He searches the top three people on aggro list (excluding the MT), and then whichever one has the highest current hp (not max) he will HS that target.

And to clarify, the "He HS's the same target multiple times until it lands" idea was false.

Edit: To expand a bit (not including MT into this)

If Tank A has 10,200 HP, Tank B has 10,000 HP, and tank C has about 9,900 HP, then Tank A will take the first HS assuming everyone is topped off going into the fight and in melee range. If Tank A doesn't have over 10,000 HP after 1.2 seconds (then Patchwerk HS's again), then Tank B will take the next HS. If Tank A is topped off after Tank B takes a HS (especially if Tank B parries), then he'll HS Tank A again before Tank C because Tank A will have more current HP. This is why guilds often times put the least amount of healers on their Tank C.

It occurs to me that the seemingly most common strategy of healer allocation to tanks accentuates the problem of dropping one of the offtanks off the HS list.

Patch chooses the highest current hp offtank to hit. This is a function of two variables - the warrior's max hp: as soon as he's overhealed he's at the max - this should happen often. And the number of healers allocated to that specific tank; more healers means that tank will be highest current hp most often.

The common allocation strategy seems to be something like 5 healers on the highest hp tank, 3-4 on the second and 1-2 on the lowest. Now, the lowest hp tank will be the slowest to recover his hp, meaning he gets hit less. Also, he has the lowest max hp, so even at full he won't get hit unless the other tanks' healers are slow.
If instead your last offtank also happened to have the highest max hp, he'd get hit every time the healers maxxed his hp, but he'd still get hit less often than the guy you allocated 5 healers to, because they can lift his hp faster.
Rearranging the healers/tanks in this way means you can force the 3rd offtank to get hit regularly, while still having your primary OT hit the most often.

Obviously this is tank gear dependent - I imagine you'd want the most healers on the tank with the highest dodge/parry because that's the most leveraged approach. Ideally this tank would have slightly lower max hp than the other tanks I guess, but in practise that's seldom going to be the case.


(as before, this 'strategy' is not intended to be a practical suggestion, rather I'm interested in understanding the encounter mechanic and how it works)

My observations from our last PW kill:
We use the same 3 OT strat as mentioned before, I am OT2. The other 2 warriors are both auto-attacking with Thunderfury the whole time, I use Bloodlord's Defender.
At about 5 minutes into the fight I died an untimely death but we continue with the other 2. Got a combat rez, rebuffed, healed to full and went back in. After ~20-30 seconds (would have to check logs) of auto-attack and Shield Slam/Sunder as available, I take HS again. Whatever it is, it's certainly not #2-#4 on aggro list.

Are people sure about HS giving threat and crap? Honestly our first few kills we had our tanks sit there and auto-attack. Now we have the OTs with salvation on for the encounter. I highly doubt it's a threat issue with the DPS. The only one who needs to stay #1 on threat is the MT.

I believe this has more to do with the fact that people are reporting oddities with combat resses not wiping threat in general with the latest patch.

We spent several days on Patchwerk simply testing different theories on the HS mechanic. The #2-4 on threat is the only theory I've seen that perfectly explains every single oddity we've encountered.

The problem with this is that the role of the third tank is not to take HS whenever possible. His role is to act as a buffer in case there's a long HS streak (multiple consecutive HSs without any dodges/parries/misses in between), because that is what will kill tanks. If you waste the buffer right away as soon as he's healed to full, you'll have a far harder time living through HS streaks. HS streaks should always start from the tank with the highest amount of healers assigned.

We haven't had any trouble with the third tank dropping from the HS list after we realized it's threat-based. Just have the third tank do as much threat as he's capable of(and preferrably put one of your better threat-generating tanks to do this, ie. one with TF), rogues vanish early into the fight and dps warrs wait a bit longer before going in to do dps. You can also have the third tank have the most HP in the pull so he eats the first HS and then click off some HP buff to drop third on HP, this way he'll get a nice threat boost right in the start.

I was considering that as well. But why did I not take HS right after engaging again then? I can't see Shield Slams with the rage generated by Bloodlord's getting me back up there. Though my guild is alliance, so the DPS had Salvation.
Threat seems to be the best explanation for HS, I just thought this was a little odd. I'll check combat logs later for some numbers I guess.

This weeks patchwerk was fun, I took some of my higher stam/armor gear off in favor of avoidance gear. I was afraid I didn't get primed on the pull becausse my health was staying full, but I just dodged/parried/got missed for his first five (!) hateful strikes. All in all, he took 125 swings at me, and only landed 60 of them.

Hello again Whiteknight,

You are a genius :)
Well, at least it looks that way: because that's exactly what happened to me, the first time I faced PW in my new guild. The story had a happy ending, since it was their first time one shooting PW :)

I happened to be the MT3, the one with lowest HP (7/8 t2, while MT1 and MT2 had at least 4 t3 pieces), but ironically I also think I was the one with highest dodge/parry AND block (my block % is usually at around 27% according to recap, while the other tanks are at around 22-25%, but for that fight it was probably higher, since I wasn't allowed to use any other defense ability and I also have TF to build threat with + enchants such as +2% threat).

I think we all got hit equally, but I recall MT2 taking longer to recover, or being more of a worry in vent chat.
And yes, we were all stacked on each other from the beginning. (Next time I will pay attention, to how many healers we each have as well)

Take care and happy hunting!