How it FEELS to Play Sona

I've been playing Sona for six years okay I've played thousands of matches I've seen all there is to see on this champion and right now I'm going to tell you nobody should play Sona but if you're going to play Sona you might as well Focus up and play it right no half measures on this Champion you either learn to do it right or stop because if you don't you're going to be a [ __ ] tumor and I have to imagine that for people who play ranked their experience with Sona is having someone on their team lock her in and do exactly that so there are two ways that this can happen the first comes from the reality that not a lot of people know how to play Sona competently because Sona [ __ ] sucks the second comes from the fact that while Sona can be incredibly effective the effect is subtle it's not flashy it doesn't happen all at once but it happens little by little Sona denies a ton of damage from the enemy team closes gaps and applies just a pathetic little amount of magic damage to your auto attacks like damn 14 damage it's kind of insulting all right what I'm trying to do here is address the general stereotypes surrounding Sona right the box that Sona is put into as a champion and the box that Sona players are put into to as players because I think Sona is a relatively misunderstood Champion compared to [ __ ] like Nautilus pretty easy Champion to wrap your head around everybody who plays League knows what this means but how many people do you think actually know what this means now maybe you do and if so good job man you know you're [ __ ] but a lot of people don't and so they classify Sona improperly as just another enchanter no wrong in fact I was looking at guides just for a bit of research and I found this one and while I was reading up on enchanters I was like so you're supposed to utilize your laning phase and play aggressive to make space is this is this guy on [ __ ] crack but it turned out Sona was actually considered a special case of enchanter in this guide alongside Yumi which we'll get into this but huge difference in laning Phase between the two fine whatever this guy is absolutely right in his classification though I would argue the specifics are very outdated your advantage is in your sustain it's it's it's crack it it has to be crack right Sona is very very strong but she's also very weak she's a simple Champion but she's a little complicated and likewise league as a game is pretty easy to play but pretty hard to understand should I heal dude you this game is dog [ __ ] in that sense Sona is a great representation of league as a whole but she's also a terrible representation of league as a whole Sona despite being one of the easiest champions in the game is not cut and dried at all and the people who play her aren't easily generalized either now I'm pretty much the last person you would expect to play a champion like Sona before before I ever played League I almost exclusively played firstperson Shooters and I almost exclusively went for DPS no Medics I played zero supports I liked playing more independently and wielding all my power right in front of me Sona was like the antithesis of that she is the antithesis of how I play video games but I've played her constantly over the years anyways for one simple reason do you see this now do you see this are you getting it yet it took me a long time to start enjoying Sona and by extension League as a whole because there was nothing fun about playing some weak [ __ ] off no damage healer until one day something just clicked and since that point I've had a better and better understanding of this champion and that understanding is what I'm here to share with you today lazy purple if you really do exist I'm sorry for stealing your titling scheme for the second time but this one's not TF2 related and I think that should make it okay so with the new season coming up to change everything again I want to talk a little bit about why I play Sona what makes her fun what makes her suck and what distinguishes a shitty Noob inter Sona from an experienced battle Harden Warden anyways there's a couple things I have to explain in order to do all this starting with the basics of the champion and don't roll your eyes because I'd bet for a majority of the league player base the basics of Sona are far less basic than you think they are when you're a new player and your opponents suck Sona definitely shines as a simple champion because all you actually have to do is just use your abilities a lot and that's true no matter where you are on the ladder but once your opponents get more experience this seemingly easy play style will become [ __ ] impossible because you're making a 100 mistakes per second second that the enemy team will know how to punish and some of you are sitting there and going yeah no [ __ ] but you'd be surprised how many people don't understand the severe punishment for Simplicity in this game because some people don't have very powerful critical thinking skills and that's okay you can still play anyone in this shitty game because it's a little toy for children we're getting off track eventually you're going to need to use all three parts of each three abilities as optimally as you can so knowing what they do is pretty important in the interest of time