Look, i am not saying that Illari wasn’t too much and overtuned on release, i agree that she was. But even with having a simple and straightforward kit and playstyle, she was still something new when it comes to the Support role. One big mistake about her is that Alec didn’t let players adapt to her Pylon and the rest of the kit. Many players were so loud about her that she first got nerfed 2 weeks after her release, and then in every big patch until season 8. Every part of her kit, except for her mobility was nerfed. The main issue here, like i said is that they didn’t let players adapt to her and didn’t give Illari a chance, they sucked out the fun out of her. Now we have hero that has a 100 health deployable, that cannot be moved for 8s and when it’s one tapped it goes on a 15s cooldown. You are being punished for using your kit in the way you can’t react to it, this is absolutely unfair. And i will not go over how harsh and big primary hitbox nerf actually is.
I personally think that the pylon health nerf was needed. You had to either trust that your team would break the pylon, or do it yourself, expending most of your resources to do so, then dying because it took you ages to break the turret that was in the middle of the whole team.
I think they may have overdone the nerfs to her kit in general, but I do not mind the pylon nerf itself. All of her nerfs combined did make her much less viable, but if I’m being honest, there is not much “counterplay” or “learning” about breaking a deployable that is out of reach and able to stop a ton of your value with barely any effort.
Just my opinion, though. 
They do not care about balance. She lost her value of bringing money into the game. She was always going to get nerfed unless people actually enjoyed her. But they do not care about Illari because she has no personality. 
Yeah, I always found that a bit weird. As a character her personality felt pretty flat, but maybe that’s just me. 
Sadly, this sums it up nicely. She got 2 BP skins and few shop skins and she is about to become Moira 2.0. Sadly or i would say thankfully she is not Kiriko, anime waifu bait that is getting multiple skins every patch with other cosmetics and buffs sprinkled on top.
It’s her personality pretty much and the tragedy she caused and went through. She is still dealing with it, and i understand what they were going for but the lack of interactions in game and no cinematic or written story or anything doesn’t help at all.
I did watch one video of the devs that worked on her and her voice actress and another one that dev posted on social media how she went from being a concept to finished hero and it looked to me like a lot of love and passion was put into her but in game it’s not showing.
The problem is they gave her the wrong nerfs. No one was asking for pylon to have longer downtime after it gets broken, we were asking for it to not be allowed to stay up indefinitely out of LoS of the enemy team.
So now no one is happy; pylon is still broken when placed correctly, but if broken illari has nothing but her right click, which they chose to nerf as well rather than just making pylon less powerful. They need to fix the way pylon works to make it actually fun to play with and against, and buff the alt fire beam to compensate for pylon not being an absurd broken ability.
I’m also very very much not a fan of the 75 damage bodyshot, rather they just give her a normal 2x headshot and drop the body damage to like 60, but that’s a separate discussion
This part hits home. I played the heck out of Illari up until the 15 seconds pylon cool down nerf. She just became so frustrating to play at that point that I decided not to bother. I’m sure she’s still effective, but that nerf really sucked the joy out of it for me.
I think these buffs would be nice:
Illari
Solar Rifle (Primary Fire)
- Projectile size increased from 0.05 to 0.075 meters
Solar Rifle (Alt Fire)
- Healing increased from 105 to 110 health per second
Healing Pylon
- Recovery time reduced from 0.8 to 0.75 (37.5 → 40 HPS)
- Cooldown reduced from 15 to 12 seconds
I think the other buffs are fine, but I don’t think she really needs a buff to her primary fire size. Before her primary fire projectile size nerf, Illari’s would dominate lobbies by just jumping into people’s backlines and murdering everyone.
great hero design- should never have been released with the numbers as they were tho. also waiting for playerbase wouldnt have made a difference in this case. she was fundamentally broken.
I don’t have trouble landing shots on illari even with the projectile size reduction. I think 0.05 is fine personally, I don’t know why people are so upset over it.
If I have to guess, I think her reduced pickrate/winrate in lower to mid elo is predominantly caused by the nerfs to her pylon. Healing for supports in lower rank is very important because a lot of players don’t know how to use cover and end up taking too much damage.
But it’s hard to know for sure considering that they nerfed her pylon and projectile size at the same time.
The devs probably should’ve nerfed only one of them first, observe her pickrate/winrate, and then decide whether it’s appropriate to add another nerfs or not. Now, deciding which nerfs need to be reverted is going to be a guesswork.
Both her healing and damage numbers are down by a lot.
Hitbox size nerf didn’t really affect high rank players that much, it made her much worse in the lower tiers. Pylon nerfs were too much and affected everyone.
I think they did an amazing job with her as someone who lived through childhood trauma. She’s got moments when her inner kid comes out but they’re fleeting, since she’s generally focused on her pain. In her chuckle emote, you can actually see at the end when she recalls her past and is ripped back to reality. She stops laughing and looks guilty, as though she has no right to express joy. Despite her talking so tough during combat, you can see that she’s actually quite fragile.
I’m guessing they have a plan for her to gradually come out of her shell as she navigates her trauma. Overwatch will eventually become her new family. But naturally, a personality like this isn’t going to have widespread appeal and relatability. And people seem to prefer the more over the top, less realistic personalities like Rein, JQ, etc. I totally get that.
yeah, even I as a support main acknowledge how busted supports are, but they went over the board with the nerfs and she got Cass treatment basically, where everything in her kit is so awful now that you are better off playing anything else, which says something. She was never broken at a fundamental level like current Kiriko or mercy who can tp through walls, slingshot across the map, nullify ults, kills or plays that teams tried to pull off with little skill required
In Illari current state her rifle became too hard to hit and combined with the charging time it needs it makes her nearly useless
Tbh they just need to increase projectile size back or let her charge the solar rifle while reloading and healing
They could also tune down the other 2 supports so she becomes more viable too
If Kiriko is the new face of the game out of all the overwatch 2 newcomers then Illari is our Pharah equivalent. Absolutely non existent and doesn’t fit into the world at all.
I feel like this logic is backwards? Illari players should be the ones to adapt, not the other way around.
Uh, her Secondary Fire is what needed hard nerfs.
Are we forgetting that, at launch, that thing healed 120 HP/s compared to Moira’s 140 HP/s with Coalescence? And don’t even go on about the ‘limited up time’ bs. That thing recharges crazy fast for the amount of healing it pumps out, even now. No hero should have that level of healing or damage unless its bound to an Ultimate. Not to mention it’s only 5m shorter than Coalescence to boot, so it’s not like Iliari has to put herself at risk to use it. Even 105 HP/s is pushing it. It should be 80 HP/s max. That’s still significantly more than any other Support can pump out without committing a healing ultimate like Transcendence
Seemed to me everyone adapted to illari pretty well for how much she was played in comp & owwc immediately.
their is nothing to adapt too, its a turret that has no set duration that can be placed outside of the enemy LoS.
the reason she was/is broken is a combination of her ults high kill potential, her weapons kill potential and her passive healing from the pylon allowing her to deal more dmg instead of healing.
technically they should of added a duration to the pylon so it wasnt an ‘always up’ ability.
id even say torbs turret should function the same way, but these abilities would need to be buffed to match that.
also this ^^
Illari is an aim hero. If you can’t get kills as her don’t play her or you’re throwing.
Support players are way too dependant on broken abilities to carry them and these threads show that.