My guild just started playing with Patchwerk and it seems like we are missing something on the healing strategy. We are having OT's die prematurely with heals in the middle of casting during their deaths. On the surface it seems like a pure timing issue, but I am wondering if there is something else going on here, or something else that others are doing to mitigate this.

We have 5 healers on each tank( 1 MT 2 OT ), a mix of priest druids and shamans. We made the most attempts using straight heals HT, HW, Heal without a reliance on HoT componenets. Spamming lead to mana problems very quickly and even with some basic attempts at mana conservation we were hitting 50%+ over healing. My question being: how are other people handling this? Rotations? Spam? Guess and check? Are you using max rank heals or regular raid rank?

I tried hunting through the other patchwerk threads for some concrete info on but didn't find anything directly answering this. If there is, please point me in the right direction.


Thanks in advance for the help.

you should try having some use quick cast heals with others using bigger heal. counting on a 2.5 second heal to keep somebody up that can take 2 massive hits in 2.4 seconds wont always work. i have never faced patchwork but from what im reading he HS's every 1.2 seconds to target with highest health on top of threat list, from what i gather you have to have the ot's at full health within 2.4 seconds so the HS alternate on tanks.

We had pretty much the problem you're having (give or take). There's a few things that I found really helped (though maybe you've tried them).
Firstly, you need your best healers on the OT's and move the not so great ones to the MT (this maybe isn't an issue for a lot of people, but it seems that some healers are simply far faster to react than others, and it helped more than I'd expected to have these on the OT's).
Secondly, staggering the healing can help quite a bit. What I mean by this, is that whichever OT has more HP will naturally take a LOT more HS'. What I'd do with the amount of healing you have, is take one healer off the MT, and have 6 healers on the OT with the most HP and 5 on the one with least (try to set it up, by switching food buffs etc. so that the OT with more armor is the one with more HP, as that'll help a lot on healing).
A final change which we went through (which shouldn't require much of a change to tactics) is to have a 3rd OT stood there ready to take any HS' which would otherwise 1 shot either of the other OT's. Though this is costly in terms of flasks and stoneshield pots, and can require some added complexity in terms of having the third OT get queued up as a HS target (turning his back to patch and having a few stam buffs up which he subsequently clicks off should help) and sorting healing for him (having him in a PoH group with the other OT's would be ideal, but you also need to have him step back out of melee range briefly when he takes a HS, so that he's not standing there taking them at 5k hp).
(apologies for stepping a bit off the topic of actual heals used, but for the most part I stayed well out of that side of our tactics).

We use 4 on the MT, 5 on OT1/2, and 2 on OT3. If we're 15 healers, we use 4 on OT2. If we're 17 healers, we use 5 on MT.

Healers on OT1/2 communicate with those also healing their tank to sort heals - We usually have 1-2 on OT1/2 with small heals, and the other 3 with big heals. OT3 takes longer to heal up due to only having 2 healers, but thats entirely intended; If you push OT3 above 5k hp before either OT1 or 2 are up, OT3 is going to take a HS and die.

More than anything, we've had problems with OT3 not being hit because of seriously bad luck (as in, 5+ misses in a row on OT3) or OT3 not being hit in the start because healing on OT1/2 is too fast. Other than that, things seem to go fine.

Indeed. This is in my opinion the greatest drawback of 3 OT system. Sometimes it takes 20-30 seconds before HSTank3 gets hit which is time that the dps is wasting swimming in goo. This last run it worked perfectly and HS1, HS2, HS3 all got hit on the first pass and unsurprisingly it was our fastest kill at a touch over 5 minutes.


I believe on our last few kills we have had.
HS1 = 4 healers
HS2 = 3 healers
HS3 = 3 bored healers
MT = 5+ healers depending on raid but 5 is sufficient.

We use primarily paladins on the MT, and put druids/priests on the OTs.

We told the OT healers to use a 2k heal, whichever it is, and that's all there was from the management side. I think we use 5/4/3ish.

On a personal note, the trick for a healer is to put the group window(for whichever group has the tanks( right next to both the casting bar and the target health. Whenever you see the other OT take a huge hit in health, have a heal casting to hit your OT (third ones do not apply I suppose, I am always on the main OT). I time it so my heals start just before the other OT is supposed to get hit, but you could react to the other OT being hit and start.

After a half dozen attempts your healers will get good at this and thing will go smoother. Up until this fight, healing wasn't nearly structured enough to force people to be good at doing the heal/stopheal thing, so there's a bit of a learning curve.

since our guild is Australian and we all have 500ms+ ping we have found really that the only way to do it is just to spam efficient heals. We have to cancel heals about 1/4 through casting to get them to actually not land so it makes it pointless to even try cancelling. We use pretty much all forms of buffs/consumables available and we use 5 healers on the MT and 5, 5, and 1 on the OT's. Thinking about maybe changing though, due to the fact that the 3rd OT sometimes drops off the HS list due to not being hit early on.

But in any case it is possible to do it by just spamming heals on the OTs.