for this video I'm just going to cover the important stuff your passive does two things it gives you a power record every three abilities which is an enhanced Auto attack that does extra damage and applies an effect based on the last ability you used abilities also Grant Stacks from your passive accelerando which I will be calling accelerando because I'm an American these Stacks Grant you half a [ __ ] point of ability haste maxing out at 120 Stacks after which it just starts taking time off the remaining cooldown of your R that's just son as Passive by the way if I was teaching you how Lux worked we'd be done by now anyways your Q does damage it does this damage and it does that damage the power cord after Q just does more damage W does some healing and gives some Shields and the power cord after W makes the target physically smaller and reduces their damage by 25% for 3 seconds which is almost like using exhaust your e speeds you and your allies up and the power cord after e slows the target your R is pretty simple which is why Riot freak is going to be explaining it for me sona's ultimate is Crescendo it's a skillshot line nuke making enemy Champions dance in place while taking damage okay so that was a long time ago it looks like this now I wouldn't call it a line nuke anymore really it's a line stun I mean 50% AP scaling is [ __ ] abysmal saraphina and Nami gets 60% whatever it's still good it's the centerpiece to sona's kit and it was so weak in Wild Rift that they had to rework it awesome that's most of what Sona does covered in record time and for most of the game these abilities kind of feel like [ __ ] what you need to understand is Sona contributes very very thin margins to her team's strength with each ability but remember you're stacking CDR just by existing so you can contribute these margins many times a lot and eventually they'll start to add up if you've ever taken calculus it's like your abilities are DX you're doing an infinitesimally small amount of damage or healing but you're making up a remon sum under the exponential curve that is your scaling power and you can pretend like you're a real Champion that Riot hasn't power creeped out of existence I will remind you as Sona you Lulu and Yumi are the only actual supports in the game that have to wait for level six to have hard CC but Lulu has a polymorph you don't have anything that strong in your entire kit and you is untargetable for the entire laning phase so I think it's fair to say you have pretty much the biggest Lane disadvantage for better or worse this is how it's supposed to be and is what Riot considers balanced for Sona because you scale now I'm going to be square with you the only thing you really need to worry about is the early game because the late game is pretty easy if you do well enough to make it there Sona is referred to as a hyperscaling champion and while I don't think the picture that paints in your head is accurate to reality you certainly do scale but before you do that you have to focus on not [ __ ] blowing it and lo losing the game that first starts in champ select I'm going to be honest the best thing you can do here is pick someone else pick thresh or Nautilus or Jana or ranata picking Sona has a good chance of instantly tilting your team I honestly can only recommend this Champion for people who are seriously determined to play it right knowing you have to put in a lot of work for almost no [ __ ] reward but that's what we Sona players do we lock it in anyways the game might want you to take ignite I love ignite but I hate ignite it never [ __ ] casts correctly so I have to take exhaust but both of these spells require you to get in cast range of the enemy to use it on them which for an enchanter whose best position is about right here that doesn't make a lot of sense so if you want to be a [ __ ] you could also take heal I doubt anyone cares about runes but for whatever reason the recommender gives you scorch instead of gathering storm I don't know why Gathering storms seems way better on a scaling Champion I will say I cannot play the game without presence of mind it is insane how many Mana problems on this champ are mitigated by presentence Mana flow band and tear and Riot just thinks that with every new season you don't need all three of these things to make the chant playable they are wrong take all three until I tell you otherwise also why not take the ability haste Riot what the [ __ ] is this Rune page whatever that's fine moving on we're in the game now I'm going to miss the [ __ ] out of spell thiefs because it charges way faster than this new piece of [ __ ] item that they're heading for season 14 but this new item does change up how Sona is played kind of sort of maybe before we get into that take a point in Q and cast it twice to stack your passive in base and cast it a third time after leash if you really want to there used to be a good reason to only go twice so you can Auto qu and then get an auto reset for your power cord to get three fast spell thief's procs but the new support item starts with [ __ ] zero so save yourself the risk and just do whatever seems right at this point with the new item there's a little bit a time when laning starts where you still have no charges you can use this to be a little more