Hey Idra, I don't think your name is unfamiliar to anyone here on TL, but its been a little while since we've heard anything from you. Tell us a little about your experience in Heroes of the Storm, what teams you've played on, and in general what you've been up to since you left SC2.

After I quit SC2 entirely I started going to school, I played dota but purely for fun. I got into heroes the day it released thanks to a friend at Blizzard and have been playing it since, I wasn't sure how seriously I was going to take it at first. I figured I would at least make content or cast for it or something, but the game turned out to be way more fun and well designed than I expected. I also found a group of people who are really fun to play with, lzgamer is probably the only one who would be familiar to TL, so for the time being at least we're all practicing as seriously as we can and playing it as competitively as one can play a game that's in alpha.

That's really interesting, what are you in school for? And a little more on topic, what would you say it is that makes heroes fun to play and keeps you coming back?

Chem engineering at the moment, but I still have to do general classes so I'm not entirely sure where I'll end up. There are a lot of things that are appealing about the game, I honestly enjoyed farming in other mobas so I kind of miss the laning, but it makes up for it with very fast constant action. It's also more strategically diverse, I think, given how variable maps are and how many different objectives there are on each map. Every objective is likely to be a team fight so figuring out rotations and timings is a constant, important thing. The pace of the games is really, really nice too. My team all went and played league together during the recent downtime and games just feel so slow and lacking in action compared to heroes. It takes very specific maps, team compositions, and playstyles to have any kind of downtime in heroes.

This is completely true, heroes is very dynamic. Speaking of teams and dynamism, your team, Snowflake has had a couple of roster shuffles, you guys recently picked up Chillatech because you were looking for a strong vocal player who could serve as a shot caller, how has he been working out in this role so far?

It's been fantastic, we're still trying to figure out exactly where everyone falls in terms of communication, shotcalling and whatnot. Most of us come from an individual game background so that's been the hardest part for us. But chilla is very comfortable talking while he plays which is a huge help to the team, we had him and keylax swap roles and had practiced together for like 4 days and we took a series off of SMG, who had previously been unbeatable, so I think we're all going to do very well together once we get things ironed out.



Following that thought of you all originally being players from one vs one games, how has the transition been for you? Are there any lessons that have really stuck with you or that you think players transitioning from a similar background should keep in mind?



I played a good amount of both league and dota so even though I wasn't near competitive at either I don't really feel like I was coming at it from a pure RTS player perspective. I absolutely think communication is the biggest hurdle in the transition though, given that it just doesn't exist in solo games and, especially in a purely teamwork based game like heroes, it's absolutely paramount. I'm still not good at it so I'm not sure how much advice I can give, but just constantly relaying information and following decisions decisively are probably the two biggest points so far to me. As for the game itself, a lot of skills should transition, map awareness is still huge, judging fights is different but similar, control is simpler but more important. But lots of pure RTS players seem to be god awful at it, I'm honestly not sure where the disconnect is.



I found similar things when I started playing mobas, it turns out controlling just one hero isn't quite as easy as it seems. A little more on your team, Snowflake is considered one of the very top teams in the scene right now, what do you think are the main factors leading to your success?

There's a ton of factors that go into it, faye is probably the best player in the game mechanically, just in terms of hitting skillshots and whatnot. Lz and keylax are both very diverse players who have played a whole range of heroes competitively for us and let us experiment with our lineup and get everything perfect. Chilla has stepped in and performed great even from a shotcalling role with no competitive experience and little familiarity with the team. I play the ranged dps types so I just kind of stand there and shoot things, but everyone else is really good. Another big thing I think is the team atmosphere, we all get along really well and everyone takes losses well. A lot of the other teams will get super negative and bitch at one another if a game is going poorly. We take everything in stride, which has led to some insane comebacks, and even if we lose it makes it much easier for us to diagnose and learn from mistakes.



I wouldn't downplay your contributions, your positioning during ECS has been quite impressive to watch. Snowflake played Symbiote Gaming in the recently aired ECS finals, while your team lost the games felt pretty close. Going into them, did you guys have a particular draft or strategy prepared? Or were you especially concerned about Symbiote pulling out anything in particular?



That actually kinda sucked for us, we played the MVI winner finals vs them, the bo3 we won, immediately before that and we had a solid plan for how to deal with them that worked out well. They watched the replays and figured out what was going wrong and adapted better than us going into the ECS match. I think it was mostly on my drafting too, the easiest game we won vs them was when we just banned strong heroes and picked their comfort heroes for ourselves. Going into the later matches I got more conservative and just tried to pick generic strong heroes for us. All our players are really diverse in terms of hero selection and playstyles, didn't take advantage of that enough. But yeah generally speaking against symbiote you always have to watch out for bloodlusts and backdoors. Zagara and Rehgar are probably the two most important heroes for them. They also first picked Arthas+Tyrael for the first time there which caught us off guard and turned out to be very powerful.

Oh, wow, I didn't realize those series were played so close to each other, that gives a whole different perspective on how things turned out. In general how do you guys prepare for tournaments? How much time do you invest in practice would you say?



We have 4 hours of scheduled team practice that's intended to be scrims and serious games every weekday, and whoever has time tends to play additional less serious games to try out various heroes or whatever. Weekends we tend to play all day. It's really hard to practice specifically for matches right now, against a lot of the teams our specific preparation is more discussing drafts and playstyles. SMG is the only team that we really need to practice specifically for, and no other team compares to them either in terms of skill or style, so it's mostly just general practice and a lot of discussion and theorycrafting

That's a lot of time spent practicing. As you commented earlier, you tend to play ranged DPS heroes, would you say that's your favorite role to play or do you have another preference?



