He seems to regularly have very low hero damage. Feels pretty weak to me
Sometimes I don’t even join teamfights at the start, I wait till heroes are low before using the hunt to fly in, because he feels completely useless at the start of teamfights.
Any thoughts or tips?
Tip: pick another hero, odds are high for them being better pick for the situation.
Anecdotal evidence: I have 1 HL win in 2018 with an Illidan in my team when we didn’t even have a tank, so the enemy was just too bad to capitalize on our terrible comp (and another from 2017 officially '18 s1) when I doubled the enemy support and dealt more damage than our Illidan so again it was nothing to do with our Illidan 
illidan main here
He would be fine if this and that talent would work like this and that. Unfortunatly, you can’t get spell armor until lvl 13 so you have to soaking in lanes and kill minions and mercs until you don’t have the +40 basic attack dmg.
I’m running aways with “The Hunt” R talent when i feel i have to run. If you learn to playing with the walls, then you will be able to run away betterly.
You should playing with Butcher. If we don’t look at the hunt skill, then The Butcher better in everything. I can’t say anything what illidan can do betterly like The butcher.
He really, really, really needs another front liner to dive with him. If he dives alone, he dies. So you pair him with a good enabler tank, or a good diver.
he is a finisher just like genji and the rest of the glass cannon assasins, so wait for someone else to do some actual dmg and then dive in to finish them off.
lul, I’ve yet to win a HL game this season with a Illidan, not even a Grandmaster who just yolo camps and did 10k damage for 12 deaths.
Illidan can only exist in two states:
So bad that picking him is a reportable offense and almost a guaranteed loss.
So overpowered that the live servers need to be turned off because the game is compromised.
Right now he’s slightly teetering in the former category, but I’m warning you, don’t push this, GD.
I also thought he’s a finisher. So I wait for enemies to get low before joining in with the hunt. But some games my teammates don’t manage to get any enemies low. So I contribute nothing the whole game and get reported for non-participation -.-
It all depends on how prepared you are to play him
that’s not anecdotal evidence. it might seem like it because of the low count and what not but that’s a pretty standard result from what ive read and heard from friends.
Illidan’s winrate is not that bad though. It’s around 48%.
But illidan’s hero damage is the lowest among ALL the assassins (according to hotslogs), lower even than many tanks and specialists
His is always on the lower side (which ends up being a target for people in a game to point at and blame for literally all problems in a match), but he is still threatening. If he’s got high damage numbers chances are the other team is letting him get away with a bunch of stuff while sustaining.
Not currently in a great state but workable in the right comp, a bit of love and he’d be acceptable to most people imo. If you have comms you can use hunt to aid with the engage on a target that your team wants to drop asap instead of just using it as a low hp finisher type thing. He can definitely have a presence at the start of a fight just gotta play it well.
Not sure whether illidan is weak or it is a melee assassin problem in general. Valeera, zeratul, greymane all don’t feel so great at the moment
Illidan is on the weaker side currently but to say he’s awful or a “finisher” is just so wrong.
Illidan is a sustained DPS that happens to be a melee. Even his in-game tip specifically states “Strong with heroes who can enable him”. What does this tell you?
If you pair a good Illidan player with backline support that constantly watches over him he’s borderline unstoppable. Illidan forces so much attention onto himself that it frees up the rest of the team because if he’s not focus fired he will chase down and kill literally anyone because of his terrible kit design.
The 2 issues that has come up for Illidan is kinda interesting. He’s not only got the “Valeera syndrome” of no one wanting to cooperate with him. This is partly because many Illidan players have too much of an ego but also because the vast majority don’t know when to go in and instead ends up feeding constantly.
Secondly Illidan is one of the most challenging heroes in the entire game to play well.
So not only is he very difficult to play, he requires a comp built around him to shine, he’s very easy to shut down because of his reliance on others, he has a terrible community stigma and the reward for actually executing him well is very, very low without a comp.
Melee assassins are actually very good right now. The likes of Kerrigan, Alarak, Zeratul and Maiev comes to mind as frequently picked/banned early in the draft but none of them has the same issues as Illidan. I’d imagine they’re actively trying to rework Illidan because his current iteration will always be too strong or too weak.
Also as a final note a lot of melee assassins tends to have low hero damage because they have no range abilities. The exception to this is normally Maiev and Alarak because they function more like midrange mages in terms of playstyle so they can put a lot of poke pressure.
Kerrigan and Illidan for example normally has very low damage overall but that’s because they do a tremendous amount of damage in a short window of time. Illidan can easily destroy full health heroes in seconds. Kerrigan can oneshot basically anyone who isn’t a tank when executed well. Yet they can’t pad stats through poke so their contribution from a stat perspective appears low.
Cleave Zeratul is also on this list as he does pretty low damage until he has scaled a bit (usually post 10, Cleave ramps up around 13-15, spikes 16+) and AA+W Zeratul starts to ramp up at 7 and scales off after 20. (Altho this is so niche most players don’t ever face it)
HOW GOOD (OR BAD) IS ILLIDAN RIGHT NOW?
Either (very)bad or (very)good, nothing between. Similar to Samuro (+lot of macro as well).
Such unrivaled wisdom!
Oh hail, HEISENBERG!
I actually love playing Illidan because his skill-cap is nearly unlimited.
The issue I think people run into is a misunderstanding of Illidan’s role. He’s not a burst assassin. If you’re posturing around a lot waiting for a split second to jump in for a killing blow all the time, you’re playing him wrong and that’s why his DPS feels bad.
There’s no shortcuts with Illidan. You cannot be slow or second-guess your plays. You must know how to body-block, maximize your auto-attacks, and recognize opportunities for yourself.
You must be able to adapt continuously with Illidan - getting tunnel vision or otherwise refusing to dodge when you need to is perhaps the biggest mistake I see Illidans make.
Depends the comp he’s fighting. He can do really well against sustained damage AA. Thrall varian butcher artanis if you time evasion well. But if they have a lot of cc and burst you are better off with someone else.
I think Illidan is second only to TLV in terms of needing a rework. He just doesn’t have a place currently. He used to have a role as a Zagara counter because he could beat her in lane and farm her when she split pushes with Hunt, but Zagara was nerfed and hunt was nerfed so he’s just kind of meh now. I feel like he’s lacking identity.