Recently I put up a review of the Circle of Healing Podcast, a Priest-slanted healing podcast by Dawn Moore of WoW.com, Matt Low (a.k.a. Matticus of World of Matticus and WoW.com), and Jerome “Kinaesthesia” Phillips of the US guild Vodka.

At that time I felt that there were some wrinkles which needed to be ironed out, but that there was a lot of promise in the podcast. After a short break because Dawn apparently had some computer problems, they’re back and have released episodes 3 and 3.5 (a shortened one without Matt Low), and the website (http://www.circleofhealingpodcast.com/) has also gone live. Since the quality of these two episodes is way higher, I wanted to return to the subject and give them an updated review.

I had a couple of main criticisms at the time. The first was more technical, in that there were some issues with hearing the contributors and with them hearing each other, and the volume normalisation was a bit iffy in places (Kina was very loud, Dawn was very quiet). The second was that the discussion didn’t feel quite as smooth as I personally prefer, with contributors sometimes drifting off on tangents or seeming distracted.

I’m pleased to report that these last two episodes have really stepped things up a notch. The technical niggles have been sorted out now and everyone is clearly audible, and no one made my ears bleed when they spoke.
More importantly, the dialogue between all three (or two) contributors feels a lot more fluid. I personally feel that a podcast should, if not hide, then at least not draw attention to the fact that these people are sitting in different cities, states or even countries; the dialogue should flow as if they were sitting having a chat to each other (and with us). In these latter two episodes there’s some genuine three-way discussion happening, which makes the podcast come alive somehow.

I’ve also been really enjoying the content. It’s great to have a couple of high-end raiders on the panel in Dawn and Kina, and it’s nice to have someone whose raiding experience is more towards the average experience of the audience (with apologies to Matt, I couldn’t find a better way of phrasing that!) to represent another point of view. As I said in the previous review, these are people who play WoW and heal passionately and collectively they have a huge amount of knowledge they can share and this podcast is a great vehicle for it.

The last question I had about the podcast from episodes 1 and 2 was the question of where it was aimed: healing in general or Priests specifically. It’s pretty much settled on being a Priest healing podcast, with general healing topics being hit on as they crop up. That’s fine: I started this blog intending to be a healing generalist but ended up writing almost exclusively about Priests (although there’s some more general interest articles around the place) but it’s worth bearing in mind that if you’re not interested in in-depth discussions of Priest talent trees or mechanics you might be needing your fast-forward button a bit.

Anyway now the quality has stepped right up and the podcast is really hitting its stride, I’d unequivocally recommend that you go and check out the Circle of Healing Podcast, and submit your questions to the panel so Dawn, Kina and Matt don’t have to make up any more!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Circle of Healing Podcast

There’s recently been a bit of a debate over the use or not of addons for healing. I don’t want to throw more fuel on the fire, but some of the posts and commentary have been quite throught-provoking, and since I’m about to head into the Beta and my usual UI will go out the window, I thought I’ve been giving my own addon usage even more thought.

My story

I use addons to heal and pretty much always have. I remember my first healing experience in Wailing Caverns in my 20s, way back in mid-2007, clicking on party frames to target people and then clicking on the healing spells on my bars. This being early in TBC and not my first character I was well aware that there existed a wide variety of addons to help classes do their job, so it was a natural next step for me to go a-Googling and I quickly found Healbot. Thus was a click-healer made.

Although I’ve never seriously used the default raid interface to heal, I have had occasion to quickly drag out the default raidframes and heal with keybinds (not mouseover macros, just target & press number keys) in a pinch when I’ve been disconnected mid-fight. I’m far from brilliant with it, but I can be non-useless in such a situation.

Pros and Cons

For me, healing effectively means mastering two stages: decision-making, i.e. picking the right person to heal and the right spell to use, or deciding whether to dispel that thing or to leave it; and then acting on that decision, i.e. reacting in time and hitting the right person.

Addons can help in both areas, but I mostly value assistance with the first part. Addons, if you spend the time to set them up properly, can provide you with as much information as you need to make your decisions, with (hopefully) no excess clutter, although of course in reality no addon can provide perfect configurability.

