OverwatchOverwatch Illari Guide and Overview

Harnessing the power of the Sun to deal damage to her enemies and heal her allies makes Illari one of the most deadly offensive Supports in Overwatch. Her Solar Rifle seamlessly swaps between damage and healing mode, allowing for quick adjustments from one moment to the next. Among the Support cast, Illari has one of the most mechanically demanding kits because the true power of her kit lies in landing critical hits. Players whose forte is clicking heads often pick up Illari and quickly start carrying games. 

Her place in the meta tends to always be niche and heavily depends on map and team composition. Her poke presence is really strong, but she lacks consistent healing output compared to other supports. Make sure to place Pylon where it can’t be shot by the enemy but can still heal your team, and you’ll be set for success. 

TLDR

Play As

• Focus on keeping up your damage output. If you aren’t applying a lot of offensive pressure, playing a different Support would be better. 
• Place Pylon behind walls where it is hidden from the enemy team. Only move it when your whole team is repositioning. 
• Use your ult to target enemies that your allies are already attacking. That way, they can quickly trigger the Sunstruck explosion. 

Play Against

• Illari has great ranged damage, but struggles with close-range duels. Try to avoid her LoS until you can catch her in a close-range fight. 
• Teams with Illari are at a disadvantage in longer fights that require a lot of sustain. Play patient and only commit to the attack after she’s lost her Pylon and used up her Solar Energy.
• When you hear her ult voice line, prepare your countermeasures. Shoot her out of the sky, block the projectile, stun her before she fires, or escape out of her LoS.

Strengths

High poke damage

The long range and high damage of her primary fire make Illari feel more like a DPS hero who just so happens to be able to heal her allies as well. Oftentimes in OW2, burst damage ends up being the most valuable ability any hero can possess. Landing critical hits with Illari forces the enemy to either start playing out of her LoS where they struggle to get value, or ego duel to the death.

Passive healing ability

Healing Pylon is a really strong healing ability. The deployable can be positioned near your team and auto-heals everyone within its range. The automated healing frees up Illari to focus on clicking heads or use her healing beam to give a quick burst of health to a low-health ally.

Knockback movement ability

Heroes with the ability to simultaneously CC their enemy and reposition themselves possess an advantage against close-range enemies. Outburst can be used for quick vertical or horizontal movement for Illari, or can be used to boop away the enemy out of position. Illari wants to maintain distance from her enemies to take advantage of her ranged power, so Outburst is a great tool to keep that distance.

Weaknesses

Poor close-range performance

When paired with teammates who want to play in close range to the enemy team, Illari can struggle to keep up. Healing Pylon benefits from teams holding positions for extended periods and staying within its range. Her slow rate of fire can also make dueling at close range very challenging and typically puts her at a disadvantage.

Limited healing

Healing Pylon only has 125 total HP, making it easy to break if spotted. When an enemy does break the Pylon, its cooldown doubles to 14 seconds. That is a long time for her team to rely solely on Solar Rifle's healing. Even when up, she can only heal a single target and has a very limited healing resource from Solar Rifle.

Ultimate easily countered

Captivating Sun can either feel like a massive fight-winning ult, or completely useless. First, Illari’s voice line alerts everyone she’s ulting, then she flies up into the air at a slightly fast speed that’s not too hard to track. Finally, she only has a 5-second window to fire the projectile. During this time, her enemies can prepare their countermeasures, which can vary from Defense Matrix to Protection Suzu, to a simple phase ability to self-cleanse.

Primary Fire: Solar Rifle

Tips for Solar Rifle

• Prioritize offense
• • The purpose of playing Illari over other Supports is to take advantage of her range and poke damage. Look to spend as much time as possible attacking the enemy team with your primary fire.
• Jiggle Peek
• • It takes just over a full second to prep a max-charged shot. Between firing, get behind cover, and peek out in the open just before firing to line up your shot, and get back behind cover.
  • Jiggle peeking is crucial for Illari to minimize damage taken while maximizing the time she can spend attacking. 
• Charge and Ammo management
• • Unlike other charge abilities, such as Winston's or Zarya's right-clicks, Illari’s charge does not affect her ammo usage. 
  • To maximize damage output, full charge every shot.
• Break points
• • Within 30m range, 2 headshots + 1 body shot is needed to eliminate 250HP and 275HP heroes.

