Made for the Role

All the talk about tanks and healer and damage dealers lately has me thinking a lot about the roles and the people that play them, or don't play them.

Do you believe that each person is made for a role?  As if there is a role that best suits them to play.  I am not talking about skill at playing it, anyone can become skilled at anything given enough dedication and determination, so skill at the role means nothing for this post.  Well, not nothing, but saying someone is skilled at doing something does not mean they were made to play that role.

At the beginning of last expansion we were in need of a tank, as in when are we not in need of a dependable tank, and I recruited a friend from real life to come tank as I knew she had a geared and leveled tank and she was skilled at playing it having had played once since vanilla.

As it turned out we ended up not needing her on her tank as we ended up picking up a few of them but suddenly had healers feeling the heat from the massive healer hell that the beginning of last expansion was and I went to her and asked if she had any characters that could heal.  She said she had one but it was not 85 yet.

I helped her level, taught her all I knew about healing, and geared her up as best I could through randoms, craftables and the such and in no time she was ready to heal.  Having never healed before she stepped in and was healing as if she had been doing it all her life when in fact this was the first time she had ever even attempted to heal.  Even when gearing her up she did not heal.

A few weeks later and she was ready to claim the spot as the number one healer on the team.  Her reaction was spot on, he choices always seemed well thought out, her numbers amazing.  She was a healer, she adapted completely and she adapted quick.

It was then that I got the shock of my life.  She was playing on an old system that she could not use addons on.  This means she had no custom UI, no healing addons, no DBMs, nothing.  She was doing that good at healing through natural ability only.  Wow, just wow.

She was meant for the role.  That is what I mean about being meant for the role.  You don't even try, you are just good at it.  Anyone can learn to be good at something, but to be good at something naturally means it is something you were meant to do.

Do you believe that people are meant for certain roles or certain classes?

I love being a hunter, but does that mean I am meant to be one?  And if so what spec is it that I am meant to use. 

I always played a hunter but it wasn't until MM was the spec that became the raiders choice that I actually started to become a good hunter, raiding wise.  I changed to MM and was instantly topping the charts.  All without even thinking.  I could be talking on vent, not playing attention to anything I was doing in game and it seemed that everything just fell into place.  Not only did my DPS go up but so did my raid awareness as odd as that might sound.  I guess it was because I did not need to think when playing MM so my awareness of other things seemed to be heightened.

Perhaps I was meant to play MM.  Perhaps it was just that at that stage in the game my play had just moved to the next level and it would have not mattered what spec I was playing but I tend to believe that for me when playing a hunter that MM is the spec I was made to play.

I've always believed that any decent player, any real gamer, could play any class in any spec and do well at it.  But the made to play it theory goes further than just being able to do it.  It means to be able to do it with ease, as if it were natural.

While MM seemed to be that way to me as a hunter what is there to say that I was not made to play a druid healer or a monk tank or what have you.  There are the classes and roles we like and we tend to believe that because we like them because we are made to play them because we happen to be good at them and enjoy doing it.  But that is not entirely true as I see it.  Just because you are very good at doing something and really enjoy doing it doesn't mean you were made for the role.

I think the vast majority of players never find the class and role they were meant to play.  I am not even sure I have yet and I have dabbled in every spec and class in the game at one point or another.  I just say it is the hunter that I am meant to play because I am good at it and I enjoy it and have been doing it so long.

What if I could be so much better doing something else?  What if I have not found the role for me?

What if all those people that refuse to play tanks or healers were actually made to play a tank or a healer but because they refuse to ever give it a chance they never find out.  They could be the average player, even the good player, but they would excel at doing something else because that is what they were made to do.

Every person has strengths and weaknesses and those all go into being made for a role.  It was like when I took the job as a raid leader.  A job I never waned and a job I wish I could pass off to someone else.  But I was told that it was something I would be good at.  As it turns out, while I am not some great raid leader or anything, I do have the natural tools to be one and it comes without even trying.  Managing people is a skill, just like everything else.  Would I say I was made to do that, absolutely not, but I am sure the person that gave me the job things I was.

Goes to show you that you don't even need to enjoy doing sometimes to do it well.  Sometimes it is just who you are.  And maybe they saw something in me that I never did.  In the end I understand why.  Whenever I do a raid, if I assemble it or not, if it is a pug, open raid, LFR, you name it, given time I will always end up taking control of the group while not even trying to do so.  Because in the end, that is who I am.  I am a leader by nature for as much as I despise being one.

Do you believe people are made for a role, or a class?  I do.

I just wonder how many of us never really find that place.  We never see that, while we are good at something, there might just be something we are naturally better at.  Like that warrior tank that had been playing since vanilla that is now a shaman healer.  They were a good warrior tank, but they are a better shaman healer, because that is the role they were meant to play.

I absolutely do believe that every person has something they will just excel at naturally.  But then again, I also believe that anyone can excel at anything with enough time and dedication put toward it.

Do you believe that you have found the role made for you?

I believe I have, as long as I can play an MM hunter, which sadly I can not now.  Oh well.