I have 506 games on LiLi, and I have a little bit of criticism for her level 20 talents as I find them to be relatively underwhelming. Sadly, the hero in general has been nerfed into the grave, lost her identity as HPS (heals per second healer, and frankly is not rewarding to play anymore.
Some of the big changes that I did not like includes:
Removal of her level 20 cooldown talent.
Removal of Self Serpent.
Removal of level 20 shield
Uncalled for Healing nerf (25 mana for 180 HP is not very good, you also can’t target it you know)
Shake it Off - this talent fundamentally annoys me as it shows that whoever came up with it does not understand the hero. LiLi almost never dies, pretty much the hardest support to kill, I have 14.5 KDA on her. That is level 20 talent we are talking about, and it is absolutely worthless as she does not need it, it makes zero impact for a level 20 talent.
Mistweaver - I don’t know in what world 350-400 HP late game saves anybody, it’s literally a single cast of a generic healing mid game. This is significantly worse than Shield. Other supports get insane heal boosts at 20, look at Malfurion, 10% of missing health on every Q cast, Anduin instantly saves an ally with 1100+ heal, Alex gives perma 500 HP.
Some Ideas
Mistweaver (rework) (level 20, 60 seconds cooldown) - when off cooldown LiLi throws a free drink every 10 seconds that costs no mana. Can be activated to throw 5 drinks in 2 second, but looses passive bonus until cooldown is reset.
Serpent Guardian (level 20, 60 seconds cooldown) - chosen ally gets a permanent Cloud Serpent that deals 50% more damage until recasted.
On a side not - in my experience playing sustain supports in general, I think LiLi’s Q should be reduced to 20 mana.
The shake it off talent needs to gradually decrease in armour when lili no longer has her trait active.
It gradually goes up from 0 to 30, it should gradually go down (8 per second) from 30 to 0, not BOOM 0.1 second of trait deactivation you gotta rebuild the armour again.
I mean if gazlowe can get 25 permanent armour and 100% bonus damage at level 20, I think blizz can help lili to keep her 30 armour up a little more often =.=
You think a self stun for 2 seconds that has a 40 second cooldown and heals one person while disabling your other heal, is better than an instant aoe heal on like a 11 second cooldown?
Your complaint here shows you might not understand the hero.
The Jugs upgrade is, in my humble opinion, not working very well. It throws two jugs at once, which is cool to heal the 2nd lowest, but it also comes with the cooldown of Jugs itself. (CC as well.)
The… other ult upgrade… should be good, but I hardly ever get to choose it (the ultimate). Even if I do, it’s hard to make good use of it (team coordination), or the upgrade. The throughput from Q and W isn’t outstanding and the Jugs is, more or less, mandatory in my games.
Mistweaver complements healing by adding a teamwide top-up. It complements Q and R-Jugs well.
I never even got to consider Shake It Off.
Whenever I get to play frontline Li Li, I have beautiful numbers but that’s all just self-healing in the name of stat padding. Once in a blue moon I have top dps and several kills, but so did I with Malfurion.
But loses out on a ton of heal for a while then after. 400 HP net sounds about the same.
Which is <1 powerful hit late game and is lost on death and has reasonable CD. Far better to upgrade her ult for more healing.
She is already one of the most mana efficient heroes in the game. She only runs out of mana healing early game and only if you do not go mana sustain talents. Most of her mana drain is damage and she is already one of the more powerful support heroes.
She got nerfed to super-niche level because low ranks couldnt play anything else, ok, but Im super consfused why you even talk about lvl 20. Its the least of her problems.
You have to look at it from a practical sense, not from raw numbers.
Many Level 20+ fights end in seconds with one of the carry heros getting blown up, the higher you move up the ladder, the more common it is. It’s better to have a burst of heal, not something that adds up on same hero over 3 casts.
LiLi often does not get that ‘second chance’ as her Kit is not efficient enough to save someone from burst.
Lili is not good against burst. That is an acceptable weakness. She is a great over-time healer that excels at topping off her allies.
Maybe I was left out of the loop, but what is a HPS healer? Heals per second? As in, how many times she heals per second? Why would that be important?
Do you mean high HPS healer? As in, a lot of heals in a short amount of time?
It is now baseline.
You use it in conjunction with your other abilities to keep your team topped off. Yes, it will not save anyone who was thrown by Garrosh into 5 people, but that is not its job. As I write above, Lili was a certain weakness against burst; that is okay.
True, Li Li can easily survive without it. But the benefit of shake it off isn’t to save you from normal situations, it’s to allow you to go a lot deeper than you’d normally do.
It’s not meant to be a lifesaver button, (Though it can make a difference in combination with other heals), it’s mainly a strong source of team sustain. One full Mistweaver activation is worth almost 5 free Qs, on a potentially 10s cd. That’s a solid upgrade to the amount of healing you normally toss out.
Key word: ‘Missing’. It’s NOT the same as 10% per Q. (Also note that Malfurion usually needs to keep juggling Q around to refresh heals, he rarely wants to save it for low allies). On average Mistweaver typically heals more than it.
Except in the situations where you’d draft her, against strong auto-attack heroes.
You can also take into account having allies who can help themselves against burst.
It’s basically meant to be the same as dps.
Instead of damage, taking into account cooldowns and down time, it’s healing taking that into account.
A hero can have high healing per second or damage per second if they do a huge amount of burst but have long cooldowns, or if they constantly output low amounts of damage/healing.
I don’t remember Lili being all that focused on having high healing output. Mostly damage negation via Blind, and decent damage output for a support, though that was shifted away from near mage levels of burst with nerfs to her Blinding Wind.
I do think the slows from Hindering Winds or Water Dragon are also important.
healer, and frankly is not rewarding to play anymore.