We've killed Patchwerk 3 times now and are very close to making him a regular one-shot. Last time we were there:
First pull--HS3 never gets his spot, DPS starts getting splatted here and there, we come up short on DPS.
I say, "Make sure HS3 gets Struck on the first round."
Second pull--same.
Healers, "what do you want us to do, just heal slower?" Me: "Well . . . obviously. You know when the Strikes are coming, just time it."
Next pull--HS1 gets struck. HS2 gets struck. HS3 gets struck. HS1 gets struck and dies.

We got him next pull, but I'm not convinced it's really nailed down yet. How exactly do people reliably handle the first 4-5 Hateful Strikes?

The third Strike of the fight has no chance of killing a tank. Do you just make sure to time things so as to not heal up HS1 and HS2 before 2.4 seconds have passed? What happens if you get Dodges/Parries in the first round?

What about when many seconds have passed and he's only taken 1? Is there any advice for healers other than, "slow down just a hair, but not too much?"

If your OT3 is dodging/parrying too much to eat one of the first HS just have him turn with his back to patchwerk so that he eats it for sure.
We're still working on killing him for the first time ourselves and we have this problem a lot too, every once in awhile OT3 is just totally ignored, but for some reason Patch doesn't HS anyone else either.

We have killed patchwerk 3 times now, we tend to finish the fight with a good 30-45 seconds to spare.

We just allow more time and wait for each tank to eat a hateful strike, most of our tanks have very similar HP (think we have a spread of about 600 from OT 1 to OT3) and with healers being a bit slack at the start we tend to get all guys to eat HS's fairly easily at the start. We thankfully haven't had to deal with a streak of dodges/parries at the start.

How is your healing balanced? Are you attempting to just maintain OT1 and OT2 for the main duration? Could be an idea to spread some of those healers off OT1 and OT2, at least untill OT3 eats one strike.

We have the raid leader, or each warrior call when they 'eat' one of the hateful strikes, and then we start dps proper. Obviously if this takes a rather long period then I suppose we'd have a problem :)

Turning a back as mentioned above is also a good idea to avoid the dodge/parry issue, I'm not sure but I believe popping Shield Block also prevents dodging / parrying (not 100% sure there, never really tested it)

A more severe measure if the healing is preventing OT3 becoming the target, although its probably not worth wasting the buff, would be to have OT3 last stand/life giving(not sure you'd have that equipped really) which could then be clicked off after recieving a HS.

We've tried that. I'm always skeptical though, because then he stops building his own threat, fo if PW never turns to him, he's even worse off than he was before. Before the melee DPS comes in, I think it's fine, but afterwards, it seems sketchy.

As far Patch not HS'ing anyone else, that's just good healing. If your 3 HS tanks are all on the list, and HS3 is waiting there, topped off, he takes one whenever the healing on HS1/HS2 slacks even a little and they're not fully topped off. If he's off the list or dead, however, then 2 tanks and a DPS are primed. In order for the DPS to get hit, the tanks have to be pretty low, which will happen much less often. On our first kill, HS3 went down early, and we went the rest of the way without losing a DPS.

Now that . . . is not bad.

Although there's no real reason for him to click it off.

Except if he gets healed again he will have more hp than other tanks and get hit again. Since he's not hit very often he will not have healers that are focusing on him and he might die.

It seems illogical that there's a danger of him dying. If he doesn't have enough HP to survive, he won't get hit in the first place.

There is also no point in keeping the HP buff on and clicking it off puts all your tanks right back in the correct order which should greatly help healers timing their heals to the other tanks getting hit.

We were experiencing problems similar to this, and we had our DPS wait about 5 seconds or so (it seems like you could wait less) before moving into range at the begining of the fight. This pretty much ensures that the first two tanks get HS'd and he is trying to HS the third tank or is back on the first when DPS is in range.

However we are having different problems on the fight now, at somewhere between the 60-30% range depending on the attempt, wehre on of our HS eaters will bite the dust (usually OT1 or OT2). Our healers are quick to jump onto the OT which is alive and we can sustain it with 2 OT's for a while but he starts slowly picking off rogues/warriors, and it leads to a wipe. We arent having peopel go OM at this point, and seem able to ssutain the fight for a while. We did something like 34% without healers using consumables last week, and we thought we would have him for sure, but didnt get him down :(. We are using something like a 4/6/5/2 and tried 4/7/5/1 for a few attempts, but our healers seem to prefer the formar rather than the latter. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Many statements made so far are true depending what type of healing strat you're using (4/4/4/4, 5/9/2/1, etc.), but they're not all true for every strat....so be careful what you do with this info.

The nice thing about 5/9/2/1 is that you don't need any timing for the most part. If you have laggy players like us, you can just put them on MT or OT1 and they can just spam heals for 7 mins. With the healers keeping OT1 full so often, it sometimes takes ~8+ secs before OT3 takes a hit (though as mentioned turning around can really help this because he doesn't target OT3 very often and you still have to wait until OT3 gets some rage before calling melee in or you'll wipe.)

Also, if you put druids in the 2/1 groups, they should have time to toss warlocks HoTs for more dps.

