Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Overwatch 2’s new Support hero Illari debuts with PvE story missions and a new game mode this week.
Overwatch 2 has revealed its next Support hero Illari with a trailer for Season 6: Invasion, which launches later this week. The trailer briefly shows off the Peruvian hero as one of the season’s big content drops, wielding a huge weapon that appears to be a solar-powered railgun.
Here’s the trailer:
Illari is already shaping up to be one of the roster’s more combat-focused healers, with a low rate-of-fire weapon that seems to be able to snipe heroes like Pharah from afar. We also see her pull off a huge AoE ability that appears to heal teammates and damage enemies, and toss a turret that heals a friendly Torbjorn. All of her abilities seem to be solar-powered in some way, likely tying into her origin story.
All of this lines up with an earlier leak of Illari’s kit, which we can describe here seeing as Blizzard has opted out of unveiling her abilities in full. The leak mentioned that she has a cooldown-based jump ability that knocks enemies back, almost like Baptiste’s Exo Boots. Her Ultimate allows her to fly up into the air and fire off a single rocket that deals heavy damage while applying a ‘Discord Orb-type debuff to anyone affected’. Much like Symmetra, she can also fire off turrets - but only one at a time, and they heal teammates instead of damaging enemies.
Illari will become Overwatch 2’s 38th hero when she makes her debut this week, and the game’s second Support hero in a row after Lifeweaver. Seeing as she has a hitscan weapon, a mobility-based ability and a damage-dealing Ultimate, she could end up being a great deal more popular in-game than her predecessor, seeing as players tend to latch onto healers with high damage-dealing capabilities like Lucio and Zenyatta.
Overwatch 2: Invasion launches on August 10 with three PvE story missions, a game mode called Flashpoint with two new maps, a battle pass with Omnic-themed skins for the playable roster and new Hero Mastery missions. An Overwatch 2 anniversary event will also happen this season, bringing back past events and cosmetics for three weeks.
