heroes tend to not ‘teach’ things, but it is through repetition and failure that people sometimes learn something.
Li li being a ‘teacher’ is a misnomer; she doesn’t excel at ‘teaching’ but she is easier to use – or rather, gets ‘better’ – from the situations that inexperienced players typically have.
Players that don’t know the hero roster, the range, damage of things, wander around and take a lot of unnecessary damage: great, Li li gets cdr from damage taken, and she heals herself the fastest; she has one of the best capacities for self-sustain. While she may not be the sturdiest for dealing with focused fire, she is one of the best at dealing with incidental damage, and new players take tons of that – some don’t ever get out of that.
Outside of self sustain, the other gimmick is simply: her abilities don’t miss.
The idea is that she ‘teaches positioning’ is that the indications for her abilities kick in when something is ‘in range’ and the targeting is automated. Since players don’t have skill shots to align, it can be easier to learn how to ‘feel’ out the range of interactions by having abilities with simpler visual indications for where it is targeted, if it can even be used, and simplifies what input considerations it takes to use and connect with her abilities. This part help that much more because li li’s abilities will cast ‘as is’ while some heroes will move and then cast, and others have other interactions. For newer players, some ability interactions are not visually clear, have ambiguous effects, and have a larger margin to fail.
A lot just mash buttons when they panic, and having less functions with more demanding aiming reduces the capacity for panic-moments to make things worse.
Anduin works when people have an idea of how to stutter (to get more aa heals) how to cope with slower cast and recovery animations, when things are actually ‘bad’ for pulling out a hero, when knowing the difference for when a backline hero needs to set up, and aren’t as prone to panic-casts where long animations, pulling allies (just casthing something) and other actions can actively make a situation worse.
Li li is not a backline hero, and lower ranks dont tend to adopt the assumed ‘formations’ players can learn to use once they learn roles, footies, wombo, etc. An overzealous li li feeds a kill; an anxious anduin feeds two. Anduin’s spell timing, recovery animations, anti-synergetic aspects can make it harder to learn from genuine ‘newbs’ while Li li is not has punishing.
If someone is not actively coaching someone else how to play the game, specific heroes, expanding their roster/roles, then most heroes don’t really ‘teach’ anything. However, there is a time/failure threshold people have to put in to learn the ‘laws’ of a game, and li li has tools that empower her to perform better in some of the usual shortcomings inexperienced players encounter.
If people have not done a lot of interjecting new aspects to other players, seen how newer players ‘learn’ any given game, or don’t know how to not project their current experience onto the the expectations of other people, then they’re probably going to keep on harping on about li li and claim they’re doing everyone else a favor for it.
Part of the thing about ‘ranks’ and player experience isn’t so much that li li doesn’t do well at higher tiers, it’s that the expectations for specific roles is more rigid. Heroes exist to protect healers, so split-targeting gimmicks that don’t carry hard cc tend to not be played as much as those that do. If people don’t play a hero as much, they also tend to not do as well them, and it fuels a cycle of repetition where the lack of success pushes people away from playing that hero more, so then they do that much worse when they ‘test’ the hero again.
That’s part of why some of the issues of li li are more particular to perception, rather than performance, and cycles coming around to her time and again repeat the same things, bemoan deviant statements, and ignore protracted conversations that try to clarify misunderstandings.
should get a “spill tea” thing