Fusion Gleebglarbu Interview Transcript (Part 1: Time on TSM)

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Question: The first place I wanted to start was the circumstances of your joining [TSM].

Gleebglarbu: I was contacted to try-out. I don’t remember the exact circumstances but basically Turtle messaged me asking if I wanted to try out and of course I said yes. We began with a few scrim sets against Cloud9 and those went pretty well we won every single match. And afterwards, I also had to talk to Regi for a while and basically explain my situation since at the time I was still in high school. I had to finish my final semester to graduate. I explained my circumstances and then I got a call from Regi saying that I would be playing and that’s pretty much what happened.

Question: Were their any candidates for the support position other than you and Xpecial?

Gleebglarbu: I’m not entirely sure. I think that it was just me and Xpecial. I know that there definitely were other supports who wanted to try out and tried to set that up but to my knowledge I was the only one who was trying out.

Question: Xpecial is considered by many fans and commentators to be the best support in NA history. It must have been a big deal to step into his shoes like that. What was it like for you? Do you think there was any extra pressure?

Gleebglarbu: Yeah I think there was a lot of pressure. He’s been one of the best supports in the League scene since the beginning so there was defintiely a lot of pressure in performing and living up to those expectations.

Question: What did TheOddOne bring to the table as a communicator? In a Facebook post, you mentioned that the original scrims were played with him rather than Amazing. I believe you made a few comments about his communication skills. He’s had a reputation in the community for being more of a quiet player and someone who just listens to his solo lanes.

Gleebglarbu: Well, first off he’s has so much competitive experience since he’s been on the team so long. He’s had so much competitive experience and he’s done so well at so many different LAN tournaments. I’d say he just knows how to communicate in-game really well. He mostly just says important information and doesn’t say anything that doesn’t need to be said. He’s very concise and doesn’t say anything that doesn’t need to be said. During the try-out period, this made him really easy to work with. It was easy to set-up things like jungle invades.

Question: I noticed that during your play [on TSM] you would sometimes come through with periods of strong play but this was marred by long periods of inconsistent or weak play. What do you think was the cause for this or would you disagree and say that you were a consistent player?

Gleebglarbu: I think during my time on TSM the games were pretty consistent. There were times where I played exceptionally better than average or exceptionally worse. But I feel like those were usually games where the whole team was doing well or the whole team was doing poorly. Also it has a lot to do with what teams we were matched up against. During the early portion of the split there was a vast skill difference between most of the teams. Depending on who we were playing it could be a game where we could either play standard and win or it could be a game where we were just outclassed at the time.

Question: So talking about that there was a time on Summoning Insight where TSM had taken heavy criticism. A lot of TSM players disagreed with it. One of the two particular stats they brought up at the time was that TSM had a very strong record against the bottom tier tiers like coL, EG, or Crs at the time but struggled against the top teams. It didn’t really look like a coincidence. Do you think this was just a coincidence or there were underlying reasons as to why it happened?

Gleebglarbu: I think it just had to do with the overall strengths of the rosters at the time and how people were adjusted coming into the split. I think that coming into the beginning of the split CLG and Dig were the two strongest teams at the start along with maybe LMQ? And Crs and coL. Well coL had just come out of the Challenger scene and they were previously playing only in the Challenger scene which would effect their play against LCS teams. EG was dealing with a new bot lane as they had recently replaced yellowpete with Altec and they were still using Snoopeh. I think Helios coming into EG helped them improve a lot.

I think that part of it was just the way we played. When we played against teams with worse records we were more confident and just won one or two lanes and snowballed it into winning games.

Question: The other stat that I wanted to bring up was TSM’s jungler Amazing had a spotty record on champions other than Elise or Lee Sin. I have two questions about this. 1. He seemed to disagree with issues of like champion pool and such so what exactly was TSM’s ban-pick process? Did you guys try to prioritize those champions for him?

Gleebglarbu: Picks and bans change every weak. Lee Sin and Elise were definitely very strong at the time. They were constantly prioritized by the top junglers like KaKAO and DanDy. I think that we were just trying to pick the best picks possible. There were situations were Amazing was heavily banned out leading him to play a champion he was not as comfortable on. But in that situation the rest of us all get our comfort picks so it should be that in our opinion that we can make up for a weak jungle pick since we got the other champions that we wanted.

Question: The other thing I wanted to bring up was that a common defense fans had for Amazing had was that other champions did not get such a strong banning treatment. I looked into this and other junglers known for wide champion pools like Meteos or Diamondprox actually oftentimes got Lee Sin or Elise. How did teams get the idea to ban him out only?

Gleebglarbu: Nothing that I can think about in particular. Amazing is incredibly good on those two champions, perhaps more so than the other junglers in North America. So it may be more dangerous to give Amazing Lee Sin or Elise. It’s clear if you watch his games on either the Wolves or TSM how well he did on those two champions. Maybe after playing against it a lot in scrims they were like we don’t want to play against this at LAN.

Question: It seems like WildTurtle’s laning has dropped off a little bit since his peak in Season 3. Do you agree and what’s your logic behind this?

Gleebglarbu: That’s actually really hard to say. I’m not sure how you could measure [laning] maybe CS leads or something like that? Turtle and Lust played really well in the regional tournament and I can’t exactly recall how they did every single game at Worlds but versus Cloud9 in the finals I think that they played really well. I wouldn’t say that his laning dropped off. In Season 3 he was playing a lot more Draven. He was probably the best Draven in NA alongside Sneaky. I think another big thing too is the pool of players he was playing against was different. When he first joined TSM he was playing against the compLexity bot lane of brunch and MeyeA or Aphro and Double when Aphro was more recently playing support. Turtle was able to 2v2 kill people and things like that because he was just mechanically a lot better than the the other ADs and Xpecial was a lot better than the other supports. Right when he joined he was just wrecking all the other bot lanes at the time. But I think a lot of it has to do with people improving over time and roster swaps. One example of this was Krepo. He played in the European scene for a long time and was really dominant and him coming also ups the quality of all the supports in North America.

Question: You mentioned that you think Lustboy and Turtle played really well together. Do you think that you guys had a synergy issue which is why you weren’t able to bring out the biggest strengths in each other?

Gleebglarbu: At the time, I think that I would have preferred to play more defensive which could be an issue if it’s more optimal to play aggressive. I think that overall our synergy…people made that out to be a bigger issue than it actually was. I don’t think we were ever running around getting 2v2 solo kills or anything like that but our win rate with the time I was on the team at the time showed we were doing quite well. I think people were over-emphazing the lane phase and not valuing everything else.

Question: After bringing in Locodoco I felt like there was a clear improvement in the team’s strategy. You also played under Locodoco. I want to know what was the thought process in hiring him and what exactly did he bring to the table?

Gleebglarbu: The process in hiring him, I wasn’t a part of that so I don’t know. I think that every team needs a coach, especially one that’s in-house. I’m not sure why other teams have thought differently. I think he brings a lot of knowledge about Korean strategies and how Korean teams work as well as a lot of knowledge on what it’s like to be a pro player since he’s been with so many Korean and North American pro teams…StarTale, NaJin, Quantic, etc. I think he just brings a ton of experience and knowledge about the scene and the game itself and he’s just really good at coaching.