This week we ended up at Patchwerk with 14 healers, which is a bit less than I like to bring as Horde. We ended up doing a 5/4/1 split on the OTs and 4 on the MT.

Priest/Priest/Druid/Druid/Sham on OT1
Priest/Priest/Druid/Sham on OT2
Druid on OT3
Sham/Sham/Sham/Priest on the MT

It was overall one of our smoothest kills I can recall, and the extra DPS made the kill clock in at just over 5:00 without any special buffs. Only using two mana pots on Patchwerk makes me a happy healer.

But anyway, the interesting thing that I tried from a Horde perspective... I was one of the healers on the MT, and since we were a bit light on healing there were pretty much always 1-2 tanks who were waiting to be topped off. So instead of spamming HW5 for most of the fight like I usually do on the MT, I cast mostly Chain1, mixing in some LHW and HW10 as needed if I thought the MT was dipping too much. Net result: #1 effective healing by a 25% margin, and fairly low overhealing by Patchwerk standards. Now, arguably my little 600pt hops to another tank are just causing another healer to overheal, but I'm not sure about that, and I think there's more to it anyway: The extra Ancestral procs from chain heal continually hopping among the tanks is a nice added benefit. Also, warlocks could stand near the MT stack (but not too near) and catch second or third chain hops for some free healing if the OTs didn't need it.

Granted, this requires very good gear and the right spec to be effective, or else your healing on the MT is insufficient, but with over 900 +healing and Amplify, I was getting 1300 noncrit first hops on the MT, which is enough with four healers on him. I don't think you'd want to have all your healers using chain or anything, but it's an interesting possibility to explore for at least one shaman, I think.

Interesting. I'm sitting at +800 healing (not much T3 to me yet) so that could be an interesting thing for me to try out.
You were using Chain Heal Rank 1 though and getting 1300 hops on the first tgt?

Well, with Amplify, which helps a lot. But yes, 1300-->650-->325 rank 1s assuming no crits and amplified targets. A lot of it may just be gear, which probably isn't realistic for someone who's just approaching Patchwerk in the initial stages. So just throwing the idea out there for anyone who wants to play around with it a little. I would never use chain heal on an OT, but healing the MT with HW5 I found that a lot of the time I'd overheal anyway, so I figured why not switch to chain heal to reduce overhealing on the MT and maybe help proc Ancestral on OTs?

My current set is here: http://ctprofiles.net/32681

Quick question Gurg - how much + healing did the healer for OT3 have? My experience with one healer on OT3 is that as Patchwerk selects a target a short time BEFORE he strikes, if OT3 is half hp, after receiving one heal, yet above OT1 and 2, he'll get smashed for all his HP. Granted, you'd think OT1 or 2 would die if they were in the same situation, but they always seem to get topped up in time.

We just had our first Patch kill last night. We downed Maexxna almost a month ago, but because of a mini rebuilding period (3rd geared tank quit forcing an officer to switch mains from a druid to a warrior) and a few agonizing weeks trying C'thun we had really only had 1 full raid night of attempts on him previously. Having 12 healers logged on at 7:45 (we do invites at 7:30) and fucking up the aoe slime pack twice in a row it wasn't looking too good. Thankfully, by 10PM when we got to Patchwerk we had 15 healers on and inside. Morale wasn't too good, but it was nice to see Patch again after the whole guild has been having nightmares of C'thun's room.

First pull, tanks die instantly, it was a pretty good wake-up call for our healers. After that, we managed to put him below 40% 3 or 4 times, at which point we brought in another 2 healers. The next pull we wiped at 7% due to the 7 minute enrage (2 rogues disconnected at 90%). Our mages then flasked up and after a 60% oops we finally put him in the ground. It was certainly a nice feeling and we can't wait to dirtnap Grobbulus + more in the coming days/weeks.

Onto our strategy. Due to losing our 3rd geared tank, we were stuck with 2 4/8 DN warriors, a warrior with the best pre naxx gear available and the aforementioned druid reroll sitting in blues and 2/8 DN. We stuck the Pre-naxx geared warrior as MT, having our normal MT and the other 4 DN tank as OT1 and 2. For healing we went with a 5/7/5 setup, with 1-2 pallies, 1-2 druids and 2-3 priests on each tank. It ended up being pretty stable on the kill, with no deaths until the enrage (our OT's didn't have shieldwall because of the 7% wipe). We ended up with 2 warriors, 3 rogues and 1 paladin (me, HS'd at like 2% when going in to refresh JoW) dead, and killed him in 6:30 or so. I'm looking forward to cutting down the healers as our tanks all get more geared up and hopefully bringing him down much faster.

