Feel free to introduce yourself how you'd like.

Hello, I am Barento 'Razleplasm' Mohammed and I am the Assistant Coach of Team Dignitas EU.  

When did you get into League?

I don’t remember exactly the year. I remember Shyvana and Graves had just come out. So early Season 2 I think? I tried it initially and I didn’t like it… I thought Summoner’s Rift was too large, but I much preferred Twisted Treeline at the time.

What teams have you worked with in the past?

I was a volunteer analyst for Team8 and then I was the Head Coach for Chiefs Esports Club in Australia [OCE]. After that I joined Dignitas EU.

I was actually just about to ask how did you end up working with Dignitas EU?

Oh, Ram AKA 'Brokenshard' contacted me. They were looking for someone to cover for Froskuurin’s position because she got the opportunity to work as a full time caster in Australia for the LPL. With that open, they were looking and I was available.

When was this?

This was definitely before qualifiers. I think it was early June… or late May, I don’t remember.  

What’s the experience like working with Dig.EU and how would you compare it to both Team8 and Chiefs?

Well for Team8 since i was just a volunteer analyst I only really helped with pick & bans and Level 1s so I didn’t have a lot of contact with the players; I only talked to the coach along with the other analyst, Hermes, who is the current coach of RNG [Renegades, who recently qualified for the NA LCS]. With the Chiefs though, I came in as an analyst but I ended up taking over as the Head Coach. It’s really the same in terms of how I work with Dig EU now. With the Chiefs I worked with a lot of other analysts, whereas for Dig.EU, I work under Ram so it’s kind of a tag team deal.

You said for Team8 you didn’t work with the players but as the Head Coach for Chiefs you obviously did. So do you work with the players on Dig.EU?

Yeah of course.  

Are there any major differences between working with the players on Chiefs and Dig.EU, culture-wise maybe?

I guess for Dig.EU a big thing is that they’re a bunch of Danish kids and so they’re always talking in another language haha. The Oceanic guys are older… They take it kind of like a part time job since they go to University and they’re a lot older, and have more experience being a part of the Chiefs.

With Dig.EU you don’t really have that. They have previous challenger experience but not a lot of experience of going into a professional league, but there are a lot of cultural difference between the two.

You work remotely with each of those teams, what are the benefits and downfalls of working remotely?

I would love to work in person since you can have the personal touch. Like, immediately right off the bat, contacting somebody is ten times easier. One thing, for instance, is that when they’re doing bootcamps and I’m not there, it just takes forever for me to get across my ideas. They’re heard eventually but it’s easier for them to talk to each other outside of teamspeak. It’s just easier in person.  

Is there anyone involved with Dig.EU that you think deserves praise and attention for their contributions for you the team qualifying for the LCS?

Yeah definitely. Froskuurin was the assistant coach before me. She was there at the beginning so I don’t know how much people realize she helped at the beginning and before that was rng, who is I think the head analyst for PaiN gaming in Brazil. They both deserve a lot of praise here. There’s also praise for the players, they did a fantastic job.

Also Odee for sure. He’s put in so much support for the team; the amount of bootcamps he helped with, it’s pretty amazing.

How do you think Dig.EU will do in the LCS next season?

Hmm... to compare it to Origen, they had a lot of veteran players, kind of a Fnatic 2.0, with a little of Lemondogs in it and Amazing and some new blood. However, for Dig.EU, they’re basically all new blood... so I guess the immediate goal is to not be in danger of relegation, haha.  

So at least seventh place?

That’s the thing. I want to aim high. To aim high you have to be realistic about the steps you have to take, so I want to take this as a learning curve. I want to improve on the player’s experience, macro play, and work on any rough synergy issues that exist or may come up. In Spring Split I want us to warm up, and in Summer Split I want us to go hard. I think our team has so much talent and I think we’ll have a big support staff so there’s no reason to not aim high. Honestly, the aim is worlds of course but we’re going to take it step by step.  

Are you going to move into the house with the team or are you going to continue working remote?

For now that’s not 100% certain. The goal is for me to be at the house but we’ll see how things go from now until January.

So as the host for China talk, what regions do you watch as an analyst other than EU?

So I guess I just pay attention to EU, LPL, LSPL, NA… Oceania too since I like to check up on the Chiefs. I try to pay attention to GPL a lot. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there. I used to pay so much attention to Korea, but I don’t have a lot of time especially with LPL overlapping it so I just pay attention to SKT now. I used to pay attention to KOO but not lately.

So you said you watch GPL. In interviews with some Korean coaches they said they would watch GPL to get ideas for their teams. For example, Morgana top and the original conception of Blue Ezreal. Is that why you watch GPL?

