LILI is a low skill healer, she is great for bad players or facing bad players.
Since your study is based on lower skill cap play you are going to see alot of LILI.
She literally provides NO CC, unless you get slow on blinds or waterdragon. She isn’t good at securing kills, she isnt good with follow up. She does nothing vs ability dmg. Her ults are so easy to counter, start with water dragon, provide a cleanse to said player that got hit with it, and its gone. Cups can be interrupted. She cant aim heal, she has to position in order to aim her heals, but what if she just needs to heal the tank, and he isnt lower than the safe assassin that got away, its a brain dead hero.
Tyrande- GREAT CC, Great FOLLOW UP, Great Blow up potential, is able to provide spell armor, cleanse on heals, owls have slows can heal WHO SHE WANTS to heal!! Yup I’d rather have this hero. Now I just need to find competent players that don’t allow LILI to be a thing. Imagine Diablo walling LILI, I can follow up with a LUNAR flare while reducing her armor, heck if she almost gets a way I can shoot an owl for kill or slow her for more follow up
IF I was lili, and not Tyrande, and diablo walls tyrande, what am I gonna do slow blind… and afk aa maybe stick a w on someone, that is LACK of skill hero, Its NOT GOOD, only on low level play. If players just grew their skill level LILI wouldn’t exist.
And even if they know more, there is a good reason why many dont want to play a healer.
When you are a warrior or assassin, you generaly have some influence on the damage output of your team. As healer the only thing you can do is watch your team do everything for you, which if it goes bad, makes you feel chanceless.
With that, if a healer isnt playing properly, they are very often blamed ‘because they didnt heal’. So anything difficult that doesnt have powerfull clutch heals is avoided. Ana with her difficulty still has powerfull heals, and is a lot easier to use than a deckard (because potion positioning is much harder than just straigh up aiming at your teammate).
I generaly liked supports when i started playing, i felt helpful, and they most of the time were ok.
But as i improved myself, i started to anoy myself more and more about teammates that simply were clueless and i felt like i was wasting my time by healing them. I would have been more effective as the damage dealer, even if his healing was poor. And this is the primary reason i generaly avoid healers.
During the double healer meta, even with a poor player, if you both stacked up, you could generaly compensate a lot. But as solo healer… not a chance.
Khara is fricking amazing as is. I love being able to solo the boss as support!
[yes, this has no direct relevance to the point… But I feel fine when I play Khara as a support. My healing starts low, and gets high later due to usualyl going mana fists, and his double heal waiting until level 16. But, overall he feels fine to me personally which is not the best metric]
Is this some kind of bronze league problem? Because at Diamond/Master I constantly see all healers picked (with Uther, Kharazim and Auriel rarely, but still), and honestly I think they are all viable to play up to Master (dunno about pro scene, but this is dead so no one cares).
Im personally melee assassin main but differ from that when i notice that the team has no support players and actually like to draft heals last for maximum potential.
So far i pick Auriel, Ana, Stukov, Alexstrasza, Uther, Morales or LiLi and all in different situations.
Most specialized would be Ana, Uther, LiLi and Kharazim probably because of the CC on Uther, Spellpower and heal reduction on Ana, Blinds on LiLi and a finisher/diver/anti AA Kharazim.
Each of the heroes have their weaknesses and strengths.
You can definitely carry as a healer if you just oick the right one for the situation and their playstyles are way different from eachother.
I feel like there are a lot of healers that work for the same teamcomp for different reasons which is good, and I feel like there are a lot of healers that don’t work for the same teamcomp for different reasons which is also great.
If you’re in a tankbusting team you play:
Stukov or Deckard (somewhat Whitemane+ her 13 root) for the lockdown
Kharazim for the damage (and Rehgar/Tyrande for some of both)
Auriel for the sustain vs. easy targets
If you’re running a sustain deathball/poke comp:
Auriel, Morales, Ana, Alex, Deckard, Whitemane, Stukov, all for loads of healing throughput~~~~Lucio/Malf and sometimes Tyrande also (…maybe bw?)
