With the Carbon Invitational starting on February 21st, I sat down with Jack “Shake” Kaplan support player for Complexity to discuss the Carbon Invitational, general view for supports, and the departure of Harbleu.

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First I must ask; We have Jeff Kaplan at Blizzard Entertainment, We have Jason Kaplan of ESL, and yourself, Jack Kaplan. Is there a “Konspiracy” going on here in Overwatch?

Apparently there's a lot of Kaplan's in gaming. There's also a Kaplan who plays Call of Duty professionally. No relation to any of them, just a coincidence, hahaha.

Now, Complexity’s track record precedes them with quite the history in a slew of other esports. Coming from other team’s such as Gale Force eSports and Code 7, how has Complexity been?

Complexity has been awesome; they helped us when we were at our lowest point as a team. Our manager and the general manager of Complexity both do a great job and make it easy for us players to focus on the game.

How are you enjoying the current state of Overwatch? The meta seems pretty flexible -- any thoughts on what the strongest composition is currently?

I think things are kind of in flux right now. The latest patch shook things up a little bit; the meta has definitely been less stagnant since the patch, which is a good thing. I don't feel like there is a "meta" comp right now. Teams are running a lot of different heroes in different situations and on different maps, which is great. Maybe in a few weeks certain comps will be the strongest, but for right now I think a lot of teams are still feeling things out and running heroes that their players are most comfortable on.

Complexity has always been quite creative with your compositions, always bringing new brews to the table. With the current meta landscape, do you guys feel like this could be your patch to excel?

Right now we're in the middle of roster changes, so it's been hard for us to experiment much with comps. We're really focused on trying to fill out our roster so we can play with the best players possible moving forward.

Anything you’d care to spill the beans on? Any crazy compositions from you and the Tjo boys have, coming into the Carbon Invitational?

Not right now. Our team can play a lot of heroes at a high level, so we can always pull some things out of our hat, but at the moment we aren't running anything as offbeat as our old Sombra composition’s.

Speaking of the invitational, it’ll be nice to see you guys play against NA’s finest. Do you guys feel pretty confident going into the Carbon Invitational?

I think we're fairly confident. We haven't scrimmed most of the teams in the tournament, so it's hard to say for sure, and as I said, we're working on solidifying our roster right now, so our practice hasn't been optimal lately and our chemistry with new players is sub-par. That said, I'm still confident we can perform well in the tournament.

We have seen in the past Ana players finding success on a multitude of other heroes. Being an Ana player yourself, are we going to see you more on flex position or are you sticking to her?

I've been playing support since beta, so I'm comfortable on most support heroes. I'm very confident on Zenyatta and Mercy and will probably play both of them in certain situations during the tournament.

Now, we have seen quite a bit of Zenyatta out of you. Any chance for more of the cyborg monk? And what are your thoughts on the state Zenyatta is in?

I'll probably play some Zenyatta in our matches. I think he has a place on some maps, but he still isn't as strong as Ana in most situations. You give up quite a lot of healing when you replace Ana with Zen, so you need to have an aggressive composition, or a composition with a lot of low HP heroes for him to be viable.

Any changes you’d like to see made to any of the supports?

I think Ana still needs some tweaking. I'd like to see the grenade debuff on enemy targets be reworked so that it reduces healing by 50% instead of blocking it entirely. I think the last few patches have all changed the support meta for the better. I'm confident Blizzard will keep making improvements going forward.

Dialing it back a bit, Complexity has just taken a hit with Harblue’s departure. How has finding your 6th man been so far?

Harbleu is a really strong player and was a lot of fun to play with. He brought a lot of energy to our team. That said, we understand why he wanted to step down and we're confident we can find a replacement who will fill his shoes. Right now, we're still in the process of trying people out, so I don't expect us to perform as well as we did over the last few months, but I'm confident we'll be able to get there in a few weeks and hopefully continue improving as a team.

It seems like at the beginning of almost every esport, teams go through multitudes of roster swaps and changes. Why do you think that is? Any thoughts on that?

I think there's a lot of reasons for that. When a game is brand new players are naturally going to improve at different rates. The best player a month after launch probably isn't still going to be the best player in a year. Some players can pick up a game quickly but may plateau early. Other players might take time to learn but have a higher ceiling. There's a lot of other reasons that teams make changes but that's probably why it's more common early on.

Last but not least, I’ve heard that you guys are quite popular to scrim against. In all of your scrims, who's someone who’s impressed you the most? Who is NA’s best kept secret?

The player who's stood out the most in recent scrims would definitely be Dafran who plays for Selfless. He's a recent pickup for them, but he's very talented and has made their team stronger, so he's definitely someone to watch going forward.

Any sponsor plugs or a comment for the fans?

Shout out to Complexity and our sponsors for supporting the team through it all! And of course thanks to all my fans and those who cheer for our team! I hope you guys bear with us over the next few weeks while we rebuild our roster, we'll be back in form in no time.

Interview written and conducted by: @Volamel

Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment and Complexity Gaming