I'm going to get right into this without any kind of intro.
SUPPORT TO OWN NUMBER ONE: Sona
What is the role of a support like Sona? Well, all it takes is a look at her skills to figure out that she's a teamfighting beast, as long as she can stay alive. Her ultimate is one of the most powerful abilities in the game. A well-landed Sona ultimate in a teamfight can disable three to five champions, or hit one critical bruiser or assassin as they dive your back line. Either use of the ultimate can be backbreaking to an opposing team's goals. Her other abilities also function as excellent teamfight tools, giving the ability to spread damage boosts, shields, and movement speed to all of her teammates. These powerful actives, combined with the ability to use her passive Power Chords to do things like destroy one champion's damage output or movement speed, make Sona a very powerful teamfighter.
Sona is also a strong champion outside of teamfights. Her E Power Chord can set up picks on over-extended farmers, particularly those who don't have some kind of gap creator. A Q+Power Chord can take a significant chunk of health or finish off a fleeing squishy target. W+Power Chord is excellent at turning soul-crushing tower dives into soul-crushing double kills on the enemy team. Sona's laning phase can potentially be one of the strongest in the game, with the ability to poke and sustain extremely well pre-6 while having one of the best level 6 all-ins among supports. Most supports are only really strong at one of the 3 main axes of supporting (Poke, Sustain, All-In) but Sona can be incredible at all 3 with proper use of cooldowns, conservation of mana, and a willingness to protect the flank from jungler ganks.
Sona's biggest weakness is her squishiness and relatively low amount of peel in both early laning and lategame fights. While W power chord is a strong damage reducer and ult can be enough CC to finish off a diver before they can kill your carry, both are very reactive in these capacities and if your ultimate is on cooldown and you don't have a power chord ready (or, god forbid, accidentally don't let the song animation switch before you shoot off the autoattack and end up using Q or E chord) you are basically useless except for providing a relatively small heal and shield. Your peel tools are not as frequently available or as powerful as the tools of a champion like Leona, Thresh, Nami, Alistar, or Janna, all popular supports with powerful CC on non-ultimate cooldowns.
Playing Sona in lane is all about tempered aggression. Your pre-6 poke is amongst the strongest in the game, and no support except Karma can match your level of sustained raw damage. Q has 850 range on its damaging active, which means that you can reliably hit both enemy champions for 60-70 damage on cooldown at level 3. Sona's autoattack range is 550, which puts her on the same tier as a majority of ADCs, so it's pretty easy to walk up and trade an auto-attack for the extra on-hit damage after you cast each Q. Every third spell cast you can top that damage off with even more damage in the form of a Q power chord, which adds 30-something damage to each autoattack from level 3 onwards. This multitude of damage sources, plus the bonus damage added by Spellthief's Edge, means that Sona is a defining lane bully. And unlike other lane bully supports like Karma, Annie, and Zilean, Sona offers a ridiculous amount of sustain with her W. The base heal value to mana cost ratio on W isn't amazing, but the additional small shield it grants is nice for shrugging off things like reciprocal minion damage attracted from all the autoattacking you'll be doing. A Sona lane can outpressure and outlast basically any other support lane in the game, as long as you avoid major fights that bring you dangerously low.
And that's where the "tempered" part comes in, because with her relatively simple and extremely powerful kit Sona is actually a pretty vulnerable champion. She has the fifth lowest starting HP in the game, similar to other squishy supports like Janna, Zyra, and Nami, but lacks the CC tools that those champions have available to them from level 1. Her ability to disengage and peel for a carry is abysmal at extremely low levels, where she might not even have all three skills leveled to get faster power chords. Positioning is of the utmost importance, because a good all-in by the enemy support can result in a very fast double kill. Even more dangerous is a CC-heavy jungle gank, and something like a landed Lee Sin Q pretty much demands an instant flash unless the Sona player feels like dying. Constant awareness of the enemy support's positioning and good warding in early laning are even more important than usual.
Sona is an extremely vulnerable blind pick as a support. Leona is a hard counter to Sona and a good Sona player will have to be extremely aggressive at level 1 to preemptively relieve the constant pressure a Leona can lay down after she has reached level 2. Thresh offers similar threat levels as Leona, and can actually trade autos somewhat equitably because of his Flay's passive, but the fact that his engage skill is easier to dodge than Leona's makes him slightly less difficult for Sona to deal with. Blitzcrank is a potentially disastrous lane opponent if you or your carry get hooked even once in the early levels. Against all of these lanes, your best bet is to play more safely and abuse creeps/range to avoid the enemy's engage tools. Support Fiddlesticks can provide problems with his long-ranged harass and diverse CC tools. I haven't played against too many Fiddlesticks supports recently but my guess would be that you want to space away from your carry more than usual to try and mitigate crow bounces. Ask for ganks on the Fiddlesticks lane and you will probably get kills, especially if you take a point in E at level 4 for a slow chord.