aggressive while the enemy waits for their charge but I honestly recommend just saving your mana and chilling out while you're waiting for charges laning phase is [ __ ] tough you really just have to conserve all your res resources and do well enough now if the enemy sucks ass you can play really aggressive and avoid being punished for it and you'll find Sona is really good at poking and harassing because believe it or not Once Upon a Time Sona was designed to excel at Lane control with the exact same abilities she has today I'll again let freak explain starting with Mana manipulator and him of Valor you want to abuse your early game damage output always cast your three spells while in base to charge power cord then just use the brush and sona's excellent range even against tck I'm able to consistently harass Ash but that design doesn't really work anymore because league is a [ __ ] game and support is a stupid role so most of the time you have to hunt for tiny Windows to safely sneak your poke damage in making sure to abuse the range on your que which is somehow really easy to punish it and honestly in a lot of cases where this is useful you can get away with an auto attack too but you have to do this like 200 times per game and you're instantly dead in those cases where autoing is dangerous so all that is to say be very mindful of your positioning and safety but use your your godamn poke because that's all you have right now everyone will tell you to do this when the enemy ADC is walking up to last hit a minion because they're stuck in an auto animation standing still and that's true that strategy is Mission critical for finishing your support quest in a timely manner so important that both the enemy support and ADC will know that you're going for it if they're experienced listen on Sona never underestimate the lengths your enemy laners will go to deny you your support item procs in fact you'll notice a lot of enemies are on their [ __ ] toes around you camping your Wards and watching your every click holding their wind walls and dashes through hell and back just to avoid your R people will focus on you way more than they should because they think enchanters are free kills and once you understand that you can use it to your advantage which grants you the key to mastering Sona when it comes to poking in Lane you have to do a lot of baiting telegraphing an approach for poke then dodging away at the last second making use of your e speed boost it's especially good to bait out skill shots and damaging abilities because you can teach yourself to dodge them but you can't teach your solo Q ADC to dodge [ __ ] anything and in low ELO these players just absorb skill shots endlessly so before they go 0 and 10 try to steal the focus without feeding worse than they would it's going to cost all of your Mana it's going to require you to do a lot of dangerous [ __ ] but it's kind of what you have to do in Le's current state there are a lot of Champions that are played in support that don't really belong in the role particularly midlane Mages and in this case they can hit you with practically undodgeable [ __ ] that really isn't fair when that happens get boots as soon as you can and just do what you got to do man you have no real sustain you have no CC until level six Riot forgot about you it is what it is these [ __ ] games into midlane Mages or Pike or Senna who have been blatantly overloaded and unfair for years with no substantial changes are the games that Forge a true Sona player the lane is in their hands but remember the game is in yours unless you're against Pike there's really not a lot of counterplay options there okay this seems like a good time to get into notable support matchups for Sona but I honestly can't say much because you have a lane disadvantage into every Champion the only thing that substantially changes that is the play style of the enemy bot Lane for example against the competent centa you have to just sit back and do nothing because there's no way to win a trade against an overtune Champion but if they suck and particularly if the lane is slow and non-aggressive you can actually play you see Sona has to play reactively while the enemy support always has the opportunity to play proactively into Sona but if they don't for one reason or another then you get to play proactively and that's when sona's laning is the most fun Sona is very strong when she gains control of the lane because this means the enemy Lane can't force anything and because Sona is so mechanically simple there's never going to be a good opening for the enemy to do anything if say you miss a Sona Q it's up again in 2 seconds and pretty hard to miss twice this is common in norms and rare in ranked because like I said every Champion has the proactive Advantage into Sona as for how effective specific Champions are in being proactive there's really nothing I could tell you beyond just just check the win rates in my experience it's purely a matter of whether or not the enemy laners are any good a big factor in Lane strength is also your ADC in low ELO I got to be honest most adcs are used to being carried every game and they're also used to Landing with CC tanks and other types of supports that make a lot of space when they lose that for the first time