Overwatch 2 Nerfs Illari Into The Sun

Kenneth Shepard

24 August 2023 at 4:45 pm·2-min read

It’s only natural that after Overwatch 2 heroes debut, Blizzard starts turning the knobs up and down to try and balance them out. Sometimes you’ve just gotta put something terribly disruptive into the game and see how the community reacts to know exactly how a character will affect the meta. That in mind, it’s now time for Illari, the game’s latest support hero, to suffer some major balance changes that will rein in all her raw power.

In its latest patch notes, Blizzard outlines the latest changes to Illari’s kit, most of which the studio says are in service of balancing her healing and damage output. When she first debuted, players (including us here at Kotaku) noticed she was less heal-oriented than her support peers, feeling more like a DPS hero who happened to have some healing abilities. With the tweaks, her utility hasn’t changed, but the numbers have shifted around so she can’t just passively heal with her placeable Healing Pylon and will have to rely on her secondary fire more often.

The full patch notes read as follows:

Healing Pylon
Captive Sun

“Illari has had a strong showing since her launch,” the patch notes read. “The following changes are meant to promote a better balance between healing and damage while adding more counterplay against her abilities. We are making the Healing Pylon weaker, as it’s often placed out of line-of-sight or at odd angles and isn’t being destroyed as often as we expect. Captive Sun ignoring barriers is not immediately intuitive, but we are also reducing the projectile size, so blocking or destroying will require more precision. Finally, the Sunstruck effect lasts too long to reasonably avoid the detonation damage threshold.”

All these changes come as Illari is unlocked for competitive play, as new heroes aren’t added into ranked games until a period of time after launch.

For more on Overwatch 2, check out our thoughts on the game’s new story missions.