The problem that was brought up recently was that near-ubiquitous use of addons for showing spell cooldowns and boss abilities or for changing health bar colours when a decurse is needed means that people are losing, or failing to acquire, a sense of timing or even a depth of knowledge of boss mechanics. This can lead to a dependence on the addons, to the point where people become (or at least feel) unable to heal without them.

The trouble is that this is predicated on the idea that the addon(s) may stop working one day and expose that dependency. As long as the addon is active and functioning, there’s no problem. As a commenter observed, you’re judged on results, not methods.

Of course if your addons do break on patch day someone who has a more “visceral” understanding will probably outperform you, as will someone who is more accustomed to using the Blizzard interface to heal. When you don’t have an addon using a special this-one-really-matters colour, someone who can recognise an Unbound Plague icon from a Plague Sickness one will be at an advantage.
That is, until the player adapts to a new addon or the old addon is updated.

Here’s a different perspective: the default UI can be thought of as simply a set of ‘addons’ designed by Blizzard and included with the game, rather than something special or sacred. The only difference is that Blizzard make sure that their ‘addons’ are working before each patch release. From that perspective, it becomes much more like a choice between Vuhdo, Blizzard, Grid and Healbot.
You simply pick your comfort point in the trade-off between reliability in extreme conditions and everyday convenience, configurability and performance.

As a fun thought experiment, consider Blizzard announcing that due to the large number of excellent addons in the community, they are removing the default UI completely, leaving it purely in API form.

Short Version?

The most important thing addons provide is the ability to provide only the information you want to make your decisions, no more and no less. This (in theory) should lead to the most optimal decisions being made in any given situation. If providing more information than the default UI is helpful, then suitably-configured addons should improve your healing.

If those addons break, you may find yourself worse off than someone using the default UI (which is unlikely to break, at least on Live) until you can readapt, adopt a new set of addons, or the old addon is fixed. For the vast majority of us this isn’t a problem, although I can see how world-first guilds might find it helpful to be able to raid and heal regardless of the situation on the day new content is released.

I’ll be shortly spending some time on the Beta realm, where my normal UI is unlikely to work, so this will be an interesting test of my “dependency” on addons.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Getting Started As A Healer
• [MoP Beta] Snapshot of the Disc Priest
• Reflections on Heroic Healing

In my recent post about letting people die I talked about working with other healers as a part of the mental prioritisation process we go through.
In the comments, Everblue pointed out that having a healing team with mutual trust, knowledge of each other’s role, and enough awareness to cover for each other without overhealing is the “holy grail of raid leading”, and wondered how to create that understanding.

Well, I can’t claim to have all the answers by a long stretch, and I don’t even think I’m part of such a team at the moment, but I’ve felt something closer to it in the past. So, here’s some thoughts from me for raid leaders or guild leaders looking to build a more cohesive healing team.

I should say that, while I don’t think you can necessarily create situational awareness, you can engender an interest and cooperation between team-mates which will get you a long way towards the ideal as described by Everblue.

It would also be great to read what other people think on this subject.

Communicate

Back to basics, but if you want a strong team you need to create an atmosphere of communication and information flow. So if you don’t have one already create a healers-only channel and invite your healers into it, and if your guild is one which uses forums try and get some role-specific forums created as well.

The healing channel

The purpose of the channel is two-fold: firstly you can use it to set up and discuss assignments, so everyone knows what’s going on. If it’s in a separate channel people can pull it out into a separate chat frame to keep it prominent, or give it a different colour to help prevent it getting lost in the rest of raid chat.
The second purpose of the channel is to allow discussion of how that last attempt went, if someone is feeling overstretched on the one hand or even underworked on the other, then the assignments can be tweaked, for example.

Here’s the first big tip I’ll give: keep the channel for healers only and don’t allow intrusions. There’s nothing will get people’s backs up like being told what to do by a non-healer.
I know how tempting it is as a raid leader to try and eavesdrop on every role channel, and that’s not incompatible with this idea, but if you want a properly free and frank discussion you will have to take a back seat. Every time you make a comment, you remind people you’re there, and this might not be the best way to promote discussion.
Healers in particular can be quite sensitive types, and actually it can be quite a big step to admit you need help with something, so don’t be an overbearing raid leader.