they tend to feed which accounts for a few of my rank losses but just in general most low ELO adcs straight up don't know how to play with Thea and end up making poor decisions due to that inexperience and to a certain extent it doesn't matter where on the low ELO ladder you are this is as big a problem in bronze as it is in Gold this is going to make your ADC functionally useless and you really don't have a lot of solid options when this happens a lot of times your ADC is just going to get tilted Perma fight feed 10 kills and at that point the enemy team is so fed that they can just end the game typically you want to spend laning phase making sure this does not happen the unfortunate truth is you're going to have to babysit bad adcs in like 40% of your matches so you might as well get good at it really all you can do is just keep them alive make sure they can farm and look for other things on the map that will inevitably need your attention because of your Lane's weakness the wave state is officially not your job and I'm really not kidding but it doesn't hurt to help your ADC out a little especially with this new support item so barring the minion execute which Nets you less gold so you shouldn't use it here are the general rules of wave management Persona don't touch the wave in most cases do nothing if the enemy Lane is pressuring and pushing into you and particularly if the enemy support is pushing the wave you have to contest you don't want huge w W pressure and you probably don't want them to crash so here's the Golden Rule get minions to a safe level of HP where your ADC only needs to Auto once to get it do not waste power cord do not waste abilities no autos for a freeze Focus casters for a slow push kind of focus melees for a shove but they can be kind of dicey the real golden rule is nobody's going to fault you if you [ __ ] up on a Caster minion so take your chances there if you're under Tower just go [ __ ] yourself because any CS your ADC misses is going to be blamed on you regardless of if you help or not if you help you are an eager girl with ADHD if you don't help you are useless lazy ELO inflated trash truth be told with the exception of a few unlucky Champions your ADC shouldn't need help here so if they flame you for not doing anything my recommendation is to flash in place and full mute for the rest of the match just kidding again go Caster Minions One auto early game maybe two Autos once they've scaled up a little more and you should be golden of course adjust these numbers for your adc's individual needs but these should be good rules of thumb to start off from remember be strategic be reactive proactivity is great if you have a lane Advantage but if you really do you're better used pressuring the enemies away from the wave with your poke it's also way more fun than autoing [ __ ] minions warding is really important not because of Sona but because you're a support and every support is expected to do pretty much all of the team's vision control I don't really want to explain all that in this video and even if I did it's become such a subconscious process that I'm really not sure how well I could put it into words doesn't really matter Wards are Wards Sona Wards like everyone else I guess I could say her Autos suck for clearing Vision you can do the reset with your power cord thing and there used to be some other way to reset with abilities that I don't think works anymore whatever moving on Sona builds support items you end up building a lot of things with some percentage of heal and shield power which from what I gather is a completely fake stat I'm like 99% sure you can't actually see the effects of it on your ability info all you see here is the numbers you get from AP alone Riot what the [ __ ] you get some heal and shield power you build man a regen a little AP a decent amount of ability haste and you're golden moonstone is really good but it's boring Helio is a lot of fun but it's kind of weak right now I don't care I build it anyways but just know that this is me being stubborn not what I consider optimal Shas is good in fact I have an entire move speed Sona build that I'll cover at a later date you might notice I have ghost in some of these clips ignore that we'll get there another time I covered these items first because they were mythics but mythics are going away or are gone depending on when you watch this even so these are still core items and right now it's not normal to build all three of them but you totally could but you shouldn't the rest of the items are pretty straightforward staff is good ardant is classic you need to get an early tier and build archangels for this champ to be playable at all and yes it is a miserable build path it's sucks but being out of Mana is worse Lich Bane is good for full AP again we'll get into that some other time the New Dawn core feels like total [ __ ] and when I use it on PBE I'm pretty sure it did nothing I took a bad picture but those numbers are all zero maybe they'll fix it if they don't Redemption is [ __ ] amazing I do not recommend sleeping on this item support Sona is the best build that this Champion has right now like I mentioned there are others and to be completely honest I find these off meta builds to be way more fun if you're interested in