This week Esports Heaven had the pleasure to talk one of the best flex support free agents on the market, Dante "Dante" Zegveld. Formerly of Movistar Riders, Dante now is a part of the Dutch Overwatch World Cup team. I picked his brain on what the future could hold for him, his past in games, and where Doomfist fits into the metagame.

How are we doing today Dante? How are you this morning?

Hey, I'm pretty good thank you.

Talk to me about your history in games. Were you someone who played a bunch of games as a young child or did you start later on in life? What were some of your favorite games? Did you play them at a competitive level or just for fun?

I played a shitton of games when I was younger. I can't remember exactly when I started playing games, but it must have been as close to when my memories kick in as possible. Having older cousins that were playing games before I even knew what they were, got me into them from an early age. My favorites so far have been Wolfenstein: Enemy-Territory (W:ET) and Darkfall Online. When I played W:ET I didn’t even know about esports and Darkfall Online was just a small Indie MMO with a player hosted tournament here and there for in-game items.

After Darkfall I saw games like Starcraft 2 and League of Legends and I started playing more competitive titles, including Dota and CS: GO. I always was somewhat of a ladder hero doing pretty good in the games I played, but never played any on a competitive level.

I’ll start off by asking what is next for you personally? Coming from one of the strongest teams in Europe with wins at Go4 Online Cups and a solid 4th place finish at the TakeOver 2, what are some of your personally goals coming towards the end of 2017?

Personally what is next for me is finding a team and ideally with the new announcements that team would be playing in the OWL of course. That is something I really want to participate in. Besides that I think just participating in Season 1 Contenders would be the short term goal for now. After splitting we will not play in it with our Ex-Movistar Riders rooster.

I am sure your track records have all preceded you and your teammates have definitely a strong track records as free agents. I’m not asking for a leak, but have teams been in contact with you personally?

I have had a few people approach me, but I haven’t even gotten to a point of trialing with any of them at the moment. I took a little step back and have not really been actively looking since I wanted a week to rest, but I'm definitely motivated to set myself up with a good squad in the next few weeks.

The reason I ask is because, the more organizations drop their rosters, I am curious how these actions has affected the overall ecosystem of sponsorship in Overwatch. With the recent Overwatch League news, has there been more or less contact with sponsors?

Okay, so this is kinda tricky. There were for example some offers I got that were offers from strong rosters with good placings in Season 0 in EU, but they weren’t sponsored or teams with good names that were just building up a new squad without sponsors. Then I got offers from sponsored teams that result wise didn't do well at all lately and then I'm thinking “well what is next?”

I don’t want to join a team just for the pay if there is a stronger roster looking to bring me in, but at the end of the day I would like to have some financial stability as well of course. So, there has been definitely less contact with sponsors not necessary since OWL news but since a month or 1-2 back when organizations started dropping teams. And it’s kinda hurting good squads just like Cyclowns. They had a good team, they can’t get a good sponsors so they get picked apart instead.

At the end of the day people need financial stability if they want to fully invest their life into Overwatch. If the Overwatch League news helps with it, I don’t know. I don’t think so. A lot of it is still unknown and with only 7 orgs announced yet—of which none are in the EU and some don’t even have teams—a lot of players don’t really know what to expect from sponsors or orgs.

Speaking of teams, how are things going with the World Cup team?

It’s been going decent I would say. [We] started playing together Monday and did pretty well for the first day. Yesterday we kinda had a little bit worse of a day, in my opinion, but nothing that can’t be worked [on]. So, today we are gonna do some strat talks and try and get everyone more on the same line... Decide how we’re gonna do things in the future games and just generally practice as much as schedules from people allow us.

Being one of the few chosen, how does it feel to represent the Netherlands at the Overwatch World Cup? Is there a form of pride on the line for your country? If so, do you think that the same concept could apply to the Overwatch League and the geolocations that they have announced thus far?

I don’t necessarily feel pride to represent the Netherlands, but I’m thankful that people choose me and put faith in me to both play and help form the team. Besides that it’s just a very fun and good opportunity to play in a competitive environment with a new team and different players. For me personally I don’t care that much about geolocations. However I have had Dutch people PM me with supportive messages and just in general had a lot of contact with Dutch Overwatch fans on Twitter, Discord, or on my stream and that made me think that if not city based, geolocation at least has something going for it if you look at it country-based. There are a lot of countries in the EU, so I see potential there.