For the record, our DPS consisted of 7 Rogues, 6 Mages, 4 Hunters, 2 Warlocks and 1 Fury Warrior, which is almost identical to our normal raid makeup except we generally have 6 Hunters, another tank and 3 less healers.

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure. Not that much. Less than most of the other healers in the raid.

In practice I think you actually want to have one of your lower +healing healers solo-healing OT3, because that job calls for intermittent use of max-rank big heals with (hopefully) pauses in between. OT1 and OT2 healers are spamming much more and downranking, and downranking is where +healing truly shines.

OT3 healer should not be healing reactively.

OT3 healer watches OT1 and OT2. If both are ever simultaneously below 100%, OT3 healer starts a heal. Then spam heal until OT3 is back to 100%. Repeat. Ping shouldn't be a major factor (unless we're talking like 1000 ping, and not 250 vs. 105 or something).

Now that I've contributed our sappy Patchwerk conquest story, I'll actually ask some relevant questions! :O

I was one of our MT healers for the kill, and I found spamming FoL 6 I ran out of mana at around 10%, which is obviously a pretty critical time. I was using Mageblood/Mana Oil/Sagefish in addition to my 38 mana/5 from gear, and chugging mana pots as cooldown permitted. So, pallies (or any other healers I suppose) who have done Patchwerk a few times, how do you balance your gear? As of right now I don't swap out any gear for Patchwerk, but would it be valuable to try and get a bit more regen at the sacrifice of some +healing? Or, would I be better off just downranking in the interim? I'm not sure if the sacrifice in raw heal numbers would be worth getting a lot more regen.

I'm currently the second best geared Paladin in our guild and was #4 in Raw Healing on our kill, but it will be a while before I see more Redemption since I am behind a wall of hunters in DKP. So basically, would I be better off with my current gear and downranking or building a regen set of gear and continuing to use FoL 6?

I guess once I upgrade my mainhand weapon and get a few more pieces of Redemption, but until then I'm a bit dissatisfied with my preformance on Patchwerk and a bit confused as to what would be the best way of improving it.

Ahh right, there's the difference then, we have reactive heals being cast. Maybe something new to try. Thanks!

Edit: We hover around 250-400 ping on a good night, but that should be ok.

Dark/Demonic Runes.

Use Nightfin instead of Sagefish.

And that's all, really. If you are running OOM at 10% that's not far off at all -- a couple more consumables and a gear upgrade or two will push you over the top.

Thanks, Gurg.

I guess I never really thought to use Dark Runes since on almost all other fights I never have a problem finishing in the top 3 in effective healing with minimal consumable usage. Hopefully I'll be able to get another piece or two of Redemption in the coming weeks to make Patchwerk that much smoother.

To gurgthock:

How much +healing does your druid have? One druid can keep OT3 up? What spells does he use?

Yeah I suppose it's just a matter of increased healing requirements on certain fights in Naxx. For example, Maexxna is a pretty healing intensive fight from my perspective, but because of its short length I'll end the fight with half mana even with chain casting over the course of the entire battle.

Typically for the fights that we have on farm status (except Patchwerk obviously) a Sagefish and a healthy diet of Greater mana pots will keep me going the whole time, which I suppose is the result of insanely efficient paladin heals. I will definitely start stockpiling Runes though for fights that I find I'm really strained.

When you single-heal an OT, that OT is a buffer. A 5/4/1 or 5/5/1 approach, which is what I favor based on available healers, basically focuses on keeping OT1 and OT2 always topped off, and they should eat almost all the HS. It's basically a two-tank strat with a third real tank as a buffer to eat an HS that would kill a DPS class if you didn't have the third OT. The single healer on OT3 is just responsible for topping him back off after an HS so that he can eat another one if/when it's necessary. Usually just two max-rank Healing Touches and then maybe something tiny if there's still missing hp, then back to waiting.

Maexxna's actually pretty light for me as far as a healing intensive fight. It probably doesn't hurt that we nearly always have 6-7 priests using PoH on their group, negating all the damage the stuns do. Hooray for overrecruiting priests.

Anyway as far as our OT3, our strategy has 5-6 shamans chainheal spamming (either R1 or R2, depending on how much m/5 a shaman has and how much he likes using consumables). Therefore, when OT3 gets hit, our druid that we assign on that tank usually only has to cast one spell, or a low level HT to finish topping after because the amount of chain heals we have through all the tanks helps replenish them pretty quickly. Therefore our OT3 healer doesn't need to have very good gear, just ability to top off the tank. Learning Patchwerk took 3 resets to do. Two and a half resets, we tried spam/cancel regular heals. Last day of the third week we switch to chain heal and kill him that night.

