Nomia wasn't the favorite to win the HGC, in fact, they weren't the favorite to defeat any team. Branded with the scarlet "Minor Region" label, maybe viewers and analyst had dismal hopes for the teams dive into multi-regional competitive play.
But Nomia proved that they are a team that shouldn't be underestimated. They had an amazing game 1 vs. Misfits and some say they deserved to win the entire series but lost due to some poor decision making. We talk with Nomia's assassin player, Liam "Arcaner" Simpson and get his oppinion on a variety of topics
So, a little background first: Where in Australia are you located? How did you get into esports, in general? Is HotS your first MOBA? When did you start seriously playing Heroes?
Arcaner: I live in Perth which is the capital of Western Australia. I started playimg HotS at the end of 2014 around the Rehgar patch. I started playing the game seriously at the start of 2016 around the time of Spring season where the international event was in Korea.
I got into esports basically by chance-- I enjoyed HotS so i grinded it until i got relevant in terms of Hero League MMR and when that happened, I started to play in competitive teams. This is my first competitive MOBA but I've played Smite casually. I never knew about League or DotA2 so i never played those games but i was always a fan of Blizzard games so I wanted to play HotS as soon as i got invited into Alpha.
Cool. Similarly, for all that I played Warcraft 3 to death and love Heroes, I never played League or Dota2. How is the competition in ANZ? Are you able to get regular games against decent opponents? Do you end up trying to play on the Asian servers to find better/different competition?
The competition in ANZ is not good. There are never more than two other teams for us to scrim and compete against and these teams always roster change each season so they don't improve and become consistent. It's also hard for us to get consistent scrims in each week. Teams prefer to scrim each other instead of vs'ing us and when we do find scrims there's a regularity in cancellations or stopping an hour into the scrim block.
So, overall, we have really bad regional practice and preparation for our international tournaments. We need more players to improve in our competitive scene and form better teams, but it'll take a long time for this to happen. We also can't scrim on other servers because of ping issues. The only server that half our team can scrim on, besides ANZ, is SEA... but SEA teams scrim and play HL on the Korean server. So it is unfortunate but we have to make do with what we have regionally and then look at our international tournaments as good opportunities for us to learn and improve.
The competition in ANZ is not good.
Ah. Tougher than I thought, then. That's rough. That said, everyone at Gosu was impressed with your game 1 win over Misfits. I especially called out your superlative Falstad play in that game. You picked Falstad in half of your games in Katowice. Is he a particular favorite of yours or do you just find him to be a solid pick in most situations?
Oh, thank you!
To explain the repetitive picks like Falstad and Zeratul: going into the tournament, we didn't prepare drafts or expect much of our performance. We didn't set performance goals. We just wanted to set a standard/bar for us to work from and improve against. We obviously wanted to play well and we hoped to make the Misfits games go to level 20 and not just get stomped by them.
So, without preparation, we decided we'd play the heroes we felt comfortable playing recently. Zeratul is FAT94's favourite hero and, at the time, we had a lot of success with and I felt comfortable playing Falstad as a hero to both prolong games that we are behind in and to close out games we are ahead in. But despite these heroes just being our main comforts, I think they're both extremely strong picks for the tournament.
Makes sense. Looking at game 3: You have first pick, so Misfits picks Dragon Shire. There are standard bans of Tassadar and Malfurion. You first pick Zeratul for Fat and Misfits responds by taking away your Falstad and adding Dehaka. You come back with your Ragnaros and Robadobah's Varian. In the face of two global Shrine-grabbers and good waveclear, you load up for the teamfights. Was that your approach there or were you looking at a different strategy?
We were entirely reliant on teamfighting comps and maps in order for us to do well against the top teams. So firstly, Dragon Shire is a really bad map for us and a really good map for Misfits. I knew they'd run Nazeebo like they usually do for Dshire. We probably should've banned it. But it was really complacent and unwise for us to just let them take Falstad and Dehaka on Dshire. We shouldn't have FP'd Zera and instead should've picked Dehaka.