Now this might be stating the bleeding obvious, but; keep all HS tanks alive. Lose one and you'd be lucky to recover perfectly, if at all. There's two problems with losing a HS tank, doesn't matter if it's #1, #2, or #3: (in order of severity):

a) Assuming that no other tanks have gotten an odd HS earlier, there's no way of anticipating who his next target is. It could even be a rogue.
b) Healer timing will most likely be off, leading to him slowly starting to eat through rogues and other dps tanks as you said.

Dodge HS = Keep trying
Parry HS = Keep trying
Get hit by HS = New target
HS misses = New target

People seem to be losing touch with the mechanics of this fight as more and more guilds start to drop him - This thread is worse than the Ouro one. As gear gets better people can just kill things without optimizing.

Is there anything that compelled you to write this? Cause its not true.

Check your Combatlogs:
7/5 22:22:00.844 Patchwerk's Hateful Strike was dodged by Dexaar.
7/5 22:22:02.188 Patchwerk's Hateful Strike was dodged by Pokerface.

7/5 22:22:19.313 Patchwerk's Hateful Strike was parried by Dexaar.
7/5 22:22:20.578 Patchwerk's Hateful Strike hits Pokerface for 6175. (141 blocked)

This "keep trying" nonsense was talked about back in early july/june when the R&D forums had their legendary patchwerk thread. He'll always swing after the highest current HP target on his hateful strike list, who isn't the highest aggro (thats the MT). And yes the MT is one of the 4 on the list - just have the OT's pass him in aggro and watch the fun ensue.

Exactly.

Furthermore, we've gone over 30 seconds without OT3 being hit, or swung at. He was able to pop a rage potion and sustain enough aggro to keep in the HS.
I've said it countless times, but I've seen little evidence that HS generates threat.

HS generates rage, and rage generates threat. You need to be hit to generate enough rage, to use enough abilities, to not fall below the threshold. And the threshold doesn't require the tanks to be in the top 3-4. If you want proof of it, have your OT1, the one getting creamed by HS, stop attacking entirely. He'll stop taking HS's - I think that shows almost definitively that HS is generating little to no aggro... if you can take 1 every 3-4 seconds and still fall off the list, whats it even doing for you, if the OT3 is taking far less than that. Seriously, just have the OT1 stop attacks, it'll happen like clockwork.

Edit: I'd like to add, that it matters not if HS generates threat or not. There is no arguing that threat is required to sustain on the HS list - and whether thats self generated or HS generated doesn't matter cause the OT's will have nearly capped rage and be doing DPS and going all out anyway. Even if the act of HS'ing generates no threat, the rage it creates generates threat in turn, so it is a pointless argument.

The reason I added this edit is that it is important for OT3 to simply have rage - you can hold off on stoneshields for OT3 and save a rage pot, or you can lifegiving gem to make him temporarily #1 in HP, and have him get some threat in early.

Now that is a good idea. It'll guarantee that HS hit, and if you use LGG instead of LS it'll be up again towards the end of the fight.

Thats the behavior I was told by the tanks; I go with what I have to work with. As for peoples gear optimizing stuff, sure, but that difference in mechanic doesn't make a huge difference in healing (It merely makes the logic for predicting easier for healers, not harder).

We had a similar problem a few weeks ago. I did something a little risky as OT1 and that was getting hit by an HS, walking out of Patchwerk's range briefly while OT3 got hit and then moved back in range. Pretty high chance for this to blow up in your face, so use caution :P


edit: In response to quigon's post: While HS may not add threat directly I believe it modifies your attacks to generate more threat than usual. There's absolutely no other explanation as to why the offtanks can sustain enough threat to surpass all the melee that's doing upwards of 700 dps.

This is a pretty bad idea IMO.

We've tried both and 3 tanks is exponentially easier than 2 tanks. Sure, its doable with 1 or 2 tanks if you get lucky enough, but its much harder for healers to make efficient use of their heals since they need to use faster heals that are much harder to cutoff properly (and usually less efficient).

1 Suggestion to make sure he ignores your melee dps, have your rogues/wars before they run in to jump in the slime, it lowers them below half and they shouldn't be hit any.

Actually this is a really bad idea.

Scenario, one OT has already died, aggro 4 on list is now Timmy McFurywarrior, he has 800hp thanks to a slime bath. If OT1 or OT2 is at 801-6000 (ish) hp when a HS is due AND the other OT is on less they will die. If Timmy was on full health (lets say 5,500) then having OT1 on 2,000 and OT2 on 1,500 when a HS is due would only lead to Timmy's death instead of the loss of a valueable offtank.

How about letting DPS-warriors take the bubble bath? This would leave rogues with most HP, and I think that rogues have the highest avoidance...

I wonder if HS can hit hunter pets?

My guild has killed Pwerk many times, but 3 weeks in a row, we have had our 3rd OT take a HS and then get COMPLETELY ignored by Pwerk. We still kill it with 2 OTs just fine, but it is kind of annoying, because the 3rd OT is a safety net if you get unlucy. I am still unsure why this happens, he takes HS, but I guess falls off his HS list somehow. He is not moving out of range or anything, and we were having it work fine for all of our previous kills.

I don't know - it seems to me that most guilds trying patchwerk are going to wipe (sooner or later) if they lose a 700+ dps warrior or rogue, too. Considering you need what, 9k DPS to beat him and most guilds don't win the encounter more than ~30 seconds before enrage, losing 700 DPS is going to put him past the enrage point unless it's very late in the fight.