It works like a charm but probably depends on how well geared your shamans are. Our shamans are probably equal to our priests in quality gear, while our druids are way below both classes. Therefore it's hard to rely on using them for MT like most guilds seem to do. I like to think I have good gear but with only one tide (my own), 2 Dark Runes, and 3 mana pots, I go oom in the last 10%. I'm in line for the next few T3 so that'll stop being a problem relatively quickly.

The other thing I would add is that OT3 dying probably doesn't indicate a problem with OT3 healer(s). Especially since it is OT3. OT3 got hit a second time because the other tanks didn't get topped enough to get into first place. If the hits went OT1, OT2, OT3, OT3, then it definitely wasn't the fault of the OT3 healers. On the other hand, if the hits landed OT1, OT2, OT3, OT1, OT2, OT1, OT2, OT3 and OT3 dies, then there could be a problem with speed of healing on OT3.

That being said, we go with 2 Druids on OT3, both using HT11. The two Druids heal like Gurg mentioned, starting their casts when they know their tank is about to get hit. Because there are two of them, combined with their healing gear and amplify magic, OT3 is topped off as quickly as the other tanks. They can get away with HT11 because OT3 doesn't get hit as much, and our healers on the other tanks generally do a good job.

When all three tanks are at full health, they throw a rejuv or two on the warlocks, and do FF on Patchwerk.

We put all of our Paladins on the MT. Their basic strategy outside of consumables is constant FoL rank 1 spam with a couple of Paladins on Holy Light duty for damage spikes. When those guys run low, one will do Lay on Hands for the armor buff, drink a mana pot, and go back to FoL rank 1. Like other healers on this fight, they have gotten much better with experience and burn far fewer consumables than they ever have before.

I'd like to stress that again, this is a really good approach. Me and another druid are usually assigned to this and he's topped as fast as any of the other tanks, with less healers on him. Due to him being OT3 he doesn't take that many HS' unless OT1/OT2 healers are not on the ball, but still take quite a few. Basically damage taken is 100% 66% 33% on OT1 2 3 respectively. It does require around +800 healing to do it effectively though, the OT can still take a tiny bit too much damage like this but nothing critical.

Arawethion - you're alliance, why are you guys having those problems with lack of dps and healers running low? Something really seems strange, we did a dry run on Patchwerk and got him to 35% before any healer went oom and tanks died. We're horde, so no JoW which means you should at least be able to duplicate what we're doing and we don't have any mana problems at all once we start using consumables.

Kind of off-topic but not entirely...

We're working on patch, trying to determine the best things for healers. People in the guild are arguing that all of our healers (priests, druids, paladins) should be using flask of distilled wisdom, and to me that seems like a complete waste of dreamfoil. Basically I see giving us 2000 mana per attempt, and there's no way we'll get in 10 attempts in 2 hours, so i'd be better off converting the 30 dreamfoil into major mana pots. I did some calculations, and with the extra 2000 mana I still wouldn't have enough to uprank through the whole fight.

At the same time, that got me thinking. The most effiecient way to save mana seems to be to downrank, and if I could get something that gives say... 150 healing then i'd be able to essentially lower my rank by 1 and keep the same output.

So does anyone know if Flask of Supreme Power affects healing now? I know it didn't used to, but I'm wondering if they changed it when they changed the spell power enchant.

Someone likes his new chain lightning...

The bounced AH's make a tremendous difference - and we had 3-4 shamans on our first few kills using 8 set EF for a similar reason... you get "Free healing" and some solid AH statistics. When AH drops things are nowhere near as pleasant.

For our guild its definitely time to pull off the excess healer... that post was fairly inspiring in that regard. 1 DPS can definitely make a world of difference on timing.

Back on page 10, Rygers posted this parsed data.

Why does everyone say that HS comes every 1.2 seconds?

The damage and given time of the fight in the data above is similar to what I've observed in our fights that have lasted that long (average HS damage, total damage taken by tanks for the given fight length). So I'm inclined to think his data is good, which would indicate a HS time of 1.5 seconds.

Anyone have any data to support the 1.2 second time?

Could attack speed modifiers be the cause of extended times?

/combatlogs clearly show 1.2 seconds.

They can come as slow as 2 seocnds once in a while - but the fastest they come is basically 1.2 - and thats the theoretical limit you have to prepare for.

7/5 22:21:47.235 Patchwerk's Hateful Strike missed Dexaar.
7/5 22:21:48.438 Patchwerk's Hateful Strike missed Dexaar.
7/5 22:21:49.625 Patchwerk's Hateful Strike was dodged by Pokerface.