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How do you play Zenyatta
I can never get anything done when I play zenyatta, he just dies too quickly and doesn't do much damage. Does he need a buff or is there a specific playstyle?

I can never get anything done when I play zenyatta, he just dies too quickly and doesn't do much damage. Does he need a buff or is there a specific playstyle?
Zenyatta does a TON of damage! His orbs do 45 damage base, so with Discord up (+50%) and a headshot (+100%), he does 126 damage. One orb headshot + kick will kill a tracer, and 2 headshots will kill almost any non-tank character! The trick is the timing on his orb travel speed so you can lead the enemy and land your shots. The orbs also have zero falloff, so it's not difficult to kill a widowmaker across the map, provided she doesn't see you first. I rarely use his 5-orb chargeup, but it's great for poking around corners with. Even without a Discord and zero headshots, if you turn the corner and land them all point-blank into someone that's 225 damage (275 with a kick), enough once again to kill any non-tank. If you land all five as headshots on a tank with Discord, that's 630 damage, enough to kill even a full-health tank!
He plays more like a back-line support who shouldn't be up front with the tank. When playing Zenyatta, I try to stay away from the front line and throw orbs over people's shoulders or down hallways. Once you land your Discord orb, you don't even need to see through your teammates as you can just aim right underneath the icon to hit your target.
Always be spamming E to throw out a discord orb the second an enemy pops into view, with a priority on tanks. An extra 50% damage vs tanks makes them fall over pretty quickly.
Your heal doesn't heal very fast and will drop if they go out of line-of-sight for three seconds. Try to use it on people who need healing, but don't worry too much about following them. It's their responsibility to stay in LoS of you if they want to keep it up until they're full. Other than that, I try to keep it up on the tank to help buffer when they do take damage.
His ult is one of the weakest in the game, imo, as it is extremely situational. I tend to save it until the other team makes a big push onto a point, or to try and save people from some enemy ults (Zarya, Reaper, Pharah). It's not very effective against Hanzo, DVa, Junkrat, or McCree's ults, since they do their damage too quickly.
The most challening part of playing Zenyatta is his low hp. Heroes like Winston, Widowmaker, and Tracer pose a challenge to him, so if the team has multiples of those heroes you might want to switch to another support. Keep in mind that 2/3 of his health is actually shields, which will regenerate back to full after not taking damage for a few seconds. This means if you take a couple hits you can just hide for a few seconds to heal back to full without needing to go hunt for a medpack.
Thank you for this! I admit, I only played as Zenyatta for about five minutes near the end of the beta, so I didn't really explore the character but the low hp really put me off even wanting to. Now I see where he can be useful, I'm looking forward to playing him when the game is out!
Kadaan bring some great heads up.
He is squishy like all other healers so try to stand in the backline behind the tanks. Need to beware of Widowmaker and Hanzo that like to prick you down though.
Need to juggle your heal on everyone, which can be quite hard as you try to keep an eye on everyone.
What makes him so strong is his debuff, that I often try to get on tanks to increase all the damage they take. Zenyatta himself do lots of damage, and with the debuff its crazy.
I think its just about playstyle, that you need to adapt to as he very different compare to the others (like they all are very different). c:
lol I struggle with him as well...