There is a mod called Fastcast which helps greatly with compensating for oceanic latency, several of my top casters use it. I couldn't imagine trying to cancel heals without it.

yea we use fast cast which enables you to chain cast a lot better. But it doesn't help you to cancel heals, what it does is cancel's heals earlier for you so you can immediately cast another, except the heal you cancel actually goes through.

But with oceanic latency, say you start casting a heal and 3/4s through, the MT is on full health, you go to cancel it but the spell will still go off. If you want to cancel it you need to basically need to do it abuot 1 full second before at least, which is a bad idea.

We had a lot of attendance problems because of the summer on healers, and we got no real progress on PW for several full raiddays on him. Then we changed our healing tactic completely: we just zerg heal OT1 with most HP and best gear. So we have 8-9 priests/shamans chaincasting 1500-2000 heals for the full fight nonstop on him, no interrupts, no breaks. We have 4 healers on OT2/3, and they heal one target only at the time, rest on MT. Result was a kill in few tries, and it has worked since then. This tactic allows us to have some hunters/locks playing the priests who are missing, since OT1 healing is just spamming 1 button for the full fight mindlesly. It's also cheap tactic for healers, at least I have never used a flask there, superiour mana pots/mageblood/oils/some fish food are enough even without a shaman in your group, all the innervates are used by druids themselves.

Fastcast has an option to adjust the casting bar to end when it actually finishes casting, which makes it much, much easier to time a heal cancel in high lag situations.

We run with 4 MT healers, 10 on OT1 and 2 on the backup OTs.

The OT1 healers do end up with quite high overheal but we have found you cant really go below 10 if you want to consistantly heal the HS damage before the next one hits.

If healers are running oom on patchwerk they arent using all the consumables they could, or have awful gear. Making sure to drop a potion as soon as your mana is low enough for it to not be wasted can allow you to use one more in total during the fight, which helps undergeared healers alot.

We use 3 OT's, healers set up as 5-4-4-2 (priest and druid on the 3rd offtank). One of our HS tanks was constantly parrying/dodging, and was repeatedly breaking the HS chain. Somewhat ironically because of his constant avoidance, we put him on MT duty and it clicked into place. DPS was able to engage a couple seconds after the pull and the HS tanks stayed locked for the whole fight.

We're doing him for the first time this week and I'm gonna try with one OT.

anyone got experience with doing it this way? read up a bit about it and to me it seems like the easiest (and also cheapest) way of doing it. it will require some serious organization of timing the heals.

Do people wait until the third tank gets Hateful Strike? Seems like a waste to me. We go after the second HS in any case, and thats always worked fine except when OT3 doesn't get primed bc. of miss-spree or overhealing on OT1/2 and then things are screwed anyhow.

We tried a few times with 1 ot, it seemed really hard with less than 12 healers. I suppose it can be more reliable with paladins spamming 1.5 sec heals.
I still think 3 ots is the easiest way to do the fight, especially on horde with shamans's ancestral fortitude. We use 5 healers on mt (3 shams 1 druid 1 priest), 4 on ot1/2 (2 priest 1 druide 1 shaman) and 3 on ot3 (2 druids 1 shaman).

12 healers on the ot off course, i wouldn't even clear the trash to patchwerk with less than 16 healers in raid :)
5 healers on mt is nice, you can probably use only 4 after a few kills I guess. So even with 17 healers, you'll still have "only" 12 healers on your one ot and even less because you'll probably assign 1 or 2 to heal the remainings OTs who WILL take some HSes.
When we tried the 1 ot strat, we had 5 healers on mt, 9 on OT1 and 2 on OT2+3. It didn't work at all ;x Even with the 9 healers spamming 2.5 sec heals without any cancels, OT2/3 took way too many HSes.

We do the fight with around 17/18 healers now, after changing strats this weekend, 4/5 on MT, 5 on OT1 and 5 on OT2, 3/4 on OT3 (depending on what geared tanks we have). it means dps are pushing it right to the limit with regards to his enrage, but it makes for much much more reliable healing as you can afford to have one of them mistime a heal (generally due to lag spikes >:( ) and the OT still wont die.

Its very very important to spread out your best healers within the group tho, dont put them all on MT/OT1 as they can make up for undergeared healers on the other OTs

ah fair enough :)
The plan is to bring 17 for the first tries, use 4 on the mt, 13 on the ot (who will be the one with the most hp), not use any other ot's. There will probably be a second ot standing in full tank gear and buffs but he's not suposed to take hits and if I see a single heal on him i'll remove that healer from the raid after a warning that the rest can see. with 13 healers on the ot i'm sure that after a few wipes we'll be able to keep up the steady, huge flow of heals needed to make the ot take every single hatefull strike. hope I don't get banned for talking about a fight I haven't tried yet, i'm doing it this week and hope I get away with this as theorycrafting.

Then why have him there?

because I don't expect it to be flawless the first try and getting an extra life is worth alot.

If I had 17 healers, I'd almost want to try 5-3-3-3-3 just to see if having 4 HS OTs would do okay at limiting overheal.