Secondary fire: Solar Rifle (Healing Beam)

Tips for Solar Rifle

• Resource management
• • Try to never fully deplete the Solar Energy resource because it adds a 3.36-second additional cooldown before you can use the ability again.
  • Heal enough to stop your ally from dying, then pause and let the resources refill for another burst of healing. 
• Burst healing
• • Of all the Supports, Illari has the highest healing per second outside of ults. She is limited by the downtime of her healing beam and Pylon, and by having no AoE healing 
  • Generally, Illari wants her other Support to keep the Tank up, because her burst healing gets more value on DPS and Supports. 

[E]: Healing Pylon: Deploy a pylon that heals allies

Tips for Healing Pylon

• Enable Flanks
• • As long as she’s paired with another Support that can keep the rest of the team alive (e.g., Baptiste), Illari can go on a flank angle by herself and use Healing Pylon to keep herself up while creating multiple angles of attack for the enemy to try and defend against. 
• Pylon targeting
• • Pylon beam automatically targets the ally with the lowest health in its range.
• Hide the Pylon
• • Normally, Pylon’s 7-second non-combat cooldown begins as soon as it is deployed. However, if it is taking damage or gets destroyed, the cooldown doubles to 14 seconds.
  • Therefore, placing the Pylon out of enemy LoS and where they will have difficulty targeting it is of the utmost importance. 

[SHIFT]: Outburst

Tips for Outburst

• Escape tool
• • Illari’s ideal fighting range is around 20-30m. The closer most enemies get to her, the greater their advantage becomes. Outburst helps Illari to get enemies off of her, so she can kill or escape.
  • Against flankers and dive enemies, always save Outburst for defensive escapes and avoid trying to use it offensively. Otherwise, you’ll get caught and be an easy kill.
• How to control Outburst movement
• • Holding SHIFT gives Illari more vertical height. 
  • Tapping SHIFT gives Illari faster horizontal movement. 
  • Bunny hop: Without jumping, tap SHIFT, then hold jump before hitting the ground to carry your momentum forward.
  • Highest Vertical movement: From neutral (no directional input), jump (hold), activate Outburst, and continue holding jump.

Ultimate: Captive Sun

Tips for Captive Sun

• When to NOT use Captive Sun
• • Try to avoid using it to begin a fight, as the enemy team will typically have the resources to survive the ult.
  • Don’t use when you haven’t seen counter abilities recently used. 
  • • Ex: An enemy like D.Va has boosters and DM available, or Kiri has Protection Suzu to cleanse.
• When to use Captive Sun
• • Your allies have pushed deep into the enemy team and are on their backline. They will have a higher chance of triggering Sunstruck when they are already in an attacking position. 
  • Once both teams have begun dumping resources, Support cooldowns, and defensive ults. 
• Triggering Sunstruck
• • Two body shots or one headshot will trigger Sunstruck.
  • A combined 90 damage from anyone on your team will trigger the effect.
• How to survive your own ult
• • Utilize environmental cover during the flight stage to avoid being picked out of the sky by hitscan enemies. 
  • Plan your exit path. Always look for where you can land after firing the projectile that puts you in a strong yet safe position to trigger the Sunstruck explosion during the slow effect.

Minor Perks

Rapid Construction

•  Increase Pylon Uptime
• • As previously stated, the biggest weakness of Illari and her Pylon is how much downtime there is between uses. The CD reduction has a more notable effect when replacing the Pylon without taking damage, but it's always helpful.
• Better at saving allies
• • The faster construction time allows Illari to deploy Pylon near an ally in danger and begin granting healing significantly faster. Against dive comps, Rapid Construction is the better Minor Perk.

Summer Solstice

• Makes outplaying your ult more difficult
• • The extra flight time and speed make it harder for the enemy to avoid your ult and makes your fire timing more unpredictable.
  • Against comps with a lot of Captive Sun Counters, you should take Summer Solstice.

Major Perks

Solar Power

•  Best Major Perk
• • Landing primary shots reduces recharge time and even overfills your Solar Energy, which makes Illari a far better defensive Support. You’ll be able to heal more often, build faster ults, and enable your team to play more aggressively. 

Sunburn

• Anti-dive
• • The main strength of Outburst is the distance it creates between Illari and her attackers. The extra damage will help her win 1v1 duels, but it does not massively increase the power of Outburst and is generally just weaker than Solar Power as a Major Perk.

