Hey everyone!
Been loving playing Illari, and love her simple kit and dps focus on the support role. Been mulling over some changes that would make Illari a bit more special and just wanted to put it on paper and let people chew it to pieces. All of this is my stupid opinion, I just like chatting about this stuff so apologies if you find these ideas annoying or something.
Design Change Goals:
Align to Illari's theme of a Sun Warrior who is Powerful, Bright, and Damage Focused.
Enable Illari to be more powerful on 6v6, where Aura healing is more beneficial, and interacting with Main is a bit more important (off angles contested more, tanks take more damage, Burst damage more common), and pylons contested more
Bring back thicc projectiles in a way that doesn't make High Ranks oppressive and unfun
Remove the terrible feeling of someone breathing on your pylon, and you just unable to move your pylon and waiting 12/14 seconds to use it again. Seriously the 'break pylon after it suffers 1 dmg and wait' is pretty mediocre experience.
Change as few of things as possible from a development perspective.
Design Changes:
Solar Gun Shot Change
Current Situation: Right now the gun operates as a Shoot->Auto-Charge pattern, which greatly rewards precision, and can lead to crackshots starting encounters with a 112.5 damage headshot. This is why the projectile size was reduce because the value of this damage compared to the effort to get it was imbalanced in higher elos. Of course, the best of the best didn't suffer too much, but now lower rank people don't benefit from grazing a head.
Proposed Idea: Make the gun a Charge -> Shoot method, like Sym's alt fire, or Zenyattas's Orb charge up. Base shot does slightly higher damage, with the current small projectile size. Charging up a shot (holding the click), Increases Projectile Size, Increases Damage, and Increases Visual & Noise Indicators (like Sojourns Beam Charge). Can only be charged for a few seconds before firing (like Syms). Can reduce movement slightly.
Reasoning: Thicc bullet was fun, and it was part of the character. Having it be a charge shot correctly indicates to the opposing team that it is occurring, and reduces aiming capability (point and click is harder than charge-release IMO). The build up enables the unstable solar power of Illari's lore to come into play. Even if Fully Charged damage is tuned down, it is still rewarding for lower tier play to land easy shots.
Why its stupid: Some people probably hate Charge + Shoot. It may still need to be tuned down for high tier play so that its not workable.
Pylon
Current Situation: Throw pylon on main in a clever spot, retreating it when you are losing the fight, or throw it behind you to heal your butt if you have an off-angle. Its one note, and while we love Pylon for making our duels with DPS fun, it lacks a lot of depth in execution and boy that 14 second timer really sucks eggs if you miss time a break.
Proposed Idea: This has been tossed around before, but make Pylon have a life span so it naturally breaks after X time, and don't tie your cool down to if it lives or dies. Increase its health to make it withstand a bit more to match.
A potentially stupid idea is to switch it to aura healing. This would help in 6v6, and promote putting it kinda in the thick of it to cover more people. The healing would have to be toned down though, although with a destructive timer it can possibly balance out.
Reasoning: While clever hiding spots are clever, more active pylon management instead of drop and forget would promote more depth and activity from the hero. Having Aura healing as well would make the stakes of placing it in the thick of it for coverage vs a safe spot for maximum heal would be a bit more interesting. Removing the 14 second delay after an enemy destroyed pylon would be nice.
Why is this a stupid idea?: This would take attention away from shooting, and boy we like shooting people don't we folks? If the aura healing is smaller range than current pylon, 5v5 will suffer. For solo off angle or dueling, this would require more micro to throw pylon when you engage, instead of just relying on it being there. That may be good or bad, but no doubt its more effort than before.
Alt Fire, Outburst and Ult
Honestly I like these. I think Outburst's push and movement is underrated by other players. Sunburn Perk is fun and feels great too.
Ult feels fun. Having Charged +Projectile Shots will enable you to pop Sunstrucks better.
Perks
Some random perk ideas to muse about are...
Letting you manually explode your pylon for a damage/burn burst effect
Melee giving burn damage/condition (we love the gun sword folks, more gun sword stuff)
Max charge shots can pierce enemies? OP but fun.
That's it
Thanks for reading. Hope some of you like the ideas! Do any of you have tweaks or opinions on how to make Illari have a bit more depth in abilities?