Why after 3 years of Dva I can't play Zarya?

Competitive Discussion
21

A bit late, but watching the vid now.

At the start before the fight begins 0:14 you bubble to farm energy from Junk, which I think is really good. Before teams go in and engage you usually have a “poke” phase where teams shoot spam damage at eachother, to get lucky kills, break shields etc etc. Using your bubbles selfishly here is perfect. Keep it up :slight_smile:

Around 0:28 you miss the Junkrat flanking your Moira. Remember that on defense you can control flanks with Zarya really well with Right clicks to farm ult and make them back away. When your Rein isn’t being actively pressured by their frontline, you can try to throw a glance at the flank routes on this map, which is usually left side. I think you could’ve bubbled anything there, ideally Moira but even a bubble on someone close by here would’ve given you 40 extra charge to punish the flanking Junk. Good timing on the self bubble when Hammond slams.

You were struggling with tracking the Junkrat at 0:35 and that’s normal, he was moving randomly and no one expects perfect tracking at your level. One thing you can to with Zarya to help you out at the start is to hit them with your right click. You can aim at their feet and the splash damage will send them upwards in a predictable trajectory making it easier to track them. Not to mention it’s a combo that puts out insane amounts of damage.

This is more of a general advice. But from the start all the way to around 0:40 when Ball is on point, you’ve been standing in one spot, out in the open for quite some time. I think this is one reason you find yourself dying on Zarya more than you do on D.va. D.va’s panic button (her shift) is much better at getting away from danger than Zarya’s personal bubble. The personal bubble is just some added tankiness (200 HP) you can use while retreating or engaging. Try to make a habit of using corners and walls to protect yourself. It’s really important to do so on immobile tanks.

Another thing you can work on; stick to one target especially with your laser beam. At somewhere around 0:33 you move your crosshairs sporadically between Junkrat, Mercy and Rein’s shield. It’s not an efficient use of your ammo and you minimize your pick potentialt. What I would do here is just focus all my attention on Junk, he has no sustain or escapes the same way Mercy does. Pick a target and rain hell on them :slight_smile:

0:47: Love the bubble on Symm. You already had decent energy and decided to peel Symm here. Following that I like that you take space later pressuring D.va and the Ana, and then retreating back to your Rein. I would’ve pushed the Ana and commited for a kill, but knowing your limits is good.
Nice kill on the Junk at 1:15, dude. You had charge, he was out of position and you punished him. If you get better at taking advantage of these opportunities you’ll improve on Zarya fast.

Now to 1:20 where you lose the fight. I honestly think if you had your team to play aggressive here with you, you’d be able to kill all of them. But he’s off doing god knows what. But no point in reviewing your team mates. What you could’ve done here is to not waste your self bubble. You were essentially full HP with no one hitting you and had decent energy. The Junk made a smart play to punish you for it here. Another way you could’ve played this better is probably sticking close to your Rein, EVEN THO it’s the wrong thing to do. You want to be aggressive, but you’re not gonna have aggressive Reinhardts in Gold. They play very safe and hold shield.

1:57 : Grav wasted here. One difference between D.va ult and Zarya ult has a tendency to be more team dependent than D.va ult. Meaning it’s only successful if there’s decent follow up. I think this was a bit of a panic ult. Things you can watch for before graving is; do they have a shield? If they do, you’re gonna need your team to pressure it with you, or have your Rein swing into the grav. You can make a solo play with grav, but you need to be high, preferrably full health and with your self bubble. This ensures that you can out damage the healers sustain. I have zero clue how you guys turn this fight around :laughing: but you did. Nice.

3:03: Another example of positioning that can be punishable. You’re out in the open. Granted you do have your bubble and for some reason you’re full health (what is the enemy shooting?!?). But make a habit out of staying behind cover or shield. The team fight isn’t on yet and you can spam right clicks for damage from a distance.

Man this is a lot of text. I’ll stop here so you can decide if you want more or not :laughing: Hope it helps

1 Like
22

Wow I think this was a very consistent and helpful read of my play so far.
I’d love to keep on going with this so I have two questions.

  1. How can I avoid missing the right click? Cause even if I know that it’s the highest dmg combo ( I saw Jayne guide on that lol ) I still tend to play humble and avoid my right click in fear that they might dodge it even if aimed to the ground. What would typically happen is that I would start the game knowing this combo, trying to applying it, failing and then hovering back safely to the beam tracking. How can I be more consistent? I noticed that when a character has jump abilities it’s much better to just engage them with high energy beam as they have no option but just escape that.
  2. Very interesting point on target focusing there thank you. I thought that by focusing the target lowest in HP at the moment I secure more kills for the team but actually you made me realise that it’s much better to go in a fighting knowing the targets that are weak to your kit. In that case I should have went every time damaging the junk and the ana when she was out of positioning and without sleep dart.
    This way I can apply more consistent pressure regardless of the situation given and also get more ult charge I guess.
  3. How do you balance aggression and peeling for your backline? Are there Zarya optimal spots to sit in and memorise for each map? Or do I have to hope for a corner? Cause for example on Havana on the last point there’s barely any cover until the very spawn and Rein always tend to just stand in the open there forcing you to commit your cooldowns to hold that position ugh. I wish I had an ability to pull my teammates back like Orisa pull eheh.
    Anyway I can’t wait to get more and I’ll focus on fixing the afore mentioned points. Thanks a lot!
23

