We're giving Sona some easy to access baseline functionality buffs to give her some power across her core skills since she's been underperforming in general.

Sona, like Nami, is getting her defensive and utility outputs buffed with a compensation damage nerf in the fairly invisible Q aura. We’re juicing her Q-passive just a little as it’s currently the weakest option and is a more appreciable place to give her damage. We expect these changes to be power and appreciation up for Sona and her allies.

Sona’s beats power has been dropping, so we’re giving her some more early game strength to boost her excitement and poke levels.

Sona's been overperforming in skilled play and pushing the limit in other brackets ever since Archangel's Staff was changed in preseason. We're tapping down on her power by slightly reducing her durability and ability cast frequency.

Sona's songs have been a bit too powerful, especially in Skilled play. In addition to a few bugfixes, we're nerfing her base defenses a bit, all of which should add up to an appropriate nerf for the virtuoso.

In patch 10.4, our baby girl was given a mana refund mechanic to prevent oppressive playstyles. This wasn’t a particularly fun mechanic, and sometimes it put Sona in situations where she was punished for using her spells correctly, like rotating around the map with E by herself. To fix this, we’re replacing the mechanic with a new one that should feel much more like a reward than a punishment. Now Sona has a stacking mechanic that rewards her for using some of her abilities, eventually giving her more access to her ult, and giving you all those Crescendo plays that you definitely never miss.