Interview with Rise Nation’s Phaz

An interview with Kyle ‘Phaz’ Dornian about his team, upcoming tournaments, and more.

Courtesy of Rise Nation

I had an opportunity to chat with Kyle ‘Phaz’ Dornian, one of Rise Nation’s support players.

“Phaaaz, how are you doing man?”

I’m doing great :)

“In a few sentences, explain to the people that might not know Phaz, who you are.”

I’m Phaz, I’m the Lúcio player and Captain for Rise Nation. I started off around 7 months ago with our first team name being ‘Paragon’ then ‘Gecko OW’ which finally led to us getting signed by Rise Nation the day before the Overwatch Open.

“How has it been competing with Rise Nation’s Overwatch team over the past few months?”

Really good, I knew in the first few months of scrimming/doing weeklies this is something I wanted to do at a high level and actually doing it is basically living the dream.

“Your team has consistently been getting better week in and week out since forming, and the results prove it. What do you believe are some of the key reasons for this improvement?”

I think the main thing is scrimming all the time, I have been for at least 40 hours a week since the first few weeks of Overwatch with Desro. When you scrim as often as we do and continue to against better and better teams the results are bound to come. I think the biggest difference in our play came when we got our coach Winlogon. He’s been Desro and I’s friend for years and was a sub for the team a few times, but when we were looking into finding a new coach, he sort of fit into it perfectly through his extensive raid leading on Final Fantasy and his many years of following other esports. He records all our games and helps a lot identifying issues in game or during vod review. We got him a few weeks before the Overwatch Open Playoffs and haven’t looked back.

“In your opinion, what has been the biggest hurdle so far, and how have you overcame it?”

The biggest hurdle thus far has been being a team that no one knows / that didn’t play beta and try to build relationships and a name for ourselves. Early on it was really hard to find decent scrims and find decent players to fill roles we desperately needed early on. If you check our gosugamers ‘Player History’ you’d see how many different people me and Desro have played with over the last 7 months and how difficult it was for us to really have constant growth back then with how bad the practice was. As soon as the roster started coming together, we started winning which then led to us building relationships with better and better teams, which leads to better scrims and now here we are. That’s why I have a lot of respect and am grateful for those few teams that gave us a shot back in the day because if it wasn’t for them I don’t know where we’d be today.

“You guys have the MGA LAN in London coming up in a couple weeks, and then immediately after you’ll be heading to Las Vegas for the MLG tournament. How excited are you and the team to be playing in these?”

Super excited. I’m hoping to surprise some people and upset some of the great competition we have at both events. For MSI when we first pushed that payload to beat Liquid it was one of the best feelings ever knowing that all that grinding we’ve done over the last few months has finally resulted in something as huge as winning a super competitive qualifier with a lot of great teams and winning a trip to a four team 75k lan. Which as big as being the only NA team at an EU event is, I’m even more excited for MLG because I think for all of us see it as an opportunity to prove ourselves to NA and hopefully solidify our rank among the other strong regional teams. I just hope for both events we go out there, give it our best and represent the region in a way that would make people proud.

“Are you guys doing anything differently to prepare for them?”

Not really, with it being a brand new patch we’re watching vods more often to see picks / how to play the patch and before the event we’ll be watching a lot of vods of the other teams to see what / how they play and how we can beat it.

“Now to get away from some of the seriousness… I always see xretzi changing his name in The OW Discord to things like ‘xspaghetti’ or some other funny name lol — Is he the biggest memer on the team? If not who is?”

Retzi has some good memes, but I’m probably the biggest and BEST memer we have.

“Lastly, I know we like some of the same music, what’s your favorite song to hype you up right now?”

Watch Out by 2 Chainz has been our theme song since the Overwatch Open and we quote it all the time.

“Alright Kyle, well thanks for joining me for this interview and I look forward to watching you guys compete over the next few weeks. Best of luck to Rise Nation!”

Thank you for the interview and thank you to Rise Nation and my teammates for making this all possible. Hopefully we can make you all proud these next few weeks.

Kyle ‘Phaz’ Dornian and Rise Nation will be competing in the Masters Gaming Arena 2016 tournament from December 7th-8th, and then MLG Vegas from December 16th-18th.

You can follow Phaz and Rise Nation on Twitter below