I've always preferred late game mage type heroes, AP carry equivalents from league, but there's not too many of them in the game yet. Tassadar kind of counts, and he's one of my better heroes. Falstad as well but I'm not as good on him for whatever reason. But I would be totally happy playing ranged dps, mages, or supports in this game. I'm terrible at tanky/bruiser/initiator types though. I find it very hard to judge the battles from their perspective.



Since you mentioned mage types, yesterday blizzard launched two new heroes, Azmodan and Anub'Arak, and Azmodan is all about hurling fireballs across the battlefield. If you've had time to look at them, do you have any opinion on how these new heroes fit in the game at higher levels?

The initial reaction from the community was that anub'arak was going to be super op, I think they're overrating/misplaying him quite a bit. He's way too squishy to be the divey stun machine everyone thinks he'll be. I think he'll still be strong though, just as more of a secondary tank who has to be pretty careful about when he hard engages. Azmodan I have not played yet, but he seems like he might be the strongest pusher in the game and Blizzard is really trying to encourage pushing type play. I think a well played Azmodan might be pretty strong, but he's an odd hero and I won't be sure until I play him a bit. I'm sad they stacked his q talents at level one though. I wanted to just farm it and sit in our base 1 shotting people.

A little more on recent changes, do you have any thoughts on the new patch that came out yesterday, and more specifically of the large changes to nova?





Regardless of how good nova is now the changes are fantastic, the biggest thing they need to improve about the game right now is the talent system. It gives them so much freedom with hero design since they don't have to mold everything around universal items, like other mobas, but currently a lot of the talents are placeholders. I'm sure it's just because the game is still in alpha, but it's still awesome to see them starting to implement more hero specific talents. For her specifically, she's still such a potential liability in competitive games, she's incredibly squishy and has no escape and if her burst doesn't kill someone she does essentially nothing for the next 10+ seconds. That being said her burst can be absolutely insane now, she's definitely much better, I'm just not sure if it's enough to justify picking her yet.

For the patch in general, I dislike how much they seem to want to encourage pushing and split pushing, I think it's really boring and annoying. They're also doing it badly, with the way heroes works split pushers either need to have really powerful escape or a heroic that makes them relevant to team fights. Otherwise the pushing aspect of the hero just doesn't accomplish enough and is too easily punished while they force their team to 4v5. No hero specific changes stood out that much besides nova. I was hoping/expecting a nerf to backdooring that didn't come, so that kind of sucks.



Backdooring is one of the things that can get a little annoying. On a only slightly unrelated topic, maps! which do you think is the best for high level play? Do you have a particular map you just enjoy playing on?

I think curse, garden, and dragon knight are all good for competitive games. DK can be a little funny with everyone just constantly rotating between shrines waiting for an advantageous fight, but that kind of situation is still tense and there's strategy in timing out the rotations so you pick up two sets of giants, so it's fine. Blackheart is annoying in general. It discourages fighting a lot and is kind of snowbally. There's a lot of problems with the map and I'm honestly not entirely sure how to fix it. Mines is really weird, half the time the game is decided by a level 4 fight. The combination of securing the early golem + having a level lead along with it is a bit much. But having a map that forces and emphasizes team fighting that early is kind of cool in itself, now that we have custom games and can draft around it.



Custom games isn't the only change this patch brings, as of this week servers are region locked, which means EU players cannot play with NA players, do you think this is going to impact professional play at all? Are there any teams particularly affected by this?

We already couldn't play them, even without explicit region locking. The system just wouldn't queue NA teams vs EU teams. I think the top 3 or so EU teams might be able to compete with good NA teams, but it's really hard to judge just from watching vods. But honestly even if we could play one side would have latency and that always sucks. I think we just have to write off international play until legit lans start happening.



mYInsanity looks super good right now, so its a shame we won't get to see them compete against top teams. One thing people are going to start asking soon, if they aren't already is "how to go pro" at heroes, its a question that always pops up when a game like this gets popular, so do you have any advice for those people?



Find people to play with, probably via the reddit groups, I'm not sure how competitive they are but that would at least get you into the community. Playing with people on voice chat is absolutely necessary. Solo queue is cancer in every moba and, for now, it's even worse in heroes because most people are very new to the game and communication and cooperation so crucial. The community is small enough that it's still very open and accepting, everyone is looking to grow it. Just start playing with people and be cool and if you get good it won't be that hard to get attention. The ideal thing though would be to get another group of 4 people who are dedicated and practice and take the game seriously with them. Your team is absolutely everything right now.



That's solid advice. One last question, to sate my own personal curiosity, do you still follow SC2 at all? Any thoughts of maybe playing it for fun again?





Not at all, I watched a bit of the stupid stephano petraeus swarmhost game because twitter was blowing up about it and obviously I still have a lot of friends who are involved in the game so I hear bits and pieces, but I have no interest in it and definitely won't be playing it again.



That's totally fair, that's it for questions from us, we really appreciate you taking the time to do this interview. Do you have anything you'd like to add? Any shoutouts?



Follow me on twitter, twitter.com/idra. I'm streaming on MLG now, mlg.tv/idra, though I've barely been streaming lately. I'd like to promise I'll do more soon but I'm kind of busy at the moment. There isn't much for the team just yet but there will be an announcement for us soon that Starcraft fans ought to find very exciting.



Well, that's all folks, thank you so much for the interview. We'll all be looking forward to that announcement!

