could you link your gear/profile please?

Hrm, well, eight days ago we killed Patchwerk for the first time, a day later again we killed him again with pretty the same setup,

1 Paladin, 1 Priest and 4 Druids on the MT
3 Priests, 3 Paladins on OT 1
and 3 Priests and the last Paladin on OT2,
1 Druid healed OT3 alone the rare occasion he got hit.

Well, our second kill, when we were prepared for another night full of Patchwerk wipes we surprisingly killed him in our first real try(only to wipe 4 times in a row to Grobbulus, but that's another story).

Anyway, after today's reset we thought it'd be safe to go in with 16 healers, as we normally raid only with 14-15. We drew of one druid of the MT (as many guilds seem to be safe with even 4 healers on MT), and well, we failed, until we got another druid in our raid and the following try healing worked like a clockwerk.

About 20% of our priests and half of our druids were recruited recently and are thus not very well equipped (lower than t2, probably), so this might be an explanation, another is that our guild's priests heavily rely on Flash Heal (we even had to persuade some to skill GH to 2.5s casttime for Patchwerk), and there might be missing something. Anonther thing that stroke my mind: Our guild has a very unstable performance. There are days we kill a farm boss like Anub'Rhekan in our first try without any problems, and then we're going to wipe at the same boss a week later for 3 hours, so we might just have had a string of bad luck.

Well, the question I now have, does anyone of you see a method how we could reduce the healers needed for this fight?

Woot! Just downed patchwerk 1st time! Thanks EJ forums, you guys gave a lot of good strats that helped us do it.

@kruci http://ctprofiles.net/1580027 is what i use for patchy.

@jixani: i doubt you can get below 16 healers. we always go with 17 and don't use heavy dps pots any more, just mongoose/wizard oil etc and he dies fast enough.

thx heaps, i didn't realise i was actually undergeared (compare +heal / regen )
from your regen alone you get an extra ~2.8k mana on the patchwerk fight... >,<

Ah well, that makes me feel 2 things now:
not so bad that i struggled to keep up for mana
and bloody pissed off we don't do C'thun...

:P

Interesting choice on Ring 1 ;P

meh, if you do the profile in ctprofiles, theres a list of all the possible rings on all rep lvls. not sorted or i did not find the pattenr immediatly. cba to scroll for the right one, but you hopefully know which one i am using ... although i do have the ony trinket banked for pvp shizzle. :D

We did it with 16 yesterday, and even 15 because one was ld from 90 to 10% or so. 5 on mt, 4 4 3 on ots. Actually, with enough gear you could probably reduce this to 4 on mt and 3/2 on ots 2/3. Yesterday's kill was not a flawless kill, no death but healing was hard especially because of the healer ld on ot2, ot1 took 2 hs in a row something like 3 4 times during the fight and it would have been a wipe 1 month ago. But with 2 5+ t3 warriors as ot1/2 you can do many more mistakes :)

Would be interesting to see what is possible on this fight.

We one shot him on Tuesday with 15 healers. 5 Paladins on the MT, 5 on OT1, 3 on OT2, and 2 on OT3. We also had tanks take a second HS before they were fully topped a few times, and lost one tank about halfway through the fight. Without gear upgrades that we've gotten on tanks and healers (allowing slightly bigger heals on average), combined with experience, it wouldn't have happened. We've healed the MT with 4 Paladins on him before, so I also think 14 is a possible number to do this fight with, given some decent gear and experience upgrades from doing the fight a few times.

It would be interesting to see what a full raid geared in tier 3 could do it with.

Our last week's kill had 13 healers, but took a lot of refining to figure out what healing mixture worked well, it was actually our most painful Patchwerk in weeks; going from 1shotting weekly to 2+ hours on him because of healer numbers. We just got our first Thunderfury, and it does indeed remove the necessity of 1 healer on the MT. 5 used to be the number for us (4 was much too tight, a big hit would kill MT), but TF and 4 healers is like 5 healers no TF. Normally we have 14, and that makes it much easier. Before TF 15 was our "gold" number.