that I plan on doing a video on some of my own builds in the future so you know what to do all right you got through laning phase you got some items you have Awards you haven't lost yet you're getting into the middle of the game and you're in decent shape so far this is where you get a lot more freedom but you're also in a lot more danger mid to late game a is 90% macro 10% micro if you don't know what those terms mean you should start playing Nautilus he's a lot of fun he's easy to pick up I think you'll like them a lot once you get to late game on Sono it's not like there's a button you press that makes the enemy Nexus explode you have to know how to win a game and particularly you have to know when and how to team fight Sona is strongest when her team is grouped because her auras can be applied to as many people as they touch which means you're doing five times as much as you were before or four times or some other rational scaler depending on how accurate really want to model that out but you get the point five Shields better than one your Q gives more enhanced Autos your e gives more people move speed and your R can hit the entire enemy team if they're positioned right everything Sona does has some AOE which makes her a team fighting machine but you're still really weak and you will have to risk your neck to use power cords optimally your R range is also kind of awkward and its efficacy relies on a lot of variables it was a zoning all that was for zoning so though you have a lot more going for you you have a little more working against you this this is where the real game starts and it's your chance to actually perform and use the key strategies to playing Sona the first is being considerably slippery with your e the enemy is going to try their damnest to lock you down but if they're not fast enough you get a Mobility Advantage this is huge because enchanters are often characterized by their lack of Mobility Sona does not have powerful escape tools her heal while low cooldown doesn't replenish a lot at once which makes gank scenarios very difficult for her also because slows divide all movement boosts song of Solarity is far from a get out of jail free card of course just because you get a move speed buff doesn't mean you can outrun riots 200-year Champions with all the dashes and whatever else but you'd be surprised how many sticky situations Sona can escape from this is a kind of old replay of me out running a Riven and completely turning a dangerous situation around on the enemy team and this turning the situation around is the second key because when you can outrun overaggressive players you can pull them on a string right where your team wants them this is a plat 3 ranked Lobby not great but not terrible my team is fighting an unkillable Jack show Diana but we have a few key advantages being our fed kha'zix an alloi who knows how to exist in a team fight and an enchanter with a completed serifs to bait a very overconfident tank Diana who for some reason flashes into the perfect position for my R here I drop exhaust forgetting that auction can just fly away but it's still too late we're ripping them apart that's when I noticed the actual key to winning this game this Diana is targeting me because she thinks I'm squishy which is huge because this means she won't outsustain my kha'zix as long as I'm alive and I have an item that gives me a massive Shield if I'm about to die knowing that allows me to make this play where I come to rescue my kha'zix who got spotted in the enemy's red side their entire team chases with Diana at the helm and Ours from both auan and zerth following I know this Diana who I need dead is going to ape out for me and I duy need my kha'zix as healthy as possible so I block auctions R and try to sustain him through zerth and then at this exact point the game is basically over now I'll admit I was not expecting this last charge from zerth R I swear to God he shot like six before this and I'm super lucky here that it didn't proc my serfs because having that still available combined with my R being up and my exhaust being up means Diana is dead if she engages on me and of course she does because this is plat three she pulls me in my Al goes out and nobody really does anything because I didn't Ward the river Bush so I put exhaust down just to sweeten the deal Diana dies the rest of the team trickles in but it's just way too late kha'zix has too much damage ailos has too much range and I have too much team sustained for the enemy to be able to stop our mid push which ultimately ends the game at the risk of giving bad advice I have to say that the enemy jungler is very often a weak point you can abuse with Sona especially if they're an assassin when the late game comes and you know they're going straight for you you can pretty much pull them on a string right into your team's hands using your speed and sustain serifs is huge for this but it could maybe be a detriment if the jungler sees you have it at my ELO no jungler is looking at my build and even if they did they're not factoring seraps into the equation this kind of weird version appe pealing for your team is a trick I found particularly useful in a lot of games strategically speaking you're not worth much if you're the only Survivor of a team fight