If you’re the raid leader and a healer as well, you’ll definitely need to be in the channel, but try and keep your involvement to a minimum. Ideas from authority figures, even in a game context, are harder to argue with. On the whole though I think a healer raid leader actually has a head start, because you’ll understand what motivates the healers, which can help with trust.

However, the healing team will need to communicate with the rest of the raid from time to time, which is where suggestion number two comes in: consider nominating a “healing lead”. Now I know some guilds don’t like the idea of the extra layer of hierarchy that class or role leads provides, and I’m not talking about another guild rank, just a sort of spokesperson who can liaise with the raid leader or other role leaders to pass information around. This lets everyone’s voice be heard, without needing to stick their neck out personally if they don’t feel confident.

It might be a regular, well-liked healer, it might be the theorycrafting nut, it might be the chatty one, but someone will most likely fall into this role. Let the healers choose their “champion” rather than it automatically be the officer who happens to be a healer.
Perhaps the healing lead could set up the assignments too. It’s always better to be assigned by someone who knows you better as an individual.

Healing forums

Just as the in-game chat channels are great for discussing the immediate events during a raid, forums can be a place for more distilled reflections on assignments, roles and strategies.

As an officer or raid leader, you could perhaps try seeding discussions by posting template healing assignments for the fights you’re currently working on, and asking for suggestions. Or perhaps asking questions relevant to a healing alt, which can spark discussions. Some of the best class discussions I’ve seen have come from this sort of start, and the key here is to get people posting and building up their confidence.

You could go both ways on making the role forums private to the roles in question or open to the guild, but I’d probably suggest keeping them open, to allow the discussion to be a bit more open and to keep the discussions useful as a resource for everyone’s reference. Questions from non-healers on the forums are less likely to provoke negative or defensive reactions on forums compared to in the heat of a progression night.

Clearly, the success of this one will depend strongly on how active your members are on the forums, so exercise some judgement on this one.

Final point here: if you’re the raid leader or an officer, be sure to publicly notice and appreciate the discussions that take place. To take criticism is to expose a little vulnerability, so some positive feedback will be invaluable; just don’t go so far as to be patronising, people can spot insincerity a mile away.

Don’t blame

I touched on this one earlier when I advised keeping non-healers out of the healing channel, but I want to return to it because it’s so important: don’t refer to healing meters and don’t point fingers at individuals.

First and foremost, healing is a team effort. Someone has to be bottom of the meters, and who that is is likely to depend strongly on the fight and the team composition. Not to mention the fact that healers make many more valid contributions than just their healing output: dispels, buffs, defensive cooldowns, and more.

Linking meters fails to capture the full contribution of individual healers, and can risk characterising your healing team as a set of individuals instead of a single team. Friendly competition is one thing (I used to compete with a fellow priest to get the lowest overheal, back in SSC when it mattered) but generally healer competition is counter-productive, so any signs of it should be strongly discouraged.

But what if something actually went wrong? The tank died, for example. Surely it’s the tank healers’ fault? Maybe.

Maybe the fault is with the assignments and not enough people were assigned to tank healing. In which case the tank healers may have done their jobs perfectly well but not been able to keep up anyway.

Maybe someone just made a mistake. Nine times out of ten they know about it already. It happens from time to time, you pick the wrong person or the wrong spell, you’re on GCD just as the Impale is landing, whatever. For healers the feedback tends to be immediate and very visible, so pointing it out publicly serves no real purpose, and is quite likely to just knock the confidence of the healer in question.

Or maybe the tank should have used a cooldown, or called for one, and actually it’s their “fault”.

