I majored in economics at UC Berkeley and right now, I am basically full-time Heroes of the Storm. However, I am currently finishing up part-time work as a research data analyst on the side (excel stuff). My work hours are very flexible and I can work at home as well, so it does not interfere with Heroes at all. In a few months from now, I will most likely be going completely full-time Heroes of the Storm.

And yes, I pretty much grew up playing video games. Before Heroes, I played Dota and Dota 2 for 7 years at a very competitive level. I was consistently top 200 in NA rankings in Dota 2, and played with many of the players who are now established pros in the scene today. I also played StarCraft 2 for around 4 years. I was a Grandmaster with both Terran and Protoss.

I initially discovered Heroes of the Storm when some friends of mine (KawaiiRice, Pandajigu, miwa, Ursadon, and myself) wanted to install it and try it out for fun. We started back in Alpha, sometime around November 2014. We had a lot of fun playing it and we quickly started playing against high ranked players on Hotslogs/pro players in Quick Match. We did pretty well against them, and I thought that I could become very good at this game, especially with my extensive MOBA background. Some of my friends thought the same way, and they are also well known in the Heroes community now.

At the start of my competitive career, I was in a team with my previously mentioned group of friends, all of us started playing Heroes at the same time and wanted to play more competitively. We called ourselves “Looking 4 Team” and we did fairly well in one of the first tournaments we entered (NexusChamps HPL Season 2 Qualifier), going 2-3 against Cloud 9 Vortex, who was a powerhouse at the time.

Afterwards, Jintae from Cloud 9 Vortex went back to League of Legends and they held mass tryouts for his spot. At that point, several members from L4T including myself tried out for the spot. I made it pretty far in the tryouts, even beating the previously undefeated SMG (now Tempo Storm) 2-0 in a tournament during my tryouts, but in the end the spot was given to k1pro. At that time, I looked for the next best option, and ended up joining Barrel Boys (now Complexity).

I played with Barrel Boys for several months, and we got second in pretty much every tournament (with Tempo Storm getting first place). Eventually, iDream and k1pro went to C9 Maelstrom, and Cloud 9 Vortex was completely restructured. I was offered a spot for Cloud 9 Vortex at that time, and due to personal and sponsorship reasons, I decided to accept, despite knowing that Barrel Boys would be a stronger team than the new Cloud 9 Vortex for at least a good while.

I played with Cloud 9 Vortex for several months, and helped improve the team from a new five man roster into a pretty cohesive unit that was a strong name in the scene. Very recently, Cloud 9 Maelstrom approached me and offered me a spot on the team as the melee assassin and to tryout as the shotcaller. During my time on Cloud 9 Vortex, I had multiple other offers from other teams but always refused them. However, the Cloud 9 Maelstrom offer was different in that I was friends with most of the team already and had a great deal of confidence in the mechanical skill of the players. I also did extremely well shot calling in Heroes of the Dorm, and was often the voice that made the hardest in game decisions on Cloud 9 Vortex, so I wanted to try to have a more vocal role on whatever team I am playing on. Because of those reasons, I accepted the offer and am now on Cloud 9 Maelstrom.

Yes, ever since I learned about the competitive scene in Heroes, I always wanted to join Cloud 9. I was already a fan of Cloud 9 in games like Dota 2, League of Legends and Hearthstone before I even started playing Heroes. Like I mentioned before, I tried out for C9 Vortex way back when I first started playing Heroes in December 2014. Later on, I also left Barrel Boys to join the reformed Cloud 9 Vortex. That was actually a fairly big factor in my decision to leave Barrel Boys for Cloud 9 Vortex.

The recent results don’t really affect me mentally. It has only been a few weeks since the roster swap, and we barely scrimmed for a week before going into those tournaments. Furthermore, there were also role swaps along with the roster swaps so we are still in a period of adjustment. Ultimately, the goal is to win Blizzcon, and these first initial tournaments are not too big of a deal. I believe the roster swap was made in order to strengthen the Cloud 9 Maelstrom roster as much as possible going into Blizzcon. I think that the change did exactly that, and I fully believe that we have the players and the ability to defeat Tempo Storm. It won’t be easy, and likely won’t happen right away, but we have a good grasp of our weaknesses and are actively working to fix them.

