Zarya: a balancing nightmare

8/20/26 Zarya is on paper one of the most balanced heroes, in practice though she is by far the most broken outside Mauga and maybe Orisa. What makes her balanced on paper is you can just not pop her bubbles and she wont be able to deal that much damage to your team. In practice its nearly impossible to not shoot her bubbles to give her energy. Zarya’s ability to bubble teammates which gives her energy is honestly her biggest problem. Being able to save your low health support from halfway across the team fight forces the other team to either stop shooting the support to start shooting someone else or to continue doing so and risk giving the Zarya energy.

To fix Zarya I would remove the perk “Extra Oomph” and replace it with a perk called “Projected Barrier” which allows her bubbles to instead affect the targeted ally for 75% reduced effectiveness and a 50% duration. This allows for the enemy team to be able to force a bubble on one of Zarya’s teammates which can waste a bubble charge. To replace her projected barrier an ability called “Overcharge” which on activation converts a bubble charge to 35 energy and has a five second cooldown. This is balanced because it trades a defensive cooldown for the ability to be used more aggressively but the energy gain is less than the potential energy than just bubbling and absorbing damage.