Best maps

• Circuit Royal
• • Every point and area of Circuit Royal have the perfect sight lines for Illari’s rifle. Most areas of the map also feature areas where Illari can stick a pylon behind some cover where the enemy has difficulty destroying it. On first point defense, the high ground bridge area is really strong for Illari to set up with other poke heroes. 
• Blizzard World
• • The first two points of Blizzard World provide multiple angles for Illari to set up around cover on both offense and defense. Her damage potential on these areas are really hard for enemy teams to deal with. Moreover, every high ground area on this map can be accessed by Outburst allowing Illari to reposition to her heart's content. 
• Midtown
• • Illari can always find value on Midtown. The map layout causes fights to almost always occur within her optimal range. On defense, she has multiple options for where to set up her position. When attacking, team fights usually halt at the same few locations giving her the opportunity to keep redeploying Healing Pylon within range of herself and her allies.

Worst Maps

• Watchpoint Gibraltar
• • On Watchpoint Gibraltar, the high ground areas are really strong positions and are too high for Outburst to reach. Dive comps often dominate this map and Illari doesn’t pair well with them, and struggles to stay alive against a good dive comp.
• Lijiang Tower
• • Illari can position herself and her pylon on the outskirts of the control points, but it's difficult for her not to get overtaken on any of these positions. Lijiang Tower also favors close range and brawl team comps which Illari finds difficult to keep her team alive against.
• Busan: Downtown
• • Illari fairs ok in the open section of the map opposite of the control point. When the fighting inevitably shifts to the objective area, Illari struggles to find an effective position for both herself and for her pylon. There simply isn’t a good place to put Healing Pylon where it can heal her team and not be destroyed.

Illari performs best within poke team comps that are based around doing as much ranged damage as possible, and burning down the enemy team before they even have a chance to close the distance. For the other Support hero, Illari benefits from having someone who can focus primarily on healing the team so she can further focus on dealing max damage. Illari struggles to find value in teams with a lot of fast high mobility like dive comps. Ideally, Illari can place Healing Pylon, and focus on shooting the enemies together with a DPS ally possessing strong ranged damage.

Ideal comp built around Illari:

• Sigma, Ashe, Junkrat, Illari, Baptiste

Individual synergies with other heroes

Sigma

Sigma remains the best tank for most long range and poke maps. He lacks any movement ability so it's easy for Illari to keep with him and keep Healing Pylon within range. Experimental Barrier provides great cover against the enemy's poke damage for Illari as well.

Ashe

Ashe and Illari want to be doing the same thing at the same time. They also both have similar effective ranges. Creating an off-angle from the rest of your team with just Illari and Ashe can carry games and make it impossible for the enemy team to avoid the barrage of incoming damage from multiple angles. If Ashe is having to duel any other long range heroes, Illari outputs super high single target healing which will make it very difficult for your Ashe to lose the fight.

Baptiste

High total healing output plus AoE healing to complement her single target healing make Baptiste + Illari an ideal duo. Their entire kits work well together. Illari deletes enemies with headshots through Amplification Matrix, and Baptiste can easily deal the 90 damage required to activate the Sunstruck explosion following Illari’s ult. Furthermore, Immortality Field helps make up for Illari's lack of defensive abilities.

When facing a skilled Illari player, try to find ways to use cover to stay out of her LOS. If you can get your team to play aggressively, hold W and advance on her team, that is where Illari struggles to respond. Even if Pylon isn’t destroyed it can only be redeployed every 6 seconds. If your team can force her team to move outside of its range, that creates a big advantage for you.

Do your best to track her secondary fire healing beam usage. If you see Illari holding down healing on her ally, you know you have a brief window of time where she won’t be able to provide any healing and that is your chance to quickly win the teamfight.

Specific Hero Counters

D.Va

Illari is weak to dive in general. D.Va’s Booster cool down is half of Captive Sun making it virtually impossible to outrun D.Va. Defense Matrix alone is the hardest counter to Illari since it mitigates any damage Illari can deal. D.Va also has rather easy time countering Illari’s Ult since she can fly and Defense Matrix Captive Sun pretty much anywhere she shoots it. Even if Illari lands Captive Sun, Matrix can prevent any damage that would trigger Sunstruck.

Genji

A good Genji can ruin Illari’s day. His mobility allows him to position and consistently destroy Healing Pylon. If Illari is positioned with some distance from her team as she often will be, Genji dives her and is at a huge advantage in the 1v1 duel because of his high mobility, Deflect, and Illari’s slow rate of fire makes it even harder to hit Genji jumping all around her. The charge timer also makes Illari’s shots more predictable and thereby easier to Deflect. Top all that off with the fact that he can Deflect Captive Sun back to your team and Illari has her work cut out for her.

Kiriko

Although not as consistent, Kunai can challenge Illari’s ranged damage because of its high headshot damage and lack of fall off damage. If Illari doesn’t purposely wait for Protection Suzu to be used, Captive Sun becomes completely useless since it cleanses everyone in the AoE of the debuff.