With no ability to actually use his bubbles on his teammates, this makes the Fuel high susceptible to Houston’s Dive. Inversely look at how things get really hairy for Dallas as Hanbin is Rocket Punched off the high ground. On one hand, look how difficult it is for Houston to be proactive against the Fuel’s positioning here in the train car. The Dallas Fuel featured a prominent amount of Zarya, yet their showcase was a bit rougher around the edges. Speaking of presenting examples, here are a few different looks to wet your pallet. If her bubble is a touch too late, if your positioning is slightly off if you peek out one too many times, everything goes belly up and you look like the Toronto Defiant on Circuit Royal. Ideally, Zarya creates some impressive windows for her team to punish the aggressive nature of the Dive archetype, however, precision is key. Something considered good but on the higher end of the difficulty scale creates this idea or ideal of a ‘perfect’ game where if the stars and moons all align then you create a sizeable advantage before the action kicks off. Overwatch 2’s Zarya compositions seem to settle somewhere in the fourth option. Dallas Fuel’s Lucio/Moira Rush composition from last year is a great example. Any fans of GOATs in the chat? Something considered not good but easy can take strat books by storm because of how coordinated or how the team has a strong understanding of the game script. Something that is both easy to execute and considered good, tends to create rigid metagames where only one ‘strategy’ exists. Something that is both not easy and not good shouldn’t be played. Many esports across the board have this dichotomy between what is ‘good’ and what is ‘easy’. That said, this is a composition with a high ceiling and a very low floor which may seem familiar to some of you. If you spot a team that only finds success during those moments of high resource use, their neutral game is suspect. However, that is not and has never been a strong macro strategy. Now, instead of trying to find safe rotations to close the distance and create safe zones for engagement, there are some teams that will still attempt to just play Zarya to pocket her carries for big ultimate combos like Nano-Visor and Nano-Blade. Places like Eichenwalde, King’s Row, Oasis (University) and Lijiang Tower (Control Center) give Zarya great staging grounds to abuse the enclosed map geometry and limit how much her team can be split and picked apart. Without mobility to take space or consistent damage mitigation through the use of a shield of some sort, this does mean positioning is incredibly important and oftentimes you’ll see Zarya only being picked on maps that allow for this deathball style to tuck away in houses and in tight corridors and remove the possibility of flanks almost entirely. At some point you are going to have to be proactive, that’s where placing your bubbles onto something like a Reaper or Genji tends to shine. As we all know by now, slow Overwatch is bad Overwatch. If we can’t ‘catch’ the dive with stuns, then what if we ‘protect’ against it with bubbles? That’s what Zarya does well, she takes the target of the table for the Dive and adds some impressive sustainability. With Ana being such a high priority target and picks like Winston and Doomfist being incredibly viable, Dive archetypes are the new standard and without much in the way of crowd control abilities to shut offensive flankers down, teams have looked towards Zarya as possible solutions to this. With two bubbles now Zarya comps are your go-to for an anti-Dive setup. What we're saying is that it isn’t her team’s only win condition. This is not to say that Graviton Surge is a bad ultimate or that it isn’t a win condition. Gone are the days of playing for a Graviton Surge as your only win condition. Zarya does still dictate a slower tempo composition, that much remains, but what your team is playing for in terms of win conditions and fight script changes completely. And with how much we’ve seen her within Week 1 of the 2022 Overwatch League season, it’s time to begin to build a blueprint as to how we see this composition playing out and why it’s found such mixed success. While you may think not much has changed with her, having an added bubble and one less tank sure begs to differ. Forget most of what you knew about Zarya and her role in Overwatch for a moment. Do not pass Go and don’t even think about cashing in those scrimbux.
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