Pre-TF:
5:MT 4:OT1 3:OT2 3:OT3

Post-TF:
4:MT 4:OT1 3:OT2 3:OT3

Last week (Post-TF):
4:MT 3:OT1 3:OT2 3:OT3

And yet I've managed to do it every week for the last 6 weeks since I changed my approach. First 2 kills were kind of painful but the efficiency of the healing was probably excellent.

I did run OOM around the 6 min mark on this week's kill and had to spam H2 for about 20s before I got an innervate but that's probably because we took longer (made the kill @ about 7:20 - Patchwerk enraged - 8th kill - evasion tank'd - 16 healers) but I ended the fight mind blasting/smiting away @ Patchwerk with 3-4k mana. Don't usually get an innervate - but I don't remember a single blue dragon proc (usually use Royal Seal) and I misclicked my first rune and didn't notice until about 2 mins mark so used 4 MMPs and just 2 runes.

With full buffs, I regen @ about 245+ mana per 5s (counting Blue Dragon @ 16 mana tick). I probably use 40k mana on this fight. The only time I get outside of the 5s rule is with each of my Inner Focus casts. My gear's nothing special, I did this fight in full Trans and Benediction once (I like Trans for trash and some bosses) and used exactly the same approach.

In practise, it shouldn't be possible.

As for our Paladins? They have a free cast every 2 mins, they have as much mana tick as I do and every time they crit, they get their mana back. I think ours are mainly using HL6 for the heal per second rather than the slightly more efficient Flash of Light.

No, heh. No casting regen talents/gear. Spirit is quite horrible for them

Strange thought but when you assign healers to tanks, do you try to make sure they're all the same type? I.E. all priests on one tank, all druids on another, all paladins on a third. As I see it, when HS tank 1 goes from 10k to 1k, you don't want him pushed back up to 7k by the time another tank is healed back to 6k, because you'll lose both tanks. What you might want is everyone to be synchronized in healing, so they go straight from 1k back to 10k.

We're not at that fight yet, but I'd like to be ready for that time.

I like to spread around the healers, so that we have priests and pallies and druids on each (except OT3). My reasoning is that synchronized heals is exactly what you don't want...it's great when those synchronized heals all land half a second after a Hateful Strike, but horrible it lands two seconds after one. I prefer a constant stream of heals.

6 healers on the tank is overkill. We dont have a thunderfury or a tc/nightfall dummy, and we use curse of recklessness too; 4 healers keep him alive comfortably; with some effort 3 would be enough too. Main tank healing is kinda old school there, no spamming.

If you sit down and do the math for hateful strike, it becomes really really obvious really really quickly why you don't want all your priests on a single tank. Or shamans if you're horde, still really obvious.

Hmm, fair point, if the synchronized heals were spread out across the hateful strike boundary, and that could happen easily with healer response time... Thanks!

We might possibly be one of the only guilds to do Patchwerk with 3 tanks total(1 MT, 2 HS OTs). Being one of the early guilds to kill this abom, I personally think we figured out PW purely on luck and a power healing strat. I don't even think we had the mechanic that the Highest HP gained the hateful strike at the time, we just thought 'random aggro' triggered this event.. Luckilly our strat paid out and we killed patchwerk for 2-3 weeks straight before realizing the actual mechanics of the encounter.

Basically, we have the basic engagement of patchwerk, the OTs and the main tank establish themselves and we set up healing with 4 healers on the Main tank(Up to only 1 priest) and 5-6 Healers per Off tank. Basically we spammed our most mana effiecient heals(Heal rank 2/4 Gheal 2 for priests, holy light 4/5 for paladins, druids used healing touch 4/5/6) on the tanks and hoped for the best. The outcome was a dead patchwerk less then a day later. We never used the 'spellstopcasting' method, basically by luck we'd have the hateful strikes lined up OT 1 and OT 2 always, and if a tank did take a second hateful in a row, our heals would be so constant flowing we'd be able to heal a tank through 2 hatefuls a good bit of the time(mind you we did have issues and we still ended up sometimes using 1 tank at the end of patchwerk and healing him through 40% or whatever to 0%).

