Mastering Li Li: Sustaining and Strengthening Your Allies

When it comes to dedicated healers in Heroes of the Storm, there may not be one that is as efficient as Li Li, the World Wanderer. The hero’s ability to keep allies topped off and supply a massive amount of healing to her entire team is a major advantage that is rarely found in the game. Very few characters throughout the entire roster rival her ability to support her team, making Li Li an incredibly valuable pick.

However, in order to capitalize on the hero and utilize Li Li to her full potential, there are a certain number of strategies and nuances that one can use when taking her for a spin.

Before diving into the tips, tricks, and overall strategy behind Li Li, it’s important to go over her basic strengths, weaknesses, and the defining characteristics that establish her identity as a hero. First and foremost, Li Li is one of the only dedicated healers in the game. Li Li’s primary purpose on the map is to serve as a significant factor on the healing meters. So, while the hero is in your hands, you’ll be doing everything in your power to keep your team topped off while your enemies struggle to put a dent in your allies’ health bars.  

When it comes to Li Li’s strengths, her incredibly high levels of healing along with her relatively effective damage output, especially for a support hero, is incomparable. Additionally, her low skill cap coupled with an angular learning curve makes Li Li one of the most efficient characters in the game. If you were to pick her up in the afternoon, you would have about 90% of her gameplay tactics mastered by the evening. Possibly her greatest strength is the fact that she isn’t hard to play in the slightest, and if you’re able to master her, the hero can be incredibly effective in relatively no time at all.

However, for all her strengths, there are obviously going to be some glaring weaknesses for a hero that is so simple, yet so strong. Firstly, Li Li struggles against heroes with massive burst damage, as her allies will often be erased from the map before she even has time to respond. Heroes like Jaina, Kel’Thuzad, and Chromie that simply put out too much damage too quickly will overwhelm Li Li, preventing her from getting a leg up in a lightning-fast trade or skirmish.

Also, while Li Li is definitely able to post some huge numbers, her ability to keep foes locked down is quite underwhelming. Her lack of crowd control is certainly a weak spot in her kit, as Blinding Wind, while definitely useful, doesn’t exactly get the job done. Like most blinds across competitive games, the only thing you’re really doing with is delaying is an inevitable beatdown. If your allies aren’t able to get a kill on the blinded target during the small window of opportunity that the spell gives you, there’s a good chance you’ll be in the same position you were in before the blind was cast.

Moving past Li Li’s basic strengths and weaknesses, let’s take a deeper look at the optimal talent builds for the hero.

While there is always going to be a plethora of strategies and builds that one can use when playing any character in any game, Li Li’s role as a dedicated healer essentially locks her into a tough position with little to no wiggle room whatsoever. However, if one is able to master Li Li, specifically with a healing-focused build, then she can truly blossom into one of the most potent healers in the game.

The following build allows you to capitalize on your healing, keeping your allies alive and boosting their health bars at every possible moment.

Level 1: Free Drinks

Free Drinks is a keystone of Li Li’s gameplay as a healer. Her ability to pump out consistent healing, especially towards targets that are below 50% HP, is a massive strength of hers. Rolling with this talent will allow you to keep your mana pool relatively full while your allies are topped off throughout the course of any fight or skirmish.

Level 4: Hindering Winds

Hindering Winds gives a little extra “oomph” to one of Li Li’s core abilities, Blinding Wind. As there’s no serious crowd control behind the ability except for the blind that we mentioned before, Hindering Winds’ added 25% slow is an imperative part of Li Li’s core strengths. By adding an extra layer of CC to her kit, Li Li quickly transforms into a serious nuisance.

Level 7: The Good Stuff

Without The Good Stuff, Li Li feels really choppy and static at times, as there are breaks in her healing rotation that don’t make for the traditionally massive throughput we’re used to seeing from her. Upon hitting level 7, Li Li turns into a brand new hero, as the combined effectiveness between Free Drinks and The Good Stuff turns Li Li’s healing from solid to unreal. However, if you find yourself up against a team composition with heavy amounts of crowd-control, perhaps the cleanse that Let's Go! brings to the table might be a stronger option. Both talents are viable in most situations. 

Level 10: Jug of 1,000 Cups

Although Water Dragon serves as a nice addition to Li Li’s practically non-existent damage, Jug of 1,000 Cups is too strong of a healing steroid to pass up. The ability targets the ally with the lowest current health in its massive radius, quickly raising their health bar to full while then passing on to serve the next teammate in need. Use this ability to prepare for a substantial teamfight, ensuring that the whole team is topped off and ready to engage in battle.

Level 13: Mass Vortex

On its own, Blinding Wind is a decent ability that lets Li Li’s team get some headway in any trade or skirmish. However, once the number of targets hit by the ability goes up from 2 to 3, the amount of potency that it brings to the table becomes seriously impressive, allowing Li Li and her team to cripple her enemies at any given point.

Level 16: Pick Me Up

Throughout the course of the game, as long as you stick with this build, Li Li becomes an even more effective healer when casting healing spells on targets with less than 50% HP. Pick Me Up, in combination with Free Drinks and The Good Stuff, allows you to take an allied hero with nearly no health and heal them up to full HP in no time at all. Her basic spells reach their full potential and Li Li truly becomes one of the strongest healers in all of HotS once you reach the later stages of a game.

Level 20: Mistweaver

While Jug of 1,000,000 Cups sounds like a tempting choice when it comes to boosting your Heroic ability, it simply cannot compare to Mistweaver when it comes to maximizing Li Li’s healing output. Mistweaver is a raw addition to Li Li’s rotation that turns her casting patterns from situational and abrupt to free-flowing and cyclic. Once Li Li reaches her ultimate potential, she is truly one of the most effective supports in the game, and with Mistweaver in her arsenal, she is genuinely unstoppable as a healer.

Now that we’ve established the foundation for some of the strongest Li Li strategies out there, let’s quickly take a look at the important properties behind her basic abilities before we wrap up.

Firstly, when it comes to your core ability, Healing Brew, it’s best to use it on heroes who desperately need it. As the game goes on, your mana pool will increase by an impressive amount, allowing you to constantly keep your allies’ health bars ticking upwards, while Healing Brew will feel like a consistently solid option for keeping your team topped off. Additionally, Cloud Serpent, while it may seem like an underwhelming ability at first, can actually be pretty useful in both the early and later phases of the game. Use it to keep up your levels of sustained healing, while pumping out a serviceable amount of damage. While it might not provide enough DPS to burst the strongest of foes, it’s enough for Li Li, considering she already brings ungodly amounts of healing to the table.

Blinding Wind is another ability that we’ve touched on in depth throughout the course of this piece. In its most basic state, it’s a solid piece of crowd control that can give your team a slight advantage when timed properly. However, when upgraded to its final form, Blinding Wind becomes a devastating backbreaker for most enemies. Since the ability is untargeted and extremely easy to cast, it can be tempting to use it excessively when clearing waves or fighting neutral monsters. Be sure to conserve your mana by not using Blinding Wind in PvE situations more than you need to.

In retrospect, Li Li can certainly be one of the most effective healers in all of HotS when played to her fullest potential. Her ability to keep enemies at bay while boosting her allies’ health bars in the process is unquestionably valuable and most definitely unchallenged by nearly any other support hero in the game. When it comes to raw healing power, Li Li is one of the best of the best, and if you’re able to play her in a selfless and efficient manner, your team should have no trouble securing victory.

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