There’s only answer to not missing right clicks and it’s really boring. Practice. It’s just a relatively slow moving projectile that you have to get used to. If you’re uncomfortable using it in a duel, then you can stick to beaming and practice the right click on clumped up enemies at a distance. Even if you’re slightly off the mark you’ll hit more than one target and charge grav really fast.
Come to think of it that’s something you could work on, right click into groups. At high charge it’s ridiculous. Especially when you’re being damage boosted and you get 10-15% per hit :drooling_face:

In the situation where your target priority was off I’d probably go for Junk and then Mercy, from what I remember the Mercy would be left without anyone to fly towards. But that’s just “polish”. The main thing is that your beam stays focused on a target. Regarding which target is best, it really depends. Sometimes it is the low HP target, sometimes it’s the one that’s out of position or used a key cooldown.

There aren’t fixed points you can stay in as Zarya. There are just too many factors into where you should stay. What I try to do is just split the map into corners and “dance” around them. Only full commiting when I know we’re winning the fight. King’s Row is an excellent map for this. Literally made for Rein+Zarya comps. With Zarya, ideally your backline takes care of itself with Lucio booping people away. But I really really doubt you see much Lucio at that rank. The best way to think of aggression and defensive play is kinda hard to explain. You kinda have to adapt mid game. What I usually think about is my energy levels. If it’s low I bubble selfishly, bubbling myself up front and my Rein when he’s taking spam. That usually leaves me at 60-80 and then I wait for my bubbles to come online before making a push. The rest really depends on how my team plays really. I’m kinda of a selfish Zarya 70% of the time. I bubble usually to enable aggression, sometimes it’s to enable my Rein to push and sometimes it’s to bubble a dps that is about to ult. 30% it’s to save someone who will die if I don’t bubble them, like a squishy getting focused. It really just depends. You’re gonna have to experiment a bit. Observe whether you have an aggro or passive tank partner or not.

Regarding open maps like Havana 3rd point. Sometimes the best move one Zarya is to go back to spawn and switch :slight_smile:

1 Like
24

Wow that’s a lot of wisdom. What are the focal things I should always think when I am playing Zarya apart from ult tracking, target focusing and “corner dancing”?
Also how do you maximise scouting informations even when corners take a good chunk of your visibility out?

How can I practice right clicks? Training Range? Workshops? Deathmatch?

25

I was a Dva main for a long time too. Always found Zarya to be hard to click with and I never got into her rhythm. I’ve been the same as you, if I picked Zarya in my normal comp games which could be like high plat or something, I would really suck. I had a dps account I used a bit and I started to main Zarya on that, playing in gold. After about 20 hours or so I felt like I got the hang of it and nowadays I’m probably as confident with my Zarya as I am with Dva (I’ve not been playing the game recently tbh, so Dva was in a really bad spot and it wasn’t worth playing her, so I’d pick Zarya a lot more).

Mostly I just found that I needed to think about positioning a lot more, as you don’t have an escape. And as general rule (perhaps not always applicable) I would use my projected bubble first, and basically asap off cooldown, but keep my personal one a bit more in case of emergency. Many times that will save your life and can’t if you wasted it. Wasting projected isn’t such a big deal, and I use that more to generate charge.

Also just constantly spamming her secondary fire is basically essential to generate a decent amount of ult charge. So I guess getting better at aiming that helps a lot.

26

Shouldn’t I avoid spam shot as they increase enemy supports ultimate charge too?

27

Feeding ult charge is fine if you get more out of the trade. Zarya has a really impactful ultimate, so it’s worth exchanging for most support ults. If the enemy team has a Zen, then try not to feed that ult. I either spam less in those games, or try to put damage on an enemy the main support is next to.

28

OK this makes sense. So spam to have my ult if the enemy ult isn’t an ability that counters my ult directly. That’s good. Also I think I can avoid the swings and firestrikes of rein as they feed quite some charge to him.

29

Because it’s a lot easier to get away playing bad or mediocre with D.Va than it is doing so with Zarya as D.Va is the definition of trash damage (on top of being trash tier in the current meta) while Zarya requires precision and timing to be anywhere near useful to have on the team.

To put it this way, if you get good with heroes like Tracer/McCree, Ana/Zen/Lucio or Zarya/Hammond and so on switching to heroes like D.Va, Mercy, Reaper etc. is a lot easier rather than doing it the other way around.

30

I understand. So basically I have handicapped myself with the “hero trap” and now that my heroes are not meta I have suffered a bit in terms of elo. Makes sense. But I think that I can grasp what to work on thanks to this post and I feel like I’m not a player so bad that can’t improve. Have you seen the vod? Do you think there’s hope one day that I will climb to diamond? xD

31

Saw some of it and yes, of course you can reach diamond or maybe even higher.

