I recently picked up a new champion solely because she had an awesome skin on sale for essentially all of the RP I had lying around. Arcade Sona was the skin, and it's pretty sweet. Instead of playing a piano like the normal Sona skin she has an arcade console. But most of the people I've been playing with recently have preferred to play support, so I haven't had a chance to bust her out. This morning Sceadeau and I ended up playing for about 12 hours and a fair number of those games I was playing support.
Sona has changed since I last played her a year or two ago. Back then she had a 2 second global cooldown on her three main abilities so it was really important to choose the right button at the right time or you'd be locked out from casting what you actually wanted for a couple seconds. That seems to be gone now, which is probably a good thing. You end up with a passive aura from the last button you press, and your auto attack gets modified by the last button you press, so there's still a lot of things going on in terms of the order you press buttons and such. But those buttons cost a fair amount of mana and being able to hit all your buttons in short order can be quite a drain on the mana pool.
My first couple games I built a mana manipulator, a chalice of harmony, and two philospher's stones. Mana still felt tight for most of the game, and buying all that mana regen felt like it was setting me back in terms of buying wards and getting aura items. Sceadeau suggested maybe getting a tears of the goddess even though he didn't think it built into anything good for a support. Tears has probably been my favourite item in the game so I gave it a spin. It seemed to work reasonably well, and I even upgraded it into an archangel's staff a couple of times. I still built one philosopher's stone (I think shurelya's is practically a mandatory item for support) and found mana wasn't much of an issue in the mid to late game with the tear build. It's also cheaper than the other stuff I was building, which meant I could buy pink wards and the sightstone on a pace more like what I'm used to.
Has anyone else tried tears out on Sona? Do you have a built that works better for you?
I've played Sona in ARAM only, but I highly recommend tears for her there. Especially if you're not hankering after the magic resist from the chalice.
ReplyDeleteYour options are really pretty limited. About the only other item that has both mana and (sort of) mana regen would be catalyst. That doesn't build into anything supporty though, and if you want the MR from banshee's then chalice seems like a better item.
Mikael's Crucible looks good but I've never used it.
"mana manipulator, a chalice of harmony, and two philospher's stones"
ReplyDeleteDude if you built that and STILL had mana issues you are doing something horribly wrong with sona. I get by with just a philo stone and sometimes a mid game chalice.
Now that they changed the recipie on Mikael's crucible that will probably be the only mana I need on sona.