This strat, however, with the healing power we had in the raid(16 healers with 7+ priests, 6 or so works depending on your healing setup. Make sure druids priests and paladins/shamans are staggered) works. Just requires 3 geared tanks with 75% MIT and constant spam of heals(most mana effiecient spells). Non-stop casting, no room for stopping. Of course all the healers use mageblood or some regen consumables, but running out of mana was never an issue as long as you maintained using mana effiecient heals. Requires all priests to be inspiration spec, however, to keep the MIT at highest.

Oops, shoulda seen this a few days ago.

I can see a little bit more clearly how you're making it that long. Like I mentioned before, 7 minutes of GH 1 is approximately 52k mana and 168 casts. You're hitting 40k mana usage (approximately 130 casts with 3 inner focus casts). Do you have a lot of latency/lag on your server?

Do you have any profiles of your gear and that of your Paladins?

Doing a little math...

On one of our last Patchwerk kills, I got the following damage numbers for a fight that went approximately 6:20 (I wish I could remember the exact time).

MT = 482k damage or approximately 1270 DPS
OT 1,2, and 3 = 468k, 314k, and 226k respectively for a total of 1,008,000 damage or approximately 2650 DPS

Influences on these numbers are going to include inspiration procs, enrage damage and usage of shield wall during this, and again, level of gear, spec, etc.

Figure between dodge, parry, and misses, a hit only has about a 60% chance to land. Normalizing the damage coming in to assume no misses (worst case scenario), and you're looking at approximately 4400 DPS on the off-tanks, and a little over 2100 DPS on the MT. Now, add in a factor of safety, and that gives us an idea of how much HPS we would have to maintain on the tanks steadily over 7 minutes to keep them up.

So as a really rough estimate, I'd guess if you can maintain 2500 healing/sec on the MT and around 5000 healing/sec on the three off-tanks, that's probably a good baseline target, and pretty reasonable to hit with 15 or more healers.

Anyway, it would be interesting to see a total damage taken and fight time for the tanks, and see if the numbers are consistent. (If your tanks hit the 7 minute enrage, don't include them.)

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who gave some tips and advice in this thread. We downed patchwerk on our third pull tonight!

May I ask what the little Addon at the bottom of the screenshot is called?
I've modified the "Spirit Versus Intellect"-Titanbar Plugin to suit my needs so far, but this one sure does look a lot more useful.

So as I understood it, there are 2 prevailing ways to approach this fight:

1. Spam OT1 with many (preferably 7+) healers, so he will be healed within 1.2 sec preferably and 2.4 at most (when the OT2 and OT3 take the damage)
2. Place 4-5 healers on each of the OT1, OT2 and OT3 and each of these 3 will take comparable damage, save for dodges, parries etc.

Now, we tried both of these yesterday, and faced a following problems, rather due to coordination than gear/mana:

Strat 1. People already mentioned it, it assumes these 7+ heals will land at different times, which might happen but its really luck dependent. Our OT2 and OT3 were getting hit much more often that these (few) healers could manage. We were using heal rank4 which was possible to chain cast for 7 min.

Strat 2. We tried to start casting after the OT was hit, but -as someone mentioned above - pure reactive healing is essentially not possible due to server lag/human factor etc. Even though it looks good on paper, me (priest) was hardly able to land this heal within 3.6 sec, and one error of one person lead to the death of OT. The good thing was, we were outside 5sr for quite a while (like 20%) so never got into mana troubles.

Now, I am thinking about a following setup for tonight. Put 4/5/5/2 healers on MT/OT1/OT2/OT3, and ask them to chain cast without interruptions. You guys think it will help? after all, its another variant of strat 1., but with less healers on OT1....