If you’re running it down:
Lucio, Rehgar, Kharazim, even Alex, for Speed/Slows/Damage/lots of healing to dump on those who run it down the hardest
Uther/Malf/Tyrande for the lockdown (and you know Uther’s a tanky boy who pumps out that damage)
(…maybe BW? poly +speed+armor you know)
If you’re living in the past and enjoy a global support-splitpush style team:
Abathur (haven’t tried him on PTR, maybe global support isn’t dead?)
I actually play/played healer a lot and agree with what you say.
I merely explained that people pick straight forward easier to pick up healers when they have to heal and can not pick their ranged assassin (when they do contemplate the idea of filling).
Then i realised tanking was even less popular than healing and still had some damage to add to the team on top of being able to cc/engage and never went back.
Until some sour dps players get tanks nerfed to inoffensive damage sponges like what i read in here that is.
You’d be suprised. At high level of plays (where people know more about the game and what characters are played) support diversity is quite high. Obviously Tyrande is picked a lot, however almost everyone sees plays.
However, a decent chunk are niche and aren’t picked often. This includes Reghar, Morales, Auriel, Kharazim, and Li Li.
They aren’t unviable but you have to build for them to fit in your comp.
Ana, Alex, Lucio, Bw, Stukov, Deckhard, Malfurion, and Whitemane see play all the time (Whitemane less so).
From my experience support diversity and variety is very good right now and a plethora of heroes are viable.
I think reghar and kharazim could be played more there but you rarely even have to change usual strong healing picks since tanks and shimadas often get priority bans.
Both only work in very aggressive dive comps. Reghar more so is an in between burst protection and diver but he doesn’t excel at much compared to top healers.
The analysis is rather shallow. Healers, for the very simple fact that you generally only have one on a team, amplifies the effect of popularity.
There will always be a popular healer as the meta changes and that’s not really ever going to change. Complaining about 10% popularity shows you actually have a pretty bad sense of proportion. Seeing a hero 1 in 10 games when there are 17 healers is really not that bad.
If you look at diamond and masters, the diversity increases quite a bit, and your complaints like Morales, Rehgar, and Uther become rather silly when you consider they are also some of the top win rate heroes. Heroes like Deckard and Tyrande used to be the top, and changes shift around, wow, it’s almost like changes might change things. It really makes me question if you’ve even played this game at all.
Now, if you’re saying at lower levels, easier to play heroes might be more popular and effective, that’s not exactly surprising. At 40% popularity, it does seem that LiLi is too accessible to the average player, but that’s always sort of been the problem with her.
A lot of the time in lower levels, people will fill roles they generally aren’t comfortable in, so a low skill floor healer like Li Li will see a lot of play. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though.
[quote=“rcw-2543, post:4, topic:14190”]
It works quite nice actually, you just need a team wehere the damage concentrates on one target which is ok as she clearly is a single target healer.[/quote]
I want to be clear on this one because a lot of people brought it up in this thread — Morales isn’t unplayable now. I actually like the fact they pulled away from using Mana on some of the Starcrart heroes (I’d actually like to see a little more of this). However, her heal beam consumes just a tad too much energy. The heal beam either needs to heal a little more or use a little less mana.
It wasn’t a bad change, but the changes left her unpopular because it pushed the skill cap a lot higher then most people seem capable of dealing with.
Look at how unpopular he still is compared to when he first came out though. The nerf to how many pots he can have out hurts just a little too much. I almost wish they would give him a variety of pots to he can toss out or make him progressively drop weaker and weaker pots or something.
Personally, I think they just need to increase the hitbox on her knock back a tad and be less picky about her swipe placement. It might not even be a bad idea to make the displacement baseline.
She’s one of my highest win rates( and highest for healer), but I always go blink heal to increase the heals, and only play her on maps that benefit the most from her global.