On the other hand, Sona is extremely good as a counterpick support. Alistar is a fairly easy lane to deal with because he can be poked down extremely hard pre-six. While it's easy to think of Alistar as a tanky monster because of his ultimate and high base HP and HP growth, he doesn't have any strong tools to mitigate early damage and his heal costs quite a lot of mana for the low amount of health it returns. If Alistar all-ins with his combo, it can be terrifying, but if Sona and the carry are aggressive in returning damage while Alistar walks back to safety it typically will represent a won trade for the Sona player. Janna and Lulu are also very strong matchups for Sona, since both rely on their ability to defuse hard engages to win lanes. Since the Sona lane doesn't plan on making hard engages and instead looks for constant pressure, Janna and Lulu have a difficult time making their mana bars more helpful than Sona's. Janna in particular can be bullied aggressively, because her auto attack range is 75 lower than Sona's and her ability to poke with skills is non-existent. A well-played Sona should be sending the Janna lane back to base early and often. Lulu is slightly more resilient because if played well her poke can match our outdo Sona's but if the Sona is being efficient with her cooldowns and mana she can outshield and outsustain the Lulu. I think Braum might have difficulty dealing with Sona due to his lack of sustain and minimal hard engage tools, but I haven't played the matchup enough to say this authoritatively.
These are the basics on playing Sona as well as understanding her strong and weak matchups. I'm obviously omitting a lot of things about teamfighting in making this guide, and it's with good reason. Teamfighting changes so dramatically at every Elo and in every game that it's tough to say what would be the overall best approach beyond obvious things like "land big ultimates" or "try and give your strong auras to everyone while also surviving" or "W power chord the assassins, E power chord the fleeing champions, Q power chord the squishies if everything else is dealt with." If I was to give a basic quick and easy version of how to use Ult I'd say this: if your team is winning, or at least if you have a strong frontline tank or two, you can initiate fights with Flash-Ult. If your team doesn't have much in the way of a strong frontline, save ult to peel for your hopefully strong carries. This kinda goes out the window if you're up against champions who are very hard to land ultimate on like Fizz or Zed or even Vladimir. Just don't die with your ultimate on cooldown, whatever you do. Even a one person ultimate can turn a lost fight into a win, so if you get engaged on and are 100% going to die fire the ult off to the best of your abilities and hope it turns the tides.
For runes and masteries, I personally run AP Quints, Hybrid Pen Reds, and Armor Yellows every single game that I play Sona. I have two different options for blues, one page with 5% flat CDR and the rest scaling MR, the other with full flat MR. The flat MR page is for dealing with supports that represent lots of magic damage, the Karmas and Morganas of the world, or if the support is a minor magic damage threat but her carry is a magic damage champion like Corki, Kog'Maw, or Ezreal. The other page gives you 10% CDR from level 1 with a typical 0/9/21 support mastery page.
With a finished support item (always start Dagger for the harass, occasionally swap to Talisman after laning) you get to 15/20% CDR around midgame, and the next 20% CDR will basically always come from Mikael's Crucible and Locket of the Iron Solari. In games where Locket isn't necessarily the best use of gold you might get the last 10% from something like Twin Shadows, Ardent Censer, or if you are getting particularly spicy and have a lot of gold, Iceborn Gauntlet. There's a strong temptation to buy a Sheen and later a Lich Bane on Sona because of the synergy with her kit, but the 1200 gold for Sheen is a pretty tough sell early on when Sightstone, T2 Boots, Frostfang, and Chalice are so much more important for the early- and mid-game. Lich Bane is even worse as a buy, because the nerfs made earlier this year made having a lot of AP a pre-requisite for Lich Bane to represent a considerable amount of damage above Sheen, and your build should never have enough AP to make the extra 1800 gold investment worthwhile. You pretty much always want Mikael's Crucible for the cleanse active. If the enemy team is something like Yi jungle, Zed mid, and Akali top, feel free to skip it and buy your stupid Tear of the Goddess that won't be useful for 25 minutes, or an Athene's for style points and the smug joy in knowing that your Pentakill was funded by the insane bonus mana regen passive and your enemies decision to lose the game on champ select.
So to sum up, I specifically think that Sona right now is a really really strong counterpick in solo queue. You can be an immense lane bully on Janna, arguably the strongest support in the game, and as long as you're not picking into Leona or Thresh you're probably a favorite to win a given lane. Those two are the most popular supports in the game, though, so picking Sona early is extremely risky and unless you have a lot of experience in those matchups I'd bench Sona as a blind pick in solo queue.
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