How do I play illari

General Discussion
1

How does one play illari correctly?

2

Shoot hurt beam at enemy
Shoot heal beam at teammate

8 Likes
3

This is the only way I really see it playing out.

She has a 15m healing range.
A 30m firing range to the enemy before drop-off happens.

The highest innate value and actions per second kind of idea would be to keep within 15m of most allies. Keep around 20-30m away from the enemy team to maximize your safety while maximizing your damage.

The extra value on this style means stay to the left or right flank of the main attacking force. Draw fire off to the sides away from the people who are bunched up together. Effectively, spreading out fire such that if a person is spamming they miss the one in front and hit the person behind. Don’t bunch up like that.

When possibly, hold some corner. If you take pressure, you dip back can heal others in line of sight and wait for a high enough threshold to risk shooting again. If someone is coming to attack you, outburst lets you knock them away at the corner while you get distance from the corner. Giving you safety from their LoS as well as allowing you to reposition.

Pylon usage I’d say is diverse on the situation. It can be kept near by or seperate from you. Generally, it can be put in spots that are difficult to assault. I’d say in a spot that causes the enemy team to have to look 90 deg up, down, left, or right if they get past some choke point to look at it. If they look at it, they cant’ see what’s shooting at them adn react as easily.

Look at sometimes destroying pylon before an enemy team can shoot it and not commit yet to placing it. You don’t take cooldown for destroying pylon. You only take cooldown for destroying it while its in that 3sec phase of after having been fired upon.

Your highest value team to play with are slow moving poke comps. The kind that wants to play at range and shoot people down rather than rapidly rush at the enemy comp. Illari’s 15m healing and 8sec outburst and 8sec pylon reposition is simply way too inflexible to play with the likes of a JQ or Winston half the time. Unless you have another support that can support that.

Playing with Sigma is your most ideal tank I’d say. Other decent tank pairings that naturally work well together I think are the following. This can be Roadhog. A slow ramattra (one not relying upon rush). Zarya I feel is another type of that hero. Orisa can play as a wall unless she’s playing very aggressive. Most dive tanks I feel are very poor Illari combinations. You can make it work, but I feel its simply harder to make work out.

2 Likes
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Overall goal is if the map lets you hold a nice defense position her kit is setup for that.

You’re jobs are to help eliminate enemies protect your support partner and protect your pylon to build the ult charge because that’s her biggest impact to flip a match.

The degree of difficulty rises that you have to juggle all that while being shot at, paying attention to teammate hp, and if you guys have to retreat or advance.

You don’t want to let the enemy kill you or your pylon because that gives them an advantage where in either scenario your kit is on a long cooldown.

My opinion she plays great on teams that can be aggressive to overwhelm the enemy so much they aren’t even thinking about her pylon.

There’s a lot of ways to play her.

Just be aware of the hero abilities that counter your ult as well as who synergizes with your ultimate to do a TEAM KILL

5

Just like you would play a dps.

1 Like
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With her current state and as a support main, my best advice is to use her when you will play control zones maps.

You need good map awareness for place the pylon.

For example, Think if you’re playing Sym, where are you going to place the sentries for provide utility to team fights?

7

Or just dont pick Illari, she is low skill and needs fixing.

8

Swap to ana or kiri until Mauga is nerfed

9

Cautiously! Illari’s kit is pretty simple, but her playstyle is deceptively skillful. She is an aim-intensive support who is susceptible to flankers/dive, so you need to keep space and keep up pressure as much as possible.

First things first, ALWAYS position your pylon in a good spot. Make sure it’s an area you and your teammates can hold without it getting destroyed. It’s a huge part of her value and is basically free value as long as you position it properly around cover. It’s what allows you to frag out and play her like a DPS. If the pylon goes down, it’s time to play EXTREMELY safe. You want to avoid taking poke, focus on healing your allies, and play back where people can’t jump on you until the cooldown comes back up.

Pylon is basically what decides your tempo when playing. Pylon up? Aggressive DPS-Illari who shoots everything in sight. Heal your tank when they get low, but otherwise you’ll mostly be shooting lasers. Pylon down? Scared little baby Illari who focused on healing and shoots what’s convenient for her.

As for her buttons!

Make sure you let her primary fire charge. It does SIGNIFICANTLY less damage if you fire them off before they charge so get into a tempo of popping it off just before or at 1 second, unless they’re low enough health that you could kill them with less charge. The hitbox also gets larger the more it’s charged, leading to much easier headshots when at full charge. Go for the squishies first since you can two-tap them with your charged shots. This is what makes Illari so strong is her pick potential on her primary. It’s also what makes her great against long-range enemies like Pharah since her gun has amazing fall-off distance.

