Ok we have killed Patchwerk twice but we still see very strange behaviour with hateful strike that causes us to wipe.

What happens is that one of our 3 HS tanks will drop off the list and stop receiving HS's. This usually happens about 1-2 mins towards the fight. Then inevitably tanks will start dropping.

We use 4-5 healers on 2 offtanks then 1 on a 3rd. Has anyone else encountered this problem and know what causes it? It is not always the same tank that is dropping off either, seems to be a different one every time.

I am assuming somehow that someone else is getting on the list, our mellee are standing in slime beforehand so they are very low hps so if one of them was on the HS list they probably wouldnt get hit. We have tried to find out if HS has a threat component, we have tried our offtanks building aggro and also just auto attacking but neither seems to help.

Can anyone shed some light on the subject?

We've had the same problem happen to us this Wednesday, I don't know for sure what causes it, but I assume that warriors are not standing in their correct spots.

Do a search for a thread called "Surviving Hateful Strike", it had a lot of discussion about this.
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=7594

I had read that thread before but I thought it didn't discuss this issue

I reread it and saw this post by Gurg:

thing is we have had tanks drop off who have taken lots of HS's and our offtanks never move so they are always within range. I guess we will try them all going all out on aggro to make sure they stay ahead of the dps

Here's my best understanding of how this works:

1) When Patchwerk hits you, he generates a significant amount of extra threat for the target of his attack. This applies both to autoattacks and HS. I do not know if the value for autoattack differs from the value for HS.
2) Every 1.2sec, Patchwerk uses HS. He looks to people in melee range with him and selects the #2 through #4 highest-threat players at melee (after the MT, of course). Whichever of those three has the highest current HP, he will attempt to HS.

That's it.

If the "MT" isn't working hard to build aggro and the top-hp #1 OT is building a lot of aggro, it's possible to pass the MT on the aggro list and switch places, such that the old MT becomes an HS target, and the old HS target starts taking autoattacks. This is uncommon.

More common, an OT who is the #3 OT and thus takes fewer HSes, or an OT who dodges or parries a bunch of HS in a row early on, can fail to gain the necessary amount of threat to stay on the HS list. DPS -- typically fury warriors -- will surpass him and come to occupy that spot on the HS list. Getting HS'd as an offtank does two things for you -- it generates some flat aggro value; and it also fills your rage bar allowing you to use a bunch of threat-generating abilities. The person most likely to fall off the HS list is the lowest-hp HS tank. Especially if you are using a two-tank strat with a third just as a buffer.

If your DPS on Patchwerk is strong, and you are Horde (stupid BoS) you might want to enforce a 30-second wait before your fury warriors engage Patchwerk. Everyone else can go in pretty quickly. That generally provides the head start you need to keep it stable.

yea I think that is exactly what is happening and since our fury warriors are starting on low hps then we don't realise that they are becoming HS targets.

When we were learning it 1st we had the same issue and we made mellee dps wait 10 seconds before dpsing and that seemed to fix it. There are 2 fury warriors who are generating a lot of aggro I think, I'll get them to wait longer and see if that fixes the issue, thanks.

The fight is actually very doable with a single OT eating every single hateful strike. Using this method, a slime bath for all of the melee is mandatory :-)

Why is it mandatory? Explain what would happen, please, if your DPS all had 4k-5k hp instead of 2k.

Do you have two other well-geared tanks as backup, at least?

If you don't, then you're basically recreating the situation Gurgthock outlined above. The only effect of slime dipping is that it increases the chance of losing your tank.

If you do, then it doesn't matter, because the backup tanks will have more HP than any DPS class.

Tell your offtank to turn their back to Patchwerk for a few hits.

one of our fury warriors is a troll thats why he was standing in slime then all the mellee dps decided to do it -_-

Berserking is more effective at low health. So trolls take a quick slime bath to get them down to where berserking is most effective.

isnt that just like a +15% attack speed for a few seconds? is it really worth it? although, patchwerk is supposed to be a dps crazy fight, so i guess it is. hmmm, never would have thought about that

This may be a crazy idea, but have you considered changing the maximum hp of your HS tanks during the fight?

For example, suppose you have tanks A, B, C - in order of decreasing hp. A will get hit most, C least - making C the most likely to drop off the list.
If you start the fight without, say an imp buff for A, or missing a 120hp pot or some small hp buff which changes the order so it's B, C, A - you can arrange for B to get hit a lot early in the fight. Then swap A into the group with the imp and the order should change. This would require some fancy footwork from the healers I bet.

This gives C a headstart and maybe makes him less likely to drop off the list.

(caveat, I haven't personally seen this fight other than a trivial 10man pull because we wanted to hear his voice, so this idea may be completely off-base)

20% attack speed for 10 seconds at <40% health, IIRC. 20% attack speed for 10 seconds is well, well worth it, especially since Patch has *zero* splash damage and there's an easy way to drop yourself to <40%.

This might make sense if everyone has the same gear, though as you noted, it'd require some quick adaptation from healers, which can be bad. The problem is that you often don't have three tanks with identical gear. If you do, great. But you don't want to be rearranging things so that your 4/9 Dreadnaught tank clicks off a buff to drop himself below your 8/8 Wrath tank who now takes the bulk of the HS's.

In my view, if you have the DPS with room to spare, just have your fury warriors wait a while before engaging. Everyone else can go in almost immediately.

Uh, yeah. When you have healing set up such that one person is taking 7k damage every 2.4 seconds and someone else is taking 7k damage once every 20 seconds, and then you suddenly swap the two, that's not a recipe for stability. It's an overly complex solution to a fairly simple problem.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

The strategy wouldn't work for my raid - mainly because I only have 3 tanks that are capable of getting hit by him and living. The gear gap between the first offtank and the second one is large enough that if I wanted to play tricks like this, I'd be lowering hp by enough to seriously jeopardize the raid.

The idea of delaying the fury wars a little is intriguing, but one that would only work for us once we've buffed the rest of the raid dps a little, I think.

Oh well, it's not a gear-check fight for nothing :)

It's 30% attack speed @ 40% or lower HP, but only 10% at max HP.

Tell your DPS to stop taking slime baths. Here's the scenario you're basically painting for yourself otherwise:

The only way the DPS warrior would get hit by HS is if they get into the top 4 aggro AND have higher HP than the remaining tanks in the top 4. What this means is that both the other tanks have <5k HP at the time of HS and if it hits them instead of the 10k HP tank who just lost 4th place they are going to be 1shot. Fortunately the DPS warrior will take the HS 1shot and things can go on as normal... only he's sitting on something stupid like 2k HP and so one of the offtanks cops the HS and dies. Then it most probably chains down as healers are now having to heal much more often than expected and probably can't keep up with the damage their tank is taking, or at least not in a way that's sustainable and you eventually wipe.

So yeah... stop the slime baths. If they weren't going to cop a HS there's no need for a slime bath, and if they WERE going to cop a HS the last thing you want them to do is avoid it by being low health.

Ok, I'm a bit confused now.
So what does trigger the Hateful Strike then, the amount of HP you have or the amount of aggro you have, generated either by yourself or by Patchwerk?

Both. :P

Above is all you need to know, don't worry about the stuff in the other quote.