so when you position late game it's not too terrible to go for a broke and use your health bar alongside everything else you have decent sustain from your W and all the other things I've mentioned I'm not telling you to int per se but I personally like to get into the fight get a good R use my spells and then look for a good death you do miss out on very strong neutral after the fight but in games where you really just need to win by a landslide well sometimes you got to play dirty don't get overzealous about this playing safe is usually pretty smart but if you practice you'll get a good feel for when the ining Sona strategy is appropriate those are just some of the tricks I picked up with experience and plays that I look back on fondly the remaining strategies for Sona should be pretty obvious set up advantages with your R Play Safe And spam W to out sustain the enemy they're simple plays but they're really effective and they're generally what you should be aiming to do when you decide to lock Sona in spamming W is [ __ ] boring what makes Sona fun is playing around your R it can be stressful but anyone who has experienced late game Sona knows that even though it seems weak a good Sona ult is potentially game-winning this ability is like half the reason I played League at all when I was starting out I do like the Sona changes that wild Rift has but you know I don't really see why the r needs to be a circle if you want to change the width go back to the old look just make it not look like poop anyways put these strategies into play and I assure you you have like a 50% chance of winning the game that's it as far as the big picture goes that's what Sona is all about but there are still a few smaller details I want to cover because while this is how most games typically go it ignores a lot of the essence of what makes Sona special and great earlier in the video I talked about how sona's abilities tend to feel pretty weak on their own but I would be doing you a grave disservice if I didn't mention the lanes where Sona feels incredi L strong because they do happen and while I want to say they're rare they are the ideal Lane scenarios that you try to facilitate every single game so if you get good at it they won't be rare at all I mentioned this briefly before but I don't want to make sona's abilities sound worse than they really are your poke damage and power cords were designed to be oppressive Lane controlling tools and they are but the problem is they're halfway reliant on your ad carry particularly in the Synergy between the both of you and I'm not necessarily talking about Champion Synergy but rather kind of operating on the same wavelength and the thing is this can be a total crap shoot but when you have an ADC who follows up on your poke using the effect of your q and lets you safely hit a power cord your damage is no longer something to scoff at you can [ __ ] dominate a lane with this kind of synergy and it really doesn't matter which Champion your ADC plays I've had Lanes with Draven that went at the pace of us scoring two kills per minute and I've had Lanes with Draven where where we lost let's just say we lost same of every ADC if you work together and if you synergize better than the enemy bot Lane barring unfair champion there's not a whole lot that the enemy Lane can do about it they're just going to get out traded forced off the wave and lose at the pace they decide to lose at if you can find a Duo who you generally synergize well with or someone who actually likes playing ADC and isn't a complete dumbass then you can avoid the random ADC crap shoot but you miss out on those very special matches where you get an ADC who just [ __ ] gets it matches with you perfectly you stomp the lobby to dust and then you never play together again for the rest of your lives games like those are the magic that I think keeps League alive but you know matches are just [ __ ] anyways this is kind of starting to drag on it doesn't really matter what I do there's always going to be some little thing that I think or feel when I'm playing Sona that I'm going to forget to put in this video because playing Sona isn't just about your best ults or your healing at the end of the match it's about the unique strategies that you use to get all that you can out of one of the simplest kits in the game an approach which goes underappreciated by a vast majority of the league community and I think that's fine you know Sona has become kind of a champion for one tricks which is what keeps her pick rate very low and her win rate very high I'm completely self-taught with this Champion I didn't learn my play style through a guide or anything like that I basically just threw [ __ ] at the wall for a couple years and picked up whatever stuck with enough experience every little thing you do on a champion is a vital part of how you play and doing well on Sona requires a lot of attention to those small things be it impeccable positioning and timing so you don't get one shot or prioritizing just the right things to make sure those tiny margins turn the tides of a game you have little but you can do a lot and that's how it feels to play Sona

Channel: MKUltra

Views: 302,993

Keywords: RNM

Id: hp7qyy9cBcY

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2024