Castaway: "In Dota, changing roles is astronomically hard"

Neon Esports announced their departure from the Dota 2 scene on June 27th after a hectic year. The organization had mixed success in online tournaments and Games of the Future, but narrowly missed out on million-dollar tournaments, such as PGL Wallachia, and Elite League Season 2.

We caught up with Travis "Castaway" Waters to talk about his feelings on playing ranked in Southeast Asia, how it compares to Europe, and if he is sticking to his role.

Castaway: "In SEA it's awful to play position five in ranked"

Castaway began his Dota 2 career as a midlaner but eventually transitioned into support when he joined Neon. Travis has enjoyed his newfound role, as it focuses more on shot calling and seeing the big picture.

Practicing and improving as a hard support isn't easy though, as saving allies, breaking smokes, and making good calls don't show up in your stat screen like your KDA does.

"I would say the things to improve as a support are much more arbitrary and out of the box. Not like your stats. It's not like, "My last hits are good. It's 1 plus 1 is 2."  Support is like, "What are the enemy going to do right now? What is my team going to do right now? What state of the game is it in? Should I block a smoke? Should I make a smoke? Where do I go? Where do I position?" And you have to do all of these things and have high impact and perfect spell casters. Because you don't have networth, right? You don't have networth to be strong. You just have your brain and your basic abilities at that point.And so on and so forth. So I think it's a lot more theoretical support if you approach it to the game, at least at this level."

Another thing hindering Castaway's practice is that playing support in pub games is notoriously difficult. The role is designed to..well, support other roles, and if your allies lag, it can be impossible to win the game. He admitted to the importance of ranked play, not for the practice, but the high MMR teams require from their players.

"For grinding ranked. I mean as position five, for me it's so difficult. Because the position five you play in competitive, and the position five you play in ranked. It's like the ranked one is like sewer water. And the other one is like bottled water. The one is like this product that's polished, and you fit your team. You're a cog in the wheel, it's ideal. That's the one part I say I would not like about the role, is in ranked at least in SEA, I'm not sure about Europe, but in SEA it's a bit awful to play position five in ranked, to be honest. That's why you're watching a lot of replays. It's just better than playing ranked. In my opinion. But then you need a higher rank to get a team. "

Travis will likely stick to support in his next team

Neon had four to-three finishes at Major Closed Qualifiers. (Credit: Neon Esports).

Due to his issues with practicing as hard support, I wondered if Castaway would consider changing roles to something else. Many professional players have tried out another role in their career, with results as varied as Ammar "ATF" Al-Assaf's unimpressive stint as a carry and Alexander "TORONTOTOKYO" Khertek's current success as a support.

Despite his grips with the role, Travis enjoys it and highlights the risks of becoming a core player.

"I like position five, I'll stick with it for a while. In Dota, changing roles is astronomically hard, it's not just hard but it's very risky for your career. The more Dota progresses, the more things there are for each role, more nuances. More things you only know when you spam that role. So you can't just willingly change roles. It's important even at my level to have a comprehensive understanding of all the roles in the game. For example, you know what the position four wants to do, the position one, and so on. But I don't think that translates directly to the game. I think it's very risky. For me, I'll just stick with position four and five. Because those are my most played roles in the last 14 months or something like that. And I enjoy it. It's a very fulfilling role, position five. Not in the rankings, But in competitive, it's very fulfilling."

Check out the rest of the interview with Castaway in parts one and three.

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