Riot is experimenting with some League of Legends buffs that will strike a Power Chord with all Sona mains.
Lead game designer Jeevun Sidhu outlined a few experimental Sona changes today in a Twitter thread. Since the preseason item system overhaul hasn’t been friendly to the support champ, Riot is hoping to “cement her hyperscaling fantasy in a way that doesn’t solely rely on needing lane farm.”
Sidhu explained that Sona’s current mana restore mechanics seem to punish players for not playing with allies, rather than reward them. The experimental buffs would remove the mana refund mechanic from her Q, W, and E, no longer restoring mana when casting the ability on an ally. The abilities would also have a lower mana cost.
Crescendo, the Maven of the Strings’ ultimate, currently has a passive that reduces the cooldowns on all of her basic abilities. But these changes would remove that passive completely. To compensate, Sona’s new Resonance character passive would allow her to permanently stack ability haste whenever she damages an enemy or helps an ally with an ability. Each ability would have a cap that converts stacks to bonus AP.
Players who want to scale with Sona will now get equally compensated for supporting allies and damaging enemies. This would give her a lot of power in the support role, while also potentially making her a mid lane flex pick.
Xin Zhao was the most recent champ to benefit from an upgrade in Patch 11.6. Riot devs wanted to offer the Demacian spear-wielder “unique ranged gameplay” and open up AP off-builds.
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