One Overwatch 2 character is currently better than everyone else. As a result, the best players in the world only play this one heroine.
Overwatch 2 has now been released for a little over 2 weeks and slowly but surely it has become clear which heroes are particularly strong at the moment. This is especially compounded by the fact that Torbjörn and Bastion are currently locked in ranked mode and thus fall out as counterattacks.
At least for the tank players, this has ensured that one tank lady now trumps all the others to become the pros’ favorite hero of all time: Zarya dominates the battlefield.
Where does the data come from? Reddit user “TheForrestFire” looked at the data for the top 30 players of each role on the NA servers and discovered something pretty amazing:
83% of the time, Zarya is the most played tank character among the pros. In fact, 100% of the time, Zarya is in the “Top 3” most-played pro tank heroes.
Of course, this casts all other tanks in a pretty bad light.
Incidentally, D.Va is also well represented – the mech pilot ends up in the top 3 of the most played tanks with 70% (i.e. 21 of the top 30).
Why is Zarya so strong? This is mainly due to their revision. In the first Overwatch, Zarya had different cooldowns to protect herself or an ally with a barrier. In Overwatch 2, she has 2 charges that she can freely distribute. So she can either protect herself twice or a teammate twice – or just split it up, like back then.
This makes Zarya much more flexible, allowing her to protect the team and herself in whatever way is most appropriate.
At the same time, however, this also ensures that Zarya has a constantly high energy level, which means that her weapon does much more damage.
At full energy, Zarya smashes through enemies and can deal a whopping 850 damage over 5 seconds with a single clip charge if all ammo hits.
Another benefit is that you don’t have to attempt headshots with Zarya, since her energy weapon does the same amount of damage anywhere on her body. So it’s enough to simply target the much bulkier torso.
All of this leads to the fact that Zarya is not only a solid tank, but at the same time takes on the role of a DPS and a support character, which also improves as damage is absorbed.
After all: Blizzard is aware of the problem with Zarya and probably sees that she currently simply trumps every other tank without a chance. Therefore, there will probably be nerfs for Zarya in the coming week to bring it down a bit to the level of the other tanks.
Do you like playing Zarya too? Or don’t you particularly like her playstyle as a tank?