After retiring from the League of Legends pro scene, Marcus “Dyrus” Hill has now moved on to other things. Several of those things include being an analyst/caster for Overwatch as well as being a full time streamer on Twitch and content creator on Youtube. We caught up with him at Blizzcon to ask him some questions about his experience with these things so far.

How have you been enjoying Blizzcon so far?

Dyrus: It’s been pretty cool. I was here at the last Blizzcon and the difference is they are pouring more into Overwatch. There’s a very amazing Overwatch stage they said they are releasing more content for World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm and a bunch of other games.

Out of all of those what are you most excited for?

Dyrus: Currently it’s Overwatch because I’ve played a lot of the game. I had two top 500 accounts in season one. Right now I have two master accounts because I haven’t been playing that much but after the League season I’ll be able to play some more Overwatch.

So you’ve been covering Overwatch, can you tell me a bit about that?

Dyrus: My current role is reporter. There was one or two segments where I was gonna be on the desk although I didn’t really want to intrude too much with my game knowledge so I kind of toned it down and just went with whatever all the other casters and analysts knew about the players. If I did have to go back as an analyst on the desk again I would probably give more of a solo queue point of view as a player who has played in high elo and has played very good Overwatch but maybe not at a pro level because when you watch the games as a solo queue player you look at it like “why are they not playing these heroes and doing these things?”. You get those answers from certain pro players and analysts themselves and it’s been a good learning experience. Other than that, I’ve been doing casual interviews with a couple of the players like Ster, Seagull, Poke and IDDQD. IDDQD was a really nice guy and probably one of the best interviews I’ve gotten. He provided me with a lot of information when it came to scrims, top players, if you were to put players on a team from all over the world which would he choose. I learned a lot from that.

At this event a couple of the hosts that introduced the beginning of Blizzcon 2016 were talking about esports and the general consensus was Korean dominance and it seems to apply to Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch. Heroes of the Storm have the two Korean teams Ballistix and MVP Black both believed to be very strong picks and additionally in Overwatch South Korea just 3 - 0 beat Russia. Talk to me about the Korean infrastructure and what causes them to have that level of dominance in other E-sports outside of League of Legends?

Dyrus: I can’t say so much for other E-sports but specifically for Overwatch this world cup is more of an All Star match where all the fans are just voting for their favorite player, not necessarily the best players of each region. Even though South Korea is very good at Overwatched, they voted in possibly the best roster that they could have and a lot of the other regions I couldn’t say the same. Some rosters could have had better players in specific roles, though I won’t say who. I just want people to understand it’s more of a show match. From what I saw, these players didn’t have a lot of practice together.

The reason why South Korea is so good at Overwatch by putting these players together from different teams is because South Korea will play the same comp and meta in solo queue and in scrims no matter what so what happens is everyone knows their role, it’s kind of like they are playing solo queue but they mesh together. They have a coach that can shotcall that’s really good at Lucio and has been getting a lot of praise. Also, two of their tank players (which are basically the core of any Overwatch team) are the best at their roles. I think it will be more accurate to see these teams play against each other on their current teams. Still not taking anything away from South Korea, they dominated this event and are definitely deserving all the praise they are getting.

Image Courtesy of Lolesports

Let’s move away from Blizzcon now and talk about your new focus. You’ve retired from competitive League of Legends and are now focused on streaming and being a content creator and you’ve been pumping out a lot of content on your Youtube channel putting a video out every couple of days. Other than that you are focusing on your twitch channel. Do you have any other plans coming up for your Youtube channel?

Dyrus: I do plan to upload one video every two days ideally as consistently as possible especially for the last two months because of revenue. It’s getting near winter season where there’s more Christmas ads and Thanksgiving ads and such. That isn’t really the focus. The focus is more about just being consistent and maybe I’ll throw in some different vlogs or videos where maybe I do some cooking or some painting, something that my fans would want to see besides stream highlights. I might potentially be playing more Overwatch. Besides the Youtube schedule there’s also the stream schedule which will probably become more strict by waking up earlier and streaming League and then maybe Overwatch later. Those are my current plans.

Cool! Now let’s talk about LoL. About a week ago the League of Legends world championship ended and North America had a decent showing with Cloud 9 making it to quarter finals. Team SoloMid however didn’t make it out of group stages. As a spectator, what do you think ended up going wrong for Team SoloMid?

Dyrus: Besides TSM I think NA had a much better showing than last year although group stages only show so much. Best of 5s are basically the things that matter. TSM wasn’t able to perform to their fullest extent and even then we don’t know if they would have won. I saw that Biofrost was a rookie so his first time at worlds obviously wasn’t going to perform up to the veteran kind of par but I feel like Doublelift had some hiccups during worlds where he’s a veteran player who kind of needs to lead Biofrost and he did something kind of similar to me but not as bad. I wasn’t able to lead Santorin as the veteran player and I wasn’t able to lead my team as a veteran player. From that point I realised that this wasn’t going to work for me and I gotta stop and maybe take a break. I feel Sven and Hauntzer and Bjerg all played amazing. Hauntzer might have choked on one game but Sven and Bjerg played really really well. If they keep practicing hard going for next year I think they will definitely have an even better shot than before. Only time will tell.

How have the fans been treating you here at Blizzcon?

Dyrus: I haven’t been able to see too many fans because I’ve been mostly in the back doing stuff for Blizzard. I did hold a fan meet earlier for about one hour and a good amount of people showed up. I figured I’d do it for those who really wanted to see me. Fans have been really nice. When I talk to the other pro players and other casters and analysts they’ve been really nice so it's been a really good experience for me socially.

That’s pretty awesome. Finally, do you have any last words you would like to share with anyone?

Dyrus: Thank you to all who watch me, my viewers and my fans. Hope you have a good one.