Talk:Soraka/@comment-5319740-20171018174920/@comment-26808509-20171031134824

There aren't as many healers because healing isn't a healthy game mechanic for a MOBA like League. RIOT and the community discussed this many times, heals just feel unfair. As a damage dealer your job is to deal damage, you invest time, mana/enegry and sometimes take risks to do so. Dealing damage is fun to you and it limits the enemy, because he has to be more carefully and that leads to a more interesting gameplay. Heals on the other hand are simply unfun to the opposing team because you just undo their effort and have a really small trade off to do so. That's why the introduced the health cost, that's why bards heals need time to ramp up and that's why Rakan needs to hit his Q on an enemy champion.

Now to my mind the health cost on Soraka didn't really solve the problem about her heals being unhealthy. Back then when she was reworked she was incredibly busted, because people simply played her with lots of HP regen. Rejuvation was supposed to force Soraka to interact with the enemy, but it didn't really work out either. Soraka is THE healer in League and she can only do just THAT. She has no damage, no good peel, no reliable CC, she can only heal. She can only do what is known for being unhealthy and that's pretty much the reason for her being most of the time almost broken or almost garbage. The Ardent Censar meta was the first time she wasn't the over the top and not garbage either, but only because Janna could abuse Arden't better than she could. The only way to fix that problem to my mind is to go away from this ONLY HEALS theme. Give her some utility, some unique way to buff her team and force her to interact with the enemy to heal. Her identity wouldn't change much, because she still would be the Star Child that uses her powers to protect and empower her allies. But only heals can't be balanced. Either her heals are too strong or to weak and she can't compensate either one of these cases because there isn't anything else in her kit. There aren't enough "Levers for balancing" as RIOT likes to call it.