I’ve spent the last three weeks since Illari’s last buff playing her. To start, she’s a lot stronger than people are giving her credit for. That is to say, she’s not in the best place but there are several supports who have it worse off. Here are some of my observations.
First off, she has the worst healing mobility in the game. What I mean by this is she has very short range of healing and is very stationary. Some heroes like Ana or Brigitte can heal from far away, while others like Lucio and Moira have mobility and survivability to move around. Illari has neither and must be very cautious about how and who she chooses to heal. In many cases leaving someone to die is the right choice, moreso than other supports.
Next, Captive sun as an ultimate is incredibly weak. You will get flashy team kills with it, but many games you will also go without getting substantial value from it at all. It suffers from being far too telegraphed and easy to negate. She screams “Hey guys I’m about to use my ultimate!” and then has to shoot it past barriers and absorbtion abilities and then needs to hit targets enough to detonate and even then they need to wait almost a full second to donate. Any kind of cleanses or immortality will prevent this, so it’s usually best used to close fights out after abilities have been used or to target specific vulnerable enemies.
Finally, I’ll talk about positioning. Illari wants to play shallow off angles. Pylon makes her very sustainable as a solo threat, but once it’s destroyed she needs to be able to quickly reposition to her team. As a general rule, Outburst should be about to get your back to the relative safety of your team. This is by far the most important part of playing Illari.
In terms of her Season 9 performance I find she’s mainly suffering because of the dominance of dive. In particular the DPS passive combined with projectile size changes and loss of breakpoints have made her far less threatening as a duelist. She’s also ill-suited to support dive heroes because of her lack of healing mobility. When dive levels out she will see more success even if she isn’t significantly buffed.
So Outburst is weak and her Ultimate sucks? Yeah that seems about right. If I were to buff those aspects of Illari, here’s what I’d do:
Outburst:
• Cooldown reduced from 7 to 5 seconds
• Movement distance increased by 20%
• Damage increased from 10 to 40
Captive Sun:
• Sunstruck threshold reduced from 90 to 80
• Initial cast splash damage increased from 50 to 70
Secondary Fire:
• Beam width increased from 0.25 to 0.3
That last one is just to make her healing a bit more reliable to use. I think Outburst could really use some buffs the most. 7 seconds feels far too long for how bad that ability is imo
When I think of Illari I also think of how great she would be in OW1, in some double shield meta… her pylon wouldn’t be broken easily and she’d poke from stationary positions. Paired with Baptiste, she would be pretty OP.
It’s quite incredible we have Kiriko, who is so OW2, and then we have Illari, who is so OW1.
She’s the hitscan Moira and her damage should be viable or she definitely doesn’t work. She also needs more mobility so a buff to outburst is pretty essential.
I think Captive Sun should go through shields again. It’s probably the most countered ult in the game.
Outburst is an interesting ability. It’s not weak per se, but Illari is a hero with two abilities and no passive so its a bit underwhelming with that in mind.
It’s very poorly explained how it works as well, most people don’t know you can tap it to gain more horizontal distance or hold out to gain more verticality. Also if you hold it without moving at all you gain even more verticality.
I tried a bit now in the practice range but I don’t see too much of a difference, or maybe I’m not doing it correctly.
What I wish is that there was some real super-jump (or like Moira’s fade-jump, or at least like Lifeweaver’s “petal-jump”) that could open a whole world of possibilities and an easier access to high ground. I feel like it’s a pretty underwhelming ability without it.
It shouldn’t be too hard to replicate. Just walk forward and tap shift as fast as you can and you’ll notice her arc gains almost no height. Do the same thing and hold shift and she arcs into the air. Here’s a video showcasing the tap first and then the hold, both without using jump: https://youtu.be/T0pVkCbWuKQ
Note that the horizontal jump is slightly faster (1.333 seconds vs 1.567 seconds) and goes roughly the same distance, but mostly it’s for the verticality.
As for the height thing, it’s a bit more awkward. The first jump shows how far you go if you input forward while using outbreak and the second is only inputting forward after using outbreak: https://youtu.be/hhE-xIB0GlI
You do go higher if you hold jump
Atleast on console and we sometimes get some minor tweaks to how abilities work because of our layout.
But ive tested it on the wall in front of spawn on Colloseo.
Dont hold jump = cant clear the wall
Hold jump = clears it
But the hold jump might be a console specific thing idk about pc.
Also hold jump might just give you even more verticality??? Honestly the ability is so weird it feels like any different combo of inputs creates a unique movement effect lmao
I didn’t honestly even realize that Outburst had a damage component.
Buffs I’ve been advocating:
-Increase Outburst height / distance. Let her escape to high ground instead of having a double-jump on CD.
-Reduce Captive Sun trigger damage and explosion time. Anything to make this useful.
-Increase heal beam length to 18m. Let her stand back further from the fight.
-Reduce primary charge time to .8s. Even with this buff, she STILL has lower DPS than Bap or Kiriko.
There a lot of weird walls where Outburst will only clear if you are standing right next to it. A few extra meters would be huge for mid-fight mobility. And just get rid of the boop and damage, it’s just kit bloat that is hardly ever meaningful.
The thing about Outburst is that there are so many AMAZING high grounds you could easily and quickly take, but Outburst falls just an inch short. Raising the height just enough to make it more reliable at taking high ground would help Illari out a ton.
I would like to point out that orisa’s old ult would just commonly get blown up two seconds after it’s placed. Because it can’t be moved. And most people could delete it in like a seconds time.
Illari feels incredible now. I actually feel threatening again. Ugh, hitting those crisp headshots back to back and seeing genji run away like a dog, tail curled under himself feels so good.
Yeah that seems about right. If I were to buff those aspects of Illari, here’s what I’d do: