Zenyatta in Overwatch
Zenyatta is a hero that is towing a very, very fine line between balanced and broken given his kit can be so potent in the right hands. Currently, he is being outclassed by Ana and sometimes even Mercy as a default secondary healer because Zenyatta’s utility and pushing power is not nearly as effective. Now, this is no fault of the character’s gear, as the current competitive scene just favors Ana charging up Reaper for his Death Blossom to wipe a team. Zenyatta cannot compare to that, even with his own ultimate’s healing rate increased.
So the only real thing to play with are his Orbs of Harmony and Dischord, which could use very small buffs to their effectiveness. Again, we don’t want to restore his Discord back up to 50% damage increase, but we feel bumping it up from 30% to 35% would make enough of a difference. Of course, we’d need to offset his damage output slightly to reflect that as his own DPS is in a perfect spot.
For the Orb of Harmony, we would like to see either a small increase to its duration on a target (which is currently three seconds without line of sight) or a light healing rate increase. The former, if we go that route, should be moved from three to five seconds, since it would allow him to work nicely with flankers which is what his healing is for. If we go the healing increase, it should be somewhere between a 5% to 7% increase, so he can effectively heal tanks from a distance like Ana can. These two buff should not both happen, only one or the other as it would make him too powerful.
Overwatch is always a constant stream of changes and adjustments as balancing 23 individual heroes is an incredibly tricky task. Thankfully, it feels like we are getting closer to that point with each successive patch. We can’t wait to see what is going to make it through the Overwatch PTR, but we would love to see some of these heroes get the buffs they deserve.