In any case, the point is that generally healers know when something didn’t go right, and pointing it out doesn’t really help. It’s far better to ask them collectively what went wrong and get a discussion going. If people feel safe in their environment, preferably that private channel, then they should (eventually) be able to admit they messed something up, or ask for extra help on a target, or even request a different assignment to make them feel more comfortable.
This will become a recurring theme, but early on people may be reluctant to answer these questions immediately, so take one for the team. Point out where you can see a way for you to improve (yes, there will be something, unless you’re in Paragon, and probably even then) and volunteer that. Model the behaviour and show that you’re comfortable trusting them, and in time that trust will be returned.

The other aspect of this “post mortem” is to focus less on what went wrong, and more on what will be done about it in order to win next time. Keep the discussion focused less on who failed and more on what’s needed. For example, if we’re analysing our tank death, move the discussion quickly on from “not enough healing” to thinking about assigning an extra healer or asking tanks for cooldowns.

Take an interest

You can set up the environment all you like, but if you want to get your healers working together, you need to generate some rapport as well. This might be something you do as a raid leader/officer, or you might leave it to the healing lead. I’d suggest a bit of both: if your raiders feel you care about them as individuals, they’re more likely to believe you’ll listen to them and actually value their contributions.

At this point I’ll link out to a post by Tamarind about the culture of “my door’s always open!” and why you need to go a bit further than that in reality. There’s some good nuggets in that post for anyone trying to foster a more open atmosphere.

The short version is that if you want to know something, just ask the question, don’t automatically expect people will volunteer it. And as I’ve mentioned above, if you’re asking people to lower their guard, be prepared to lower yours first.

In raids, ask how people found that assignment. Ask them what they prefer to do. Outside raids, ask them how they’re doing, and take an interest in them as a person. And again, share your own personality, preferences and your shortcomings. This is sound advice for a leader in any capacity, but if you’re actively trying to get people out of their shells and feeling comfortable, you need to make a special effort.

All in all, your healing team needs a level of mutual respect, which can only arise when the person behind the character feels valued and feels that they know something about their colleagues as well. It needs to be truly a two-way street.

Encourage criticism

This is probably best left for a later stage, because opening with this might put people on the defensive and could well be a backwards step. But once you’ve got your healers to a point where they’ve got a safe space and they’re talking to each other and communicating to the raid as a whole, and there’s no undue blame coming their way, you might be at the point where they can begin to criticise each other, constructively and gently, but always by consent.

I know everyone says on their guild apps that they appreciate constructive criticism, but not everyone is quite as ready for it as others. So perhaps put yourself on the line first. People will probably be hesitant to criticise you, and might become defensive if you criticise them, but nothing’s stopping you criticising yourself, laying yourself (metaphorically) bare and modelling how feedback can be constructive and positively-phrased.

Or you could try another approach and post links to blog posts, forum threads and or other information sources, noting how they’ve helped you to improve some aspect of your play. This also allows you to demonstrate that you’re not setting yourself up as knowing everything, that there’s always room for everyone to improve, and it also lets you provide convenient links that people might follow, rather than needing to start their own research from scratch (there’s a lot of WoW information out there, it can be daunting!).

The other thing you might consider, which may or may not be a step too far, is routinely posting links to WoL parses for raids, and allowing discussions on that basis. You’ll usually have a few analytical types in your guild who will find it interesting to go through logs and pull out interesting statistics or find some pattern that you might not have noticed.
You’ll need to be very clear that any references to “beating” others on meters, general epeening or anything else non-constructive will be moderated (and actually follow up on this). You’ll probably get a bit of that, but when it’s routine people will get bored quickly.

The thing is, by publicising things like blogs or WoL parses, you’re making it easier for people to access real examples of others in their role or class, which can make them think and question for themselves. You don’t need to point everything out to people, they’re are always more likely to value and believe what they’ve discovered for themselves.

Once you’ve got to this point, you should (hopefully) have healers who are able to refine their own healing assignments, understand each other to some degree, and with discussions of playstyles beginning to emerge you can see how healers can then begin to predict each other’s actions in a raid situation.