You unlike 95% of the people on this forum that rather blame on everything else actually want to figure out what you can do to improve and as long as you have that mentality you will become better at whatever it is your doing.

Read some guides and tutorials of different heroes and play lots of DM and it doesn’t necessarily have to be the hero you practicing like Zarya as there’s custom games that would make more sense in her case but just something fast like Tracer which is an excellent hero to practice tracking with and will improve your Zarya beam accuracy.

32

Oh that’s a neat tip. Tracer in DM. Seems fun and useful at the same time.

33

Yeah, playing tracer in DM is very effective and fun way to practice reaction, positioning and of course tracking and that transition over to other heroes.

There’s workshop/customs designed for zarya practice I believe. Like your tracking from the little I saw from the video is OK/good and you have played D.Va after all so it would be weird if it was way off target with the beam. But knowing how to use the particle cannon is extremely important, like both aiming it and when to use it over the beam and for that you have to study some tutorials for knowledge and maybe practice on bots to get a feel for it.

Also another thing that I noticed was your bubble control and positioning in general and again, there’s lots of tutorials out there that will explain in detail what you need to know and then it’s just a matter of trying to apply what you’ve learnt in practice.

Like I could say that it’s very important that you build up lots of charge before the fight breaks out which is obvious right but there’s guides that explain how to do it in the best possible way and then how to use the bubble during fights and what you should look for.
The most common mistake I see Zaryas do in terms of bubble control is to use the bubble on Rein just before the fight starts. Like there’s nothing wrong using it on Rein to build up energy pre-fight but when your Rein is about to initiate it’s good taht he have the bubble once he drops the shield and not just before.

34

OK interesting. Can you link me a couple of guides? Thanks a lot. Also I have a sens in game of 3-4 which is good but since I tried playing soldier I tried to lower it a bit and now it’s 2.8, while my dpi is 1600.
Should I prefer high or low sensitivity?

35

Sensitivty is really personal preference so I can’t say a magic value that’s the most optimal and perfect for all.

In general though, the lower the better assuming you can play with it efficiently. 2,8 @1600dpi is an eDPI of roughly 4.4k which is a rather normal sense. As reference most pros use 4k +/- 1k eDPI.

For tutorial just go on youtube and search “zarya overwatch guide”, only showing results from last year usually gives more relevant information.

36

I play soldier. He’s absolutely terrible the fact he still has spread is baffaling. Play what you enjoy. Meta only matters past a certain rank. Soldier is garbage into double shield. Even still. Yet I’m going to play him.

37

Ult tracking isn’t specifically a Zarya thing. It’s useful for all characters. But it’s helpful to track support ultimates in my opinion. My approach to playing Zarya is mostly just enabling my Reinhardt and try my best to outdamage all 11 players in the game. Pretty selfish. But I do make adjustments if needed, if my Rein isn’t that aggro or my backline is being focused and not dealing with it well.

I don’t understand the scouting question. It’s not something I think about with Zarya.

Just try not to apply all the tips in this thread in your next game, it might be overwhelming and you’ll end up second guessing yourself. Maybe one game you can focus on bubble management and positioning (corners/natural cover).

38

Yeah I think so, too. I will write down all the useful tips you gave me here on some paper and then try to practise on a couple of these aspects, perfect them and move on to the next ones, so I am not overwhelmed with stuff to learn. As a gold Zarya player it’s clear that I do multiple things wrong at a time, so focusing on all of these things at once it’s impossible. Even actually fixing a couple of those in the beginning might be enough to climb a few SR.

39

Zarya is one of the hardest heroes to play… But not to the point u r mentioning.

Generally ur main goal is not to die (more than any other hero) so that u maintain ur high charge

Comparing zarya to dva. They are different heroes! Zarya wants to brawl wants to be in the fight while dva ia more mobile

So what is wrong with u? Why u r dieing? Since u didnt post a vod we cant help but i can sense ur bad positioning and maybe being over aggressive with ur high energy… Maybe ur bubble usage is bad

U need to go to replay and look at each time u died and ask ur self why did i die… Also look at each bubble and evaluate it. Lot of players just bubble for no reason

Maybe u can post a vod

40

Weird you are the only guy who missed the vod link xD.
Also since you didn’t watch my video I have to say that your tips are a bit too generic. Usually in golds we have something we show signs of bright and shine, but we have awful habits or tendencies to fix. And the past posts helped me figure out which aspects were holding me back.
So far, a part from positioning, bubble manegement was to be improved with more focus on building charge before engagement; then I should work on right clicks and target focusing; also I must be careful at engaging with full ammo, cause in the vod there’s a part where I go facing a junkrat in a room with high charge but low ammo. I could got away with it if I had a full clip, but since it was too expensive of cool downs and fight was happening on the point I should have ignored him until self bubble refresh.