Talk:Soraka/@comment-1151457-20140916052307/@comment-1330314-20140916054949

Unlike other genres like, say, MMOs or FPSes, where any kind of PvP is based around quick combat, MOBAs can have much more drawn-out fights, especially in the laning phase where trading damage at the right time and gaining little advantages over your opponent over a ~10-minute period are crucial mechanics. Having someone who can just heal you, and therefore negate all of those little advantages in one go, at little cost, is not healthy to good gameplay and just makes for a boring laning phase, since any damage you land against your opponent can just be healed away at much less effort.

As with Kind-Hearted-One, I wouldn't call two dedicated healing abilities in a four-ability kit (one of them being an ultimate, the other having next to zero downtime) "a few healing moves". Even if Soraka didn't have either her ultimate or her W, she'd still have the best healing in the game, and putting the two together means she can keep her team healed up better than a Holy Priest in a 25-man raid. She has more healing than current Soraka, more crowd control, and more damage, while still keeping her theme as the cleric of LoL. The only change is that her healing now has proper tradeoffs that make gameplay far more interesting for everyone involved, and prevents her from going tanky (not that dedicated healers in other games build tanky either).