This hero concept is
complete! I am open to suggestions as far as refining the balance of this hero.
Zenyatta is an omnic and a former member of the Shambali, a group of omnics based out of Nepal that formed after a "spiritual awakening" following the Omnic Crisis. They believe that omnics not only have the benefit of their artificial intelligence, but actual souls, just like humans do. Zenyatta's mentor sought to unite humans and omnics together through a message of peace and unity, but was killed by Widowmaker and the forces of Talon, who assassinated him for reasons unknown. Zenyatta seeks to bring peace and harmony between humans and omnics, but he is not above fighting to defend the innocent from those who threaten them.
Zenyatta's design in this concept pitch is meant to differentiate him from other directed healers, especially the Medic, who is perhaps the closest to how he works in Overwatch. As such, he is a hero focused on providing his allies with improved regeneration, rather than direct healing. This allows him to function differently from most support heroes, in that his healing potential will ultimately be higher, but will also take longer to yield its full effects. Instead of mana, Zenyatta uses his orbs as his "resource" for all of his primary abilities. He can freely distribute them among allies or enemies as he sees fit, controlling each orb individually using the ability tray keys 1-4 to manipulate them as needed. However, using his orbs will also limit his own damage potential considerably. This makes him a very technical hero that will need to carefully allocate his orbs to maximize his effectiveness in combat, as well as providing players with three distinct styles of play for Zenyatta:
- A literal "heal-bot" who keeps his allies regenerating at a swift pace.
- An aggressive debuff hero who focuses on weakening the enemy team.
- A "selfish" damage-focused hero who focuses on providing as much personal damage as possible.
Hero Type: Ranged Support
Difficulty:
Medium
Pros:
- Zenyatta's ability to heal multiple targets means that he will be able to provide targeted healing to all of his allies at once if necessary, without the need to group up as tightly as you would with Kharazim or Brightwing.
- Zenyatta is essentially capable of healing a target indefinitely without a mana cost, though it reduces the number of orbs he has available for his own use.
- Zenyatta has the capacity to debuff multiple enemy heroes, allowing your damage dealers to focus down priority targets.
- Zenyatta's capacity for damage is high when he is not using his orbs. This allows him to defend himself against 1v1 encounters with respectable damage.
Cons:
- Zenyatta has low health even among his fellow supports, making him an easy target for burst damage.
- Zenyatta's mobility is limited due to his lack of a mount. This means he is especially vulnerable to ganks by the enemy team, and is easier to catch out of position during a team retreat.
- Zenyatta's damage is highly dependent on the number of orbs that he has allocated into his Harmony and Discord effects. When all of his orbs are in use, his damage is among the lowest of all supports, and his only damaging ability is at 20% of its normal power. This means that when he has deployed most of his orbs, he will struggle to defend himself against direct pressure from an enemy hero.
- Zenyatta's healing is entirely regeneration-based, meaning that he will not be able to heal up a single target as quickly as more direct means of healing.
Note: All figures shown on this hero concept page are listed at their baseline figures (Lvl 0).
Health: 1460 HP (+4%)
Health Regen: 3.01 HP per second (+4%)
Resource: Orbs (4)
Attack Damage: 77 (+4%)
Attack Speed: 1.0 (see trait for further information)
Attack Range: 5.5
Heroes of the Storm Build Guides
Aidan, The Dark Wanderer
Aldur, Nomad of the Forest
Genji, Cybernetic Ninja
Izsha, Advisor to the Queen of Blades
Stukov, Infested Terran
-wouldn't be simplier if with 'D' you can select the hero you want to take your orb from?
-isn't trascendence a little OP? It seems the union of a self-divine shield plus tranquility
What's your opinion?
And please, what difference should be between cure over time and buffed regeneration?
I like the idea, but I don't know what changes.
Anyway, good job!
1) In this design, Zenyatta's orbs can be placed freely on both allies and enemies using his W and E abilities, and he has a total of four that he can distribute. Setting his controls up so that the first four hotkeys are bound to his orbs actually allows Zenyatta to directly control which orb he retrieves at what time. If I locked orb retrieval to a single key (D), then it would only be able to retrieve one orb at a time. That means there's no guarantee that, in the heat of battle, you'll always be pulling the orb you wanted to. For example, imagine if you distribute your orbs like so during a teamfight, in this order:
- An orb on your team's tank.
- An orb on the enemy team's support.
- An orb on your team's dive assassin (Greymane, Illidan, etc).
- An orb on another team mate who has low health.
If you wanted to suddenly pull the orb off of your team's dive assassin to drop it onto someone else, and you were using a "D" key method that always retrieves the oldest orb placed, you would need to first remove the orb from your team's tank and the enemy team's support....which is not a very ideal way of doing things, and it also means you'd then have to reapply the orbs on the people you didn't mean to take orbs away from.By assigning each orb to a specific hotkey from 1-4, you remove this issue entirely. Now if I want to pull my orb from the dive assassin, I know exactly which key to push because each of the four hotkeys have an individualized portrait showing who possesses which orb. So I don't have to pull orbs from people I don't want, and I don't run the risk of making a mistake and pulling an orb from someone I didn't intend to.
Does that help clarify as to why I did it that way?
2) I'm always open to re-balancing the numbers for one of my hero concepts! As I see it, my pitches are less about having perfect numerical accuracy (since the devs would change any numbers they feel need changing, of course), and more about providing a generally solid concept that the HotS devs can easily work around. So I'm totally open to altering the numbers on any one of my hero pitches.
Let me explain why I set it up as I did. My intent with all Overwatch heroes is to translate their kits as close to the original as possible. To that end, I wanted to make sure that Zenyatta's Transcendence was a model similar to that in OW, which means it should have the same key aspects to it:
- An increase in movement speed
- Rapid health regeneration
- Invulnerability
Obviously, this means that such an ult is going to be very tricky to balance, since it's combining the elements of a self-Divine Shield and a powerful heal. I'm inclined to say that, yes, the numbers are probably a bit too strong at this point. Divine Shield only lasts 3 seconds and doesn't carry the heal with it, though it's also worth note that Transcendence only protects Zenyatta himself and can't be cast on others, so that's a factor too. I'm thinking of reducing its duration to 3 seconds with a corresponding adjustment to the healing rate (so that it doesn't lose most of its potency), and raising the cooldown to 120 seconds simply because of how powerful such an effect is going to be. Does that sound agreeable?3) The difference as I see it is that healing over time usually drops a packet of X HP each second, whereas health regeneration is continuous, so you gain X HP over the course of a second. Admittedly, they are pretty similar and the end result won't be all that different in most situations, which is why I'm struggling with adapting a kit like Lucio's to HotS because his healing will be very similar to Brightwing's in that respect. I think the only practical difference is that healing over time is slightly less effective against effects like Lunara's poison, since they both drop their packets at a per-second rate, whereas regeneration could potentially buy you a few fractions of a second more time against poison if you're about to die since it flows into you at a continuous rate. But yes, I admit there isn't a ton of difference and I'm not opposed to just switching it over to "X HP per second" instead.
Thank you for your feedback!