Our Main for Battle of Azeroth

“I think that many things that go on in an art school have a tendency to undermine confidence, and that shouldn’t be part of the ballgame, ever.”
Lewis Black

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Our Main in Battle for Azeroth

Over at Blizzard Watch we are asked How will you choose your Battle for Azeroth main?. The opening article compares it to going to college. The early comments look to be that most of them will stick with the class that they’ve had for years. Now would be the time to switch Mains, the character who gets all of the focus but, as the article describes, Blizzard isn’t done with the tuning. So, we have zero idea on who will be strong.

I always worry if I will be good enough to do the job, no matter the role.

I remember the first day of graduate school. Having applied to only one school and having been accepted I showed up in Los Angeles with no idea what was meant by “private art school”. I really was that naïve country boy in the big city. I would be part of a Theater program that emphasized design; set design, lighting design, sound design, stage management, production management and more.

All of the new students for our program had to meet in a theater. As we gathered, I asked those around me, “So, are we all stagehands?”. One girl replied with a haughty sniff, “I’m a designer”. I was thoroughly intimated. It struck me hard then that all of these young adults has been taking drawing classes all of their lives, they were steeped in fashion history, architecture and engineering.

I worried if I would be good enough, if I would be laughed at for not knowing stuff, if I would make it through the semester.

I didn’t have any theory training. What I did have was seven years in a road house running touring shows. A road house that did 250 performances a year. I had stage managed many local shows, designed many more community theater shows, supervised big crews in getting shows up on time. If I had thought of it, but I was too naïve, that was why I had been given a full scholarship, a stipend and a graduate assistantship for my Masters of Fine Arts degree.

And it was soon, within two months, that I realized that all that theory was good stuff but I knew how to do it. I knew what it meant to build flats in volume from pricing to painting to staging. I knew all the solutions and shortcuts because I had done this hundreds of times, while the kid next to me was working on his tenth show; having only done college stuff.

I was good enough. I was hired right out of college and never applied for any job; I got phone calls from people wanting me to work. And so did those other kids in my classes, it seems like everyone worked after they left school.

I think that I might want to Main a bear tank. I worry a lot if I’ll be good enough. I worry about the responsibility of leading players, about having skills with buttons and mostly about understanding what the hell is going on in all of the different fights. Oddly, I have “put myself out there” with designs for hundreds to see on opening night, with writings published in magazines, in front of classrooms to teach my trade and craft and theory; but I hesitate to bear tank.

Like anyone else, I blog about it to try to figure it out. It would be very easy to stay healer and I might do that. Honestly, I don’t fear the dungeons and raids as much as I fear Blizzard’s tuning and hitting a Class Wall that can only go so far.

So; are you sticking with your long time main or changing up for a new experience?