Furthermore, right now, we are still not completely used to each other, and our team synergy is nowhere 100% yet in terms of coordination and communication. I’d say we are playing at around 60-70% at best in these recent tournaments. Once we have a bit more time to practice together, I think we will have much stronger showings and be able to truly challenge tempo storm.

In terms of hero roles, I guess I am more or less the flex player on the team. For the majority of the time, that will mean I play the melee assassin or one of the ranged assassins but there are also cases where I will be on a specialist, second support, or second tank. I actually was a very good ranged assassin player, and often played it before I moved onto melee assassins, but it seems like noone knows I play ranged assassins as well haha. As for tanks and supports, I often play many types of heroes in hero league and can confidently play these heroes when needed. In that particular game though, we foolishly tried a strategy that we never practiced before in a scrim, and we gave a bad showing due to that

I was pretty confident in my team. It is true that two players on the team(Suppy and Ultimated) did not ever play Heroes before until the dorm event was announced, but once they picked it up they showed that they had very solid mechanical skill in the game. Even amongst pros, I was confident that I was one of the best in terms of game knowledge and decision making, so I was confident in our strategies and shot calling going into the tournament. With great mechanical players and solid shotcalling, I knew we had a good shot at winning. That being said, We had a disadvantage in the fact that we could only play for 1-2 hours maximum per day, so we had a lot less practice time than most other dorm teams. We definitely were worried about losing to some of the stronger teams, namely University of Washington and ASU.

That was the case because my parents aren’t very supportive of gaming, they are very stereotypical Asian parents who want me to be working at a job. They actually have found out about it by now, but there was very little reaction from them. At the very least, they seem to be a bit more tolerant about my constant gaming and the occasional flight to a tournament event.

Short term goal is to get team synergy with Cloud 9 Maelstrom completely down and win Blizzcon when it arrives. Long term goal is and has always been to be the absolute best in the world, so to become the undisputed best Heroes team in the world.

Haven’t thought much about coaching, but that’s kind of what my YouTube channel is for, and I definitely intend to keep going with that. I will probably look into more personal coaching later on as well. I’m also interested in casting, but have not gotten an opportunity to do so yet. If I had an opportunity to be an analytical caster for some event, I would probably be interested in trying it out, as long as it doesn’t interfere with me competitively playing in events.

I actually started making high level Dota 2 jungle guides on YouTube for fun before I switched to Heroes, and my Dota 2 videos were very well received. I hear they have actually gotten fairly popular after I switched to Heroes, which was cool considering how saturated Dota 2 content on YouTube is. I started making Heroes videos in much the same way. I made them for fun and educational purposes, as I knew instructional videos from the highest level of play would be something people would likely want to see. I will always put my competitive play as the most important priority, but I do try to make a video once every week or so.

Recently, I haven’t made many videos due to the roster swap and also real life obligations (had to move apartments, big hassle) but all of that is over with now, so expect more videos soon! Make sure to check out YouTube.com/FanHeroesoftheStorm.

In terms of game content, one thing I would really like is for them to stop removing Unstoppable on all the heroes. I think that the Unstoppable timing window, on a mechanical level, is something that separates good players from great players, and adds skill ceiling to the game. In the past, being able to consistently dodge Tyrael’s Heroic (Judgement) with Unstoppable on Valla’s E, or negate a stun with good timing on Illidan’s Q are things separate great players from good players. They removed it from Valla a long time ago, and now have removed it from a lot of heroes this patch. I would be fine with them nerfing unstoppable by making the timing window much shorter, and thus having to perfectly hit a frame in order to achieve it (or something like that), but straight up removing it lowers the skill ceiling of these heroes, and because of that is a bad way to go about nerfing the heroes in my opinion.

In terms of support for the competitive scene, I think Blizzcon was a good start, and would love to have something like a LCS, or even just more opportunities like Blizzcon, where teams from around the globe compete in a tournament to see cross regional play from the strongest teams in each region.

Shoutout to all of the fans who watch us, especially the Twitch chat people who stick up and root for me every time they watch =D! Shoutout to Cloud 9 and all of our sponsors. You can find out more about me by checking out my youtube: YouTube.com/FanHeroesoftheStorm, and following me on Twitter @FanHOTS.