armor, making any execution in the next 2 seconds very unlikely. Your q will act as your consistent damage, and your ult will just work as a reversed Karthus ult (thanks to her passive, with just unbelievable high scaling).

The biggest problem you got as Soraka Top Lane, is that you need a good team and a quite balanced game - there e.g. is just nothing you can do to stop a fed Autoattacker-Champion, and even your 2.5 second silence becomes just useless, if your team doesn't react on it and eliminates the silenced target (if you target a squishy high damage enemy). Same goes for your heal - a braindead adc with no positioning you just can not save - not even with over 1000 HP heals and extra armor.