Supporting can often feel like you are missing out on real action, just aiding your team kind of like a babysitter. Well, that is not the case with Zenyatta as he can dish out insane damage, sometimes even outshining his main damage dealer teammates. Positioning and mechanical skill are extremely important to be successful at the hero.

Healing your team is obviously a huge part of playing him well, so we are going to give you some tips to fully understand when to play aggressively, and when to focus on aiding your allies.

General tips

Your basic attacks have no damage falloff, use this to your advantage. Position yourself further away from team fights and constantly spam chokepoints to make it harder for the enemy team to reach you. Your secondary fire is exceptionally great at quickly bursting down squishy targets from a distance.

Orb of Harmony is returned to you if you lose sight of your teammate for 3 seconds. Keep this in mind when your flanker teammates are going behind enemy lines, you want to heal up other allies instantly. Basically, you want to have Orb of Harmony active on someone all the time, this is really important.

Just like Orb of Harmony, Orb of Discord should be active on a target at all times. Missing out on this and focusing a target without Orb of Discord can lead to them being healed up and turning the fight around. Spam that hotkey like a maniac, and always call out Discord targets on voice chat to your teammates. Use Discord as soon as your primary fire comes out to animation cancel, so you don’t slow down your attacks. And don’t forget, you can use it to see enemies behind walls, helping you to prepare a burst secondary fire.

Transcendence is your only true hard-supporting ability. It can out-heal Pharah’s Rocket Barrage, Genji’s Dragonblade and so on. Timing is really important and keep in mind, if the enemy team has an Ana, she can counter all your healing with a single Biotic Grenade.

Hero specific tips

Generally, you always want to be aggressive due to your insane damage potential, but staying too close to the frontline is not a good idea because your low health pool. While attacking, you want to push in with your team and take a position at the edge of the fight where you can easily spam Orb of Discord and Orb of Harmony. Stay relatively close to someone who can peel for you.

Defensive plays are obviously more important on the defending side, as you can position yourself even further away from the fight, forcing the enemy team to fully commit a flanker to deal with you. Make sure there is someone in your team that can help you out if needed, but you also have to be ready to take those one versus one fights against Genji, Tracer and the likes.

When dueling Genji, you want to bait out his Deflect by charging up your secondary fire and immediately canceling it with a melee attack to finish him off with your primary fire. It is easier to hit him with those if he reacts with a Dash. Tracer can be a bit harder, just aim for the head, dodge a lot and try to force her Recall as soon as possible. Doomfist is just going to kick your ass if he is skilled.

Most of your health consist of a blue shield. Blue shields regenerate after a few seconds of not taking damage, use this to your advantage and quickly hide behind a wall mid-team fight if you have the chance. Also, Sombra’s EMP instantly burns all the shields, so be ready to get focused down by her all the time.

+1

Doomfist can burst down your teammates with Rocket Punch even if your Transcendence is active. Look out for this and block his punch to save your ally.

+2

Transcendence boosts your movement speed a lot, you can use it to reach and block objectives in really dire situations and you can also block incoming abilities like Reinhardt’s Charge to save teammates.

These are our 8+2 no-brainer tips for Zenyatta. Now go and play him as a damage dealer with an insanely strong supporting ultimate, channel your inner JJonak!