Her secondary should mostly be kept for the tank. I see too many Illari players out there that spend their time trying to heal chip damage off squishy characters with tiny hitboxes and wasting a lot of healing charge as well as a lot of time that they could be spending dealing damage. Unless someone is REALLY taking a beating, let your pylon heal up the squishies. Your healing beam is better spent refilling your tanks health when they begin to dip, and your time is better spent looking for picks.

Outburst, her shift, is pretty self-explanatory. You use it to peel yourself and quickly reposition. You can use it to boop and take space aggressively if you gain the advantage in a fight, but most of the time, you’re just gonna use it to “DON’T TOUCH ME” anytime you get scared.

Captive Sun is a weird one. It gets shut down by SO many things, but it’s also still a pretty strong ult and even game-changing if you use it right. The number one thing with Captive Sun is to know what cooldowns on the enemy team you have to be aware of. Does Kiriko have Suzu? Don’t use it. Are you going to have to shoot it into a Sigma, D. Va, or Genji who can delete it or reflect it? Don’t shoot it or shoot it somewhere they can’t react to. Are you solo-ulting that annoying Mei/Sombra who have iceblock/translocator? Don’t shoot it until they use those cooldowns first, unless you just want to force them out.

Also, don’t be discouraged if you have to use Captive Sun on one person or just to bait cooldowns out or even just for the slow. That’s still value. The important thing is you optimize how much value you get out of it.

If you use it on just a Mei by herself and she iceblocks? Bad value. If you use it on the enemy team’s backline and they back off and run behind cover to stop from exploding? Decent value. If you solo ult the enemy team’s Ana and she explodes? Good value. If you ult the enemy team and nobody explodes but everyone scatters and is massively slowed, and your team snowballs the teamfight because of that? Great value. If you use it on the entire enemy team and they all die in a horrible fiery explosion? Amazing value!

That last case scenario will rarely happen unless the enemy team is horribly mispositioned, so use it liberally if you see an opening to swing a teamfight. Oh, and also use it FAST after you hit the Q button. The less time to react the better, and then you can spend more time in the ult flying and trying to pop one of your targets. If the enemy team shoots you while you’re in the air after you fire it off and you have to take cover, again, that is still value.

Illari works best on comps with immobile tanks who stay within her secondary’s range, and against comps that struggle to deal with her poke and can’t easily pressure her pylon.

Hope this helps and best of luck in your games! Face the sunrise! :sun_with_face:

5 Likes
10

Ever since her last set of nerfs, she definitely takes more skill to get value out of. She no longer gets free headshots and is MASSIVELY neutered for a long time if her pylon is destroyed, which is much easier to break now. Not the hardest support to play, but definitely not low skill.

3 Likes
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I’d enjoy her more if they fixed certain issues with the feel. 15m feels too close to keep to allies personally with his kit the way it is along with the punishments on rifle charge rate.

Why does she not charge up during melee, reload, and healing people?

12

Play her as a dps. Her damage is very strong.

13

Honestly it’s more a question of “if” you should play her than how to play her. She is one of the most map dependent characters in the game. If there is a good place to hide your pylon at the choke you can easily get 10k free heals while mainly doing DPS, but if it’s an open area or a lot of flank routes her pylon gets destroyed easily and unless you get an early pick, you will run out of heal charge long before pylon cool down is up.

14

This was a great informative post and I learned a lot from reading it. Thank you.

1 Like
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  • Put pylon on a surface where it’s useful to your team while minimising the angles it can be shot from by the enemy. You want to put it in a place where the enemy is forced to push into a disadvantageous place to take it down.

  • Shoot from an off-angle. Use jump if you get pushed.

  • Only really use beam to quick top-off or when your pylon is down. It doesn’t have enough juice for sustained healing.

  • Ult when your team is committed in a fight already. Ulting pre-fight is usually a bad idea as the enemy can just retreat and wait for the sun to disappear. Also watch out for counters like Suzu, matrixes, shields, lamp. Try bait those out first, or ask a teammate to do it.

2 Likes
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You’re welcome! Happy to help! Merry Christmas if you celebrate! :snowman_with_snow: :christmas_tree:

1 Like
17

step 1: press H
step 2: pick ana or mercy

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Try to place your turret in a hard to destroy spot, and try not to fully deplete your healing resource. Also keep in mind that she has lower crit multiplier, so you dont have to always aim for headshot.

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I would argue not to do the later.

20

is there a distance thing you can turn on? how do you know how far 30 meters is in game? lol