But, basically, we never helped ourselves to be able to win game 3 of each series - we didn't have the practice on other comps besides our main comfort picks - and we were really weak on non-teamfighting maps.
That's understandable in not having a ton of experience against other good teams and their strategies on different maps. You followed that with Gul'dan for waveclear and the only Auriel pick of the entire tournament. She's fallen out of favor in recent times in NA and EU. Did you think the close engages you were going to attempt would give her enough Hope to give you the sustain you needed? Or is she a comfort pick for Vanilla?
Auriel really sucks, but we picked it anyway. We thought she'd be OK in the team fights but Misfits had 2 globals, so they just snowballed. We got really out drafted that game.
Yeah. That happens against Misfits. In your second series, you again win the first game, this time against Team 8, responding to their opening selections of Rag and Li Ming with the backline disruption of Anub'arak. You end up on Jaina with kind of an unusual build, veering away from the common Frostbolt approach to an almost sustain damage approach (Lingering Chill, etc.) Was that your intent? Was that something that had worked for you before?
I just copied Mene's Jaina build, but he usually goes Q range on 1 as his only Q talent. I like both Frostbolt range and Lingering Chill, but I don't like playing Jaina if I go OOM, so I just like Mene's Arcane Intellect choice sometimes. Like, you can go Frost Armor or Arcane Intellect, and Winter's Reach or Lingering Chill, but Frostbitten stays the same.
shields just make original healthpool differences between a squishy and tanky hero redundant
On game 2, after Team 8 goes Rag, Gul'dan, Rehgar vs. your Malfurion and Muradin, you ban Medivh. What was the thought process there? They're not presenting a real dive comp that would take full advantage of Force of Will. Were you just trying to deny Glaurung since they'd already banned Zeratul?
They do a lot of setup comps sort of similar to us, where they go Zera/Rag or Medivh/Rag, so we wanted to just ban out Glaurung's Medivh most games. But in that game, I think we mis-picked. We didnt play well with Tyrael. We scrimmed them a lot the day before the tournament, so we knew what sort of comps were hard to deal with.
Oh, interesting. OK, outside of the Clash, what are your thoughts on the current meta? It appears to be more diverse than, say, last year. Do you agree? Some pros in NA have been complaining about the prevalence of shields (Tassadar, Zarya.) Do you find that to be a problem as a regular Assassin player?
I think the Katowice meta (Lucio patch) was a bit diverse. The meta always changes throughout the tournament, because naturally you can't play the same comp over and over or else people adapt and counter-draft. This was pretty evident when the EU teams, towards the end of the tournament, started picking lots of kill comps with Chromie vs Greymane matchups. I agree with the complaining about shield heroes but i think the main problem is heroes which prolong different areas of the game.
So things like shields just make original healthpool differences between a squishy and tanky hero redundant; it becomes annoying to deal with and hard to adapt to in teamfights. But I think the heroes which prolong the duration of a game, like Ragnaros with his trait on forts/keeps is worse than the shielding problem. I think it is so obnoxious that Rag's trait lines up with each objective. In our games vs Team 8, they played a lot of Rag and whenever we'd win an objective on game two on Infernal Shrines, for example, we never got ahead because they'd just counter it with Molten Core.
The interesting thing about Tassadar in that tournament is that he's first-banned so much that teams don't prepare to use him or practice him, so when it wasn't banned teams didn't even pick it.
Heh. That's true. OK. I think that's about all I have. Anything you'd like to add that I didn't cover?
I'd just like to make a shoutout to my team, Nomia, for playing a good tournament and finally starting to perform more like a major region, instead of a minor region.
Shoutout to Misfits and Team 8, both of whom I look up to and have a lot of respect for; especially Nurok from Misfits.
And lastly, thank you to those people who sent kind messages about our performance. We will look forward to Sweden and the Mid-Season Brawl.
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