According to HotsLogs, The Hunt currently sits at the fragile 18,6% pick rate. Most players can’t justify picking The Hunt over Metamorphosis, and they have good reasons. Metamorphosis dodges abilities, puts the fear of grouping up in your enemy, and put together with the rest of his kit, makes Illidan a very durable nuisance on the back line. Metamorphosis can be used both offensively and defensively and makes it harder for enemies to just burst an Illidan down. It is the favored heroic because it fits perfectly into the standard line of Illidan play: Get some healers, have them heal you, and go ham on the enemy.
However, The Hunt offers a different style of play. It is a disruptive tool of flying across the map and punishing every positional mistake you see. It rewards your map awareness proportionally to how much it punishes enemies who are out of position.
The Hunt
Charge to target unit, dealing 170-750(150 + 20 per level) damage on impact and stunning for 1 second.
The Good
Extremely efficient in the right team composition
An Illidan using The Hunt as his heroic can fit in very interesting team compositions. The Hunt can do wonders with ultimate map presence teams. Imagine Falstad, Illidan, Brightwing, ETC who picks Stage Dive as his heroic and an Abathur orchestrating the whole thing. You can all instantly appear at any place and burst your priority target and then proceed to wipe the rest of the enemy team. With the right talents Abathur will give Illidan the same stats he gets from Metamorphosis and more and he will bring his hunt lock down with the same demon power. The composition choices are endless, but one thing remains constant - it brings map control and takes away any sense of safety the enemy team has.
Solid team fight initiation
The Hunt provides solid engages. It is excellent for killing off high priority targets. An enemy team counting on a Kael’thas, who will deal massive amounts of damage if left unattended, can be easily countered by a map aware hunting Illidan. It also works for backdoor Abathurs. Abathur might have had his backdoor nerfed, but there are people who still run it to reasonable success. With a hunting Illidan, Abathur will have no choice but to keep himself and his locusts away from your structures.
Map/Objective control
An Illidan with The Hunt has no trouble splitpushing or soloing mercenary camps at any given moment, because if the team needs him he can arrive for the teamfight in a blink of an eye. By splitting from his team, Illidan can attract attention and in the case that someone from the enemy team comes for him, his allied team can engage a 4v4 fight which will almost immediately be turned into a 5v4, team wipe and possibly a won game.
The Bad
Needs a coordinated allied team
The Hunt requires too much synergy that is hard to achieve in a solo queue game. The only scenario of it working is if your team has accumulated a massive lead. In this case, you can use The Hunt to snowball your lead since it will almost always lead to a kill on its target. In almost all other cases, becoming a big and scary demon is the way to victory and ultimate team fight presence.
It falls off in the late game
An Illidan with The Hunt definitely misses on the utility he could have gotten from Metamorphosis as the game progresses. Late game fights are almost always 5v5 and are very prolonged. In such a prolonged fight, a one second stun with some single-target damage to it is just hard to choose instead of an AOE damage ability that allows you to dodge skillshots, grants you more HP and give you even more attack speed which translates into more cooldown reduction.
The margin of error is too small
An Illidan using The Hunt needs to have flawless decision making. Casting a bad Metamorphosis doesn’t punish you as much as casting a bad Hunt. A bad Hunt can leave you way too deep in the backline, creating a free kill for the enemies surrounding you. In addition to that, the Hunt has a delay and a notification on the “hunted” target. This leaves a small room for counterplay and in many cases Illidan can just fly into a well-timed stun that would send him to the death screen within seconds.
Seeing it in Action
Fan from Cloud 9 Vortex runs a Youtube channel with educational videos for players who are new to the game or are searching for tips on improving.
Make sure you follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his amazing Youtube channel. For high quality Heroes of the Storm games, make sure to stop by his Twitch stream too.
Below you can explore his take on playing and dominating with Illidan while using The Hunt
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