Maintenance

So, you’ve herded all your healers into their own channel (and evicted the mischievous warlock that tried to sneak in, there’s always one), you might have got yourself a healing spokesperson; you’ve made it quite clear that you don’t care about the meters and you’re being very careful to ask the healers if they think they could improve the raid’s situation or how the raid could help them, or what they feel about the assignments and their role; you might have them constructively criticising themselves and others; and you’re taking an interest in them as people, respecting their contributions and personalities and with general respect all round.

What else is there?

Well, it all takes work. Keep plugging away at it, keep encouraging, prompting, supporting the positive behaviours, and moderating discussions if they drift in undesirable directions. And help new joiners to understand how things work and make them feel welcome and comfortable and as unthreatened as possible.

TL;DR

The key points I wanted to raise are the following:

• Get your healers some safe space – a custom channel at least – and keep it for healers only
• Allow people to speak their minds. Value their opinions, but keep your own out!
• Avoid pointing fingers; instead, try asking what went wrong, what would help things go better
• Find out about your healers’ personalities and preferences and actually value them
• Always be honest and sincere. The best leaders can always find something genuinely positive to say, so don’t be tempted to fake it, people will tell and there goes your mutual respect
• If the atmosphere is conducive to it, begin to encourage constructive criticism
• Always model the behaviours you want to encourage. If you want people to analyse their own performance, hold your own up to examination first. If you want people to ask for help with assignments, let people know when you’re having difficulties as well.
• Your work is never done, so keep up the encouragement and support

Hopefully some of these tips will be useful. Remember that this is only one perspective, and guilds and raiders are all unique and have their own quirks and preferences, so as with any advice you should adapt it to suit your situation and constantly evaluate it to see if it’s still relevant.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Helping Out
• Assigning Healers
• What Makes Healing Hard?

This post is inspired by this week’s Blog Azeroth Shared Topic, suggested by Ecclesiastical Discipline, asking “When should a healer let someone die?”.
ED was asking about where the limit is, beyond which healers would just stop healing someone, but since I’ve not touched on the subject of triage in any depth I’ve added a bit of that as well.

Basics

The essence of triage is deciding who needs healing now, who can wait, and who you simply can’t save. The goal is to maximise the group’s performance in a given situation, which might not be the same as keeping the maximum number of people alive; that decision is one of the trickiest to make, but is sometimes necessary.

With this goal in mind, healers tend to operate with a priority list, which I’d characterise as follows:

1. Yourself – If you die, you can’t save anyone else
2. The tank – If they die, you might struggle to save other people from the damage that will follow
3. Important DPS – By this I mean people with specific jobs, such as CC, decursing, or anything else
4. People you like – This is where it gets subjective. “People you like” means people who you can trust not to die stupidly, or who you know are star DPSers on tight Berserk timer fights
5. The raid in general – Both healers and DPS are in this category. You might want to make the other healers a priority, or they might take care of themselves, so you can make this judgement individually
6. People prone to standing in fire – If you can’t trust someone to look after themselves, your precious heals might be better spent on someone else instead
7. Pets – This can depend strongly on the fight and if they are playing an active role, but generally pet classes have ways to take care of their pets themselves. It generally costs DPS, so heal them when we can, but pets really aren’t a priority. I know a lot of healers don’t show pets on their raidframes at all, which might be a step too far

As a completely random example, which definitely did not happen to me this weekend, let’s imagine we’re in Utgarde Pinnacle and, having vanquished Grauf using the conveniently-positioned harpoon launchers, Skadi the Ruthless has just landed in our midst and begun whirlwinding on the tank and two melee DPS.
Let’s further suppose that the not-terribly-well-geared Resto Druid who is healing the group only has time to heal two people before someone will die. In this case, our Druid friend falls back on the rules. The first heal goes on the tank, because he’s holding onto Skadi and a couple of adds, which we don’t want to be getting hit by. The second goes onto one of the DPS. You might have a preference (the rogue might died to just about every ability going earlier in the run, in which case you might suspect he’ll just stand in the next whirlwind), you might pick the person who’s the furthest out (allowing him to survive to get out of range), or you might simply pick whoever’s closest to the tank on VuhDo for speed.

This typically works for 5-man dungeons and perhaps 10-man raids, although when you add in the complicating factor of multiple healers or other factors, your priorities might shift a bit.