It’s always interesting to me to really pick the brains of pro players. With that in mind, what is your current mindset on the metagame and how do you think do Doomfist fits in it?

So to me, I love the dive meta. I know people think it’s stale and boring by now, but I’d rather play dive meta for an entire year than play triple/quad tank for 1 month. I didn’t play Doomfist after the nerfs yet and only when he just came out. He is a very burst heavy and mobile hero so I see him having a place in the current meta for sure. I think he will only enforce dive meta even more given his skill set and the way he threatens tanks. Throw a Discord Orb on the target Doomfist is going for and pretty much anything gets bursted down.

As Zenyatta, do you find yourself calling more for your teams or are you more focused on laying down supportive DPS from afar?

I definitely started calling more from when I switched from DPS to flex support back in January. I have been slowly improving on that but it can be really draining at times, especially when you are usually the priority target from the enemies dive and have to be in the best position possible at any time according to your teammates, their ultimates, the enemy ultimates, and lots of other variables.

So, in Movistar Riders I tried to balance it, so I do some calling, but i'm also focused on contributing as much as possible DPS-wise from the safest position possible. Besides that I was pretty vocal in the strategy talks we had as a team to get people to position around me in a way that would enable me to contribute more without just cowering away 24/7 and just generally setting up a game plan before fights even happen so that ingame I didn’t have to spend as much energy on that and could focus more on myself.

If you had to speculate, where do you think the support role could evolve to? Do you think more flex support players could off-role to DPS if need be?

I think healing is very important in Overwatch. The time to kill can be short at times but there are many mobile heroes that can for example just fight 24/7 with an Orb of Harmony on them if they aren’t fully focused down. Besides that I think the general theme we are gonna see is the hybrid supports as I like to call them. So, Zen and Sombra (and Ana when she had 80 dmg per shot R.I.P), that can contribute to both the healing and DPS of the team. I guess the new Lucio with the damage buff also fits in the category.

The interesting thing off these three is that Zen, Sombra and Lucio can heal while doing damage, instead of a Mercy or an Ana that has to choose between either. I don’t think flex support players will switch away from these kind of heroes anytime soon unless they nerf their damage output by a lot (and I really hope they don’t). But I do think a lot of flex support players could off role to DPS if need be given that they all require aim and a lot of flex support players or supports in general have played DPS in the past. At this point in time, the non-mechanical Mercy mains and Lucio aura-bots have kinda been rooted out of the top competitive scene I think.

Is there a support player you enjoy watching/studying or are inspired by?

I don’t necessarily have anyone I really like to watch/study over and over but there is definitely people that do interesting stuff, have good positioning and find new angles to spam their Zenyatta balls through. The first one that comes to mind would be Boombox for me. Besides that I just quickly look through what people do on occasion but I mostly learn new things from scrims against good teams. But in general people tend to kinda do the same over and over and it’s hard to come up with new things in Overwatch at the moment as a support player given how set the meta is.

In closing, I always ask the same question to everyone; what hooked you about Overwatch from the beginning? What keeps you, Dante "Dante" Zegveld, playing Overwatch day in and day out?

When I started playing Overwatch on release what hooked me was playing it with my friends. It felt a little bit similar to Wolfenstein: Enemy-Territory, given that it’s an objective, team based FPS. What keeps me playing is that compared to other shooters, I really like the speed of the game. I can run and gun and pull off all sorts of plays. [That] for me is a very natural way of playing FPS games as opposed to, for example, Counter Strike. That is also what keeps me—it’s just a very fun game at its core to play.

Joseph “Volamel” Franco has followed esports since the MLG’s of 2006. He started out primarily following Starcraft 2, Halo 3, and Super Smash Bros. Melee. He has transitioned from viewer to journalist and writes freelance primarily about Overwatch and League of Legends. If you would like to know more or follow his thoughts on esports you can follow him at @Volamel.

Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment.