First of all Lucio is the worst hero in the game, not zen. Out of thousands of games played, the number of games i have won with a lucio on my team can be counted on one hand. But that’s a different topic.
Zen’s damage is not quite the same as as Bap or Illari. It’s spam damage and projectile and those usually pull higher numbers overall, and work better at longer ranges. For one thing he can deal with a widow much easier than any other support. I for one absolutely love deleting widows as zen.
Damage boost is absolutely objectively not better than discord. Damage boost affects one person. Discord allows for stacking damage buffs if multiple people focus one discorded target. So respectfully, your math doesn’t math. I’d have to check the numbers but i believe during mercy’s ult if she damage boosts the whole team by 30% or whatever it is, and the whole team focuses one target, THAT is equivalent to discord.
His ult being hard countered by a 12 sec cooldown? I assume you’re talking about nade? If ana nades offensively she doesn’t have it for herself anymore. And it’s not as simple as you make it seem, there’s a lot more to it. For one thing you can force nade early in many ways, and then this scenario you’re painting out is a non-issue. Not to mention how many people have to be stacked together for the ana to get a really effective nade that would arguably counter transcendence. Knowing when to transcendence is part of the skill. You can transce a whole lot of things, and others you can’t, but that doesn’t make it useless. And i believe it lasts longer than all these short cd abilities. Not to mention saving zen’s own life indefinitely in the process and buy him some time to move somewhere else or just stall point or what have you.
Zen has always been extremely vulnerable. His head hitbox extends to the orbs floating around his head, so that’s pretty huge. But the tradeoff for this vulnerability is supposed to be his damage. I believe blizzard has been taking the wrong approach by nerfing his damage, and that’s on them. But even in this lesser state than what he used to be, he’s still pretty good. My biggest pet peeve with him has always been the fact that when he’s out of ammo he is basically a sitting duck while he’s reloading. Compared to moira it doesn’t seem fair at all that moira basically never ever has to reload, and zen gets punished for inevitably needing to reload unless he hits all his shots which is unlikely. I’ve always been an advocate of giving zen infinite ammo like hanzo, and i don’t think it would make him overpowered given his severe vulnerabilities.
Another thing is he can heal through enemy shields, which cannot be said about a lot of other supports. I believe mercy can too, but obviously she’d have to be way up close to do it and zen can do it from a safe distance.
Anyway, i think the main takeaway is zen’s usefulness stems from his ability to juggle both of his orbs at any given moment, along with his own damage which is not negligible if his aim is half-decent. So you can’t just point at his healing alone and say it’s trash and that’s the end of the story. If he’s good at damage then when he’s assisting a teammate the teammate won’t need that much healing in the first place. Do you just want a healbot or something? then yeah zen is the worst pick for your team, sure.
I for one find zen to be pretty useful in terms of assisting his team, albeit by not only healing, and i think he’s extremely fun to play. Yes he can be frustrating at times. Some heroes are tough to deal with - Tracer, Sombra, etc. But for the most part he’s not “the worst hero in the game”. Lucio on the other hand… god, i can write a book about all the things i hate about lucio.