Multiple healers

As you can imagine, when you are the only healer, triage is relatively straightforward. When there’s another healer in the group as well, you will need to alter your strategy a little. For example, if you have assignments, your first priority is always to make sure your assignment is fine before helping others. There’s no point healing the raid if the tank falls over seconds later, nor is there much merit in all the healers landing a heal each on the tank and letting the raid die.

More subtly, it helps to learn to anticipate who and how other healers will heal. If your Shaman colleagues tend to go straight to the melee pack with Chain Heals, prioritise the ranged DPS and healers. In TBC, when mana was more restricted, HoT healers were advised to HoT the higher health players, since direct heals like Flash Heal, and Smart heals like Circle of Healing, would be aimed at the lower-health players first.

So when is it OK to lose someone?

The short answer is: when you genuinely have no choice. Sometimes there’s just more damage coming in than you can heal up in the time allowed, and you have to choose. Sometimes a DPS player will find themselves tanking something they really shouldn’t be tanking, and you can’t react in time to save them.

The other main time it’s acceptable to lose someone is when the advantage of letting them die outweighs the cost of keeping them alive. This used to be viable on Saurfang: before he was hotfixed to invalidate this strategy, the first player to gain Mark of the Fallen Champion would often be allowed to die, to prevent Saurfang gaining Blood Power at double the rate.

There are also some quite obscure cases as well, like using Soulstones for a quick threat drop or mana boost, or Holy Priests deliberately dying towards the end of fights to use Spirit of Redemption, but these are rare these days.

In all of these cases, remember the golden rule: triage is used to maximise the group’s performance. In these examples, that’s achieved by limiting Blood Power, or by keeping a tank alive as opposed to a DPS (one DPS lost might or might not matter to the outcome, whereas a dead tank often means a wipe), or by using a resurrection as a free mana potion.

When is it not OK to lose someone?

It’s absolutely not OK to lose someone because you were unprepared or inattentive. Sometimes the damage is just too high, but if that’s because you didn’t get your Bubbles up in time for an Infest (I’ll admit to drifting off during the Lich King’s dialogue once or twice) or because you didn’t get Rejuvs all round before Phase 3 of the Black Knight fight began, then that’s a healer failure.

It’s also, in my opinion, not acceptable to let someone die because you don’t like them, or because you’re “educating” them. If someone rips off the tank, or pulls for the tank, or persists in standing in slime, fire, void zones or odd rumbling ground, by all means drop them down the priority list compared to someone who is taking incidental damage but generally avoids getting hurt, but that person should still get heals if you have them available. Refusing to heal them at all, and worse, refusing to resurrect them, is just petty and wastes everyone’s time. Most of the time a person’s death causes problems for the rest of the group, making them work harder or making fights take longer, and it’s not fair to punish the group.

Go back to the golden rule: maximise the group’s performance. Even a DPS in fire is better than a dead DPS if you can spare the time to keep them alive.

My recommendation would be to whisper the person to explain what went wrong and how to avoid it, and to point out that you have a lot of people to heal and they’re occupying an unreasonable amount of your time. I’d suggest that most people are not (contrary to popular belief) self-centred, Recount-obsessed, mouth-breathing morons who couldn’t avoid a void zone if their life depended on it, but may just not be aware that there’s a problem. Especially in 5-mans, less so in raids.

The Poison Nova on the Ick and Krick fight is a good example of this: many people don’t run away from this automatically, but when you ask them to run away next time (usually after they’ve died, but not always) most people are happy to take the suggestion on board. The culture in heroics in this half of WotLK tends to train DPS to ignore most boss abilities since they aren’t especially life-threatening, so it’s almost to be expected.

If someone’s either particularly recalcitrant, or so obnoxious you don’t want to play with them, you’re better off either attempting to vote kick them (you’re probably not the only person who feels that way), or just politely leaving the group and counting yourself lucky you escaped.

The take-away message would be that unless you’re going to try and explain to people why you’re letting them die, chances are they’ll just write you off as either a bad healer or someone spiteful who let them die for fun, and how will that teach them anything?