Absolutely.There is a lot of experimentation you’ll see in developing regions/leagues as well, like LSPL or CBLoL right? For example there’s a game where HARK from OMD [in LSPL] played Master Yi mid. At first when I saw it, I thought this was dumb because he was going against Cho’gath who just demolishes Yi. But overall in the context of that game it made sense to me when I thought about it. The main thing to take away is the concept. Is he trolling? Is he just dumb? What’s his mindset? What’s the goal?

When you watch these smaller leagues like OCE, Brazil… You witness so many interesting concepts and even though these teams aren’t strong internationally, that has nothing to do with the concepts they bring about. They might do poor internationally due to raw talent or coordination. But concept of their draft phases, their level 1s, are universal. You can have good level 1s and draft phases or laning nuances in any region.  

Moving back to NA and EU a little bit, who do you think will win the finals of EU and NA?

I think Fnatic will win 3-2 over Origen. I’m actually tempted to say Origen as my initial hunch but I think Fnatic just works together super well as five so I want to give them the edge.

As for NA, hahaha. I don’t want to give the cop out answer ‘oh you know both teams are both equally good and on any given day...’ But I really think this is in the air. I think CLG will take it 3-2 but TSM has an equal chance of taking it too. All of these western teams in general, I think they used to be so scared to make a play to get back in the game. They can’t teamfight, they can’t split properly… They sit there and die. I do think the better western teams have fixed that issue so it’ll be interesting at worlds but we’ll see.

EDG got upset twice in the last few days, to LGD and iG. What are your thoughts on why this happened, and what do you think this means moving forward for worlds?

I think the loss to LGD was really significant because of LGD's growth. I actually think they’ve always been close to EDG, which is unfortunate because people seemed to have written them off a lot because of their season play and they misread the context of the season games, regardless of the fact that at one point they were in tenth place. When they knew how playoff brackets were seeded though they started to just destroy teams.

So when they went up against EDG it went down kind of how the spring split finals went. The series wasn’t even close actually this time around, i mean the games themselves were close and they came down to one good or bad teamfight and that speaks more to LGD than EDG. In comparison the loss to iG meant almost nothing because third place only really gives you circuit points so that set in itself was insignificant to me. If anything I think you can take away that LGD has surpassed them.

How do you expect NA and EU to match up against China, Korea and LMS this year at Worlds?

I think LMS will match up to NA really well actually. I’d love to see CLG and TSM against them. But if you see CLG and TSM match up against LGD or EDG or something, that won’t even be close and they’ll be screwed. I don’t think they’ll get past those teams at all, though I do think Fnatic can go far. How far? I don't know for sure... probably not past LGD. Maybe they can upset EDG and SKT, but that’s a very big maybe. Maybe 70-30, 65-35… That’s the only exception; western teams will lose to China and Korea.

What are your thoughts on the possibility that the patch to be played on Worlds might have almost no prior competitive play on it? To clarify, what are you thoughts about an unexplored patch being used for the final tournament of the 2015 Season?

I’m not clear, the patch with the juggernaut changes. Is that going to be at worlds?

Yeah they’re rolling that patch out because the champions who are getting those changes aren’t in the meta so it has a lower risk of dramatically changing the meta as a result.

See, that’s the worst mentality, especially if they run worlds with the juggernaut changes. You could have those champions just suddenly burst out into the meta without giving teams the chance or time to play it out. I’ll give an example: When we went against Denial, guess what? Gangplank just became available again. Our teams didn’t have practice against Gangplank but we rolled it out against them anyway.

So what would happen is that the teams who aren’t able to adapt would outright lose out. They’d be bad quality games. Another thing to consider is that you have players like Zztai who can pull out any new champs like Azir and play well, but not master, before everyone else. He'd be overtaken by midlaners like Rookie, JS, everyone else really... they’d just surpass Zztai in the end. In that case players who could adapt rather than players who could master would dominate if we just randomly roll out champion changes this often.

I believe that the best teams are the most skilled. What I mean by this is that the strongest teams should be the ones who are the smartest, the ones who master of the meta.

Do you follow any other Esports?

Oh yeah I follow fighting games in general, specifically Street Fighter, sometimes Smash Bros too. I just really love fighting games in general.

Do you have any shoutouts you want to give?

Shoutouts to Team Dignitas and the support staff, China Talk, and I guess my fans too, honestly. I don’t really know who would be a fan of me. Even I’m not a fan of me hahaha. And a shoutout to the Korean lunch I’m about to have.

Thank you for your time, and good luck with Team Dignitas EU.

Any time, thanks for having me.

If you enjoyed this interview, follow the author at @SirNoogen. You can also follow the interview subject at @Razleplasm.

Cover image courtesy of Jacob 'Brayll' Wolf.