Having said all that I’ll admit that sometimes I do give in to the urge and underheal people. I’m only human after all, but I always feel bad about it afterwards!

Possibly Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

I have a few chunkier posts in the works, including looking at Heroic Sindragosa and levelling in the middle levels, but since they’re not done and there’s been a bit of a gap lately, here’s a quick comment on the new Circle of Healing Podcast.

Recently Dawn Moore (WoW.com’s healing priest columnist and Disc Priest), Matt Low (a.k.a Matticus, of World of Matticus, the sadly-neglected NoStockUI and WoW.com), and Kinaesthesia of the US guild Vodka released the first two editions of their new healing podcast. I had a listen through the episodes and wanted to give my thoughts.

If you prefer to make up your own mind before reading other people’s thoughts, you can find an introduction and download links at World of Matticus. Just remember that these are very early episodes.

The first thing to say is that it’s great to have another way to access information on healing. The podcast is quite accessible, and wisely tends to steer clear of trying to present complex technical information in an audio medium, while still giving a fairly in-depth discussion of the healing issues and topics. It’s also a good way to keep up to date with the big upcoming changes for healers and their implications, although it’s not aiming to be a news-focused show.

However it’s early days and it’s very much not a finished product yet, which unfortunately shows. The golden rule for content creation (blogs, podcasts, videos, anything like that) is to produce the first three, file them quietly away, and begin your public releases with the fourth one. The thing is that there will be technical issues, stylistic shifts and just a general development of personal interactions in the first few episodes, and in theory these will settle down by episode 4. You can always re-record and re-use the content later.

For example, in the first podcast Kinaesthesia had trouble being heard on the VoIP solution they were using for the podcast, something which the listener probably didn’t need to be made so acutely aware of.
The presenters also seemed a little uncertain about when to speak, wary of talking over each other, and the exchanges felt a little stilted. Some podcasts get over this by having a parallel text chat (inaudible to the microphones) running for cueing, but whatever means you choose, this is something you can best hammer out in the early episodes before you go public.

The other thing that bothered me a lot about the podcast was that the presenters, Matt in particular, seemed to be doing other things during the recording. At one point Matt had to have a question repeated because he wasn’t aware what he was responding to, sounding like he just wasn’t listening. Edit it cleverly if you like, but at least maintain the illusion that the presenters are paying attention to the discussion and each other.

I suppose this is partly a stylistic thing, and some people will undoubtedly enjoy the quirky, slightly haphazard, frequently tangential and very laid-back approach, it’s just not what I prefer to listen to.

The final caveat I have is that all three presenters are Priests, one Holy and two Discipline (although Matt plays both), with limited experience of other classes. Hopefully they will settle soon on whether they will just stick to Priests or incorporate other classes as regular guest presenters, otherwise I fear that they may struggle for credibility a bit.

Wow, that sounded pretty rough! It’s not all bad by any means.

By the second episode all the technical niggles seemed to have been ironed out and the discussion of the new Priest talent trees was quite interesting, with a more fluid and informative discussion taking place. The listeners’ questions section also promises to be quite valuable, once people are submitting questions for real.

Dawn, Matt and Jerome (Kinaesthesia) are people who are playing their healers at quite a high level, with a good understanding of the class, so it is a valuable resource, and definitely one to keep an eye on.

On the whole I expect the podcast to settle down from here, and the presenters to get into their stride, so I’d recommend keeping an eye out for future episodes. There’s great potential in a healing podcast, and the niggles I have are really more superficial than deal-breaking.

The website is still under development as I write this, but the links from World of Matticus will let you listen the first couple of episodes for yourself.
The podcast is also apparently on iTunes under the Video Games section of Games and Hobbies, or if you prefer regular RSS there’s a feed as well.

Oh, final point of feedback, please make the volume louder and better-normalised on the mp3. I found I had to turn it up very high to hear, and then someone’s laugh will be almost deafening. Small point, but being able to hear the podcast over traffic is handy!

Possibly Related Posts:

• New Circle of Healing Podcast Episodes 3 and 3.5 Are Out