I went through the 14 or so pages of the other patchwerk healing thread but most of what is discussed is with 3 OTs. We recently got to Patchwerk and the raid leader is convinced that we are better off dropping him with only 3 tanks.. MT and 2 HTs. Our first night of attempts with this strat, we got him to 20%. Had healers running OOM and just dropping. So we farmed more gear and consumables. We went back again two weeks later but this time tried the standard 3 OT strat, but our 3rd OT could barely even take one HT, and every attempt we kept losing a tank at 75%.

I was convinced that the 3 OT strategy would be easier for us, but it turned out we went a LOT farther with worse gear and only 2 OTs. I believe our healing setup was 5/9/3 or some such. Last night we tried the 5/5/5/2 and several variations but it just wasn't happening.

It's my understanding that this fight is a lot of gear, a little skill, and a little luck. Our DPS is definitely there, we are just waiting for the healers to figure it out. Anyway, I don't know much about the healing side so I'm trying to get any tips or suggestions for healing with the 2 OT strategy? As far as group composition and heals cast.. should they stagger spam or reactive heal? etc. Why did we do so much better using only two?

We usually run with 4 druids, 7 priests, 6 pallies or so.

I think 2 ots is better if you have only 2 tanks well geared, that's as simple as that. Otherwise, 3 ots give way more time to heal in my opinion.
Reactive healing is a no-no on patchwerk. If you want an easy kill, that's simple : tell your healers to get all the buffs they can (mana flask, nightfin, dark runes, mana pots, oils....) and to find a heal they can basically chain cast during 6 mins (usually gheal rk2 for priests). Then tell them to spam. It should do the job pretty good.

We use two HS tanks. It owns because it cuts out your consumable expenses by 1 set of tank potions.

Our break down is:
4/6/6

Four on MT, 6 on HS1, 6 on HS2. If you look at a log, you'll see that without fail on a two tank strat that immediately after swinging at HS1, he'll swing at HS2. Ergo, given a string where you have no avoidance from either tank, you need a perfectly equal amount of healing distributed between them. Run combat log, and if you find one such string, it will appear like this: HS1, HS2, HS1, HS2, HS1, HS2, HS1, HS2, until one of your tanks rolls a dodge parry or miss.

Our priests cast heal4 or gheal1, depending on their mana regen. The paladins and druids aim for HPS around those ranks. Just spam heal nonstop. Our better equipped healers have a rotation where they seed in renew or PW:S, but for most of them it's nonstop chain casting one spell one rank. It works out to be, from memory, about 4500HPS per HS tank (that figure may be way off the mark, I'll have to check some healing meter screenshots later).

Yeah I think that's the reason we went with the 2 OT strategy because 3 of our tanks are very well geared (4 piece T3/AQ/BWL gear) and the others are lacking in tank gear. Also a few of our healers are newer recruits that are slightly undergeared. We go in with full mana/5 and DPS consumables.. healers are popping mageblood, nightfin, mana oil, dark runes, mana pots, flasks etc..

What's a good healing setup for 2 OTs?

17 healers is definitely enough to heal through Patch, it just depends how you use them. The problem we identified with two tanks is that heals just don't come in quickly enough. It was incredibly tenuous the whole time, and it just meant that at any point in the 6 minutes, a heal or two not landing fast enough meant the other OT took a HS in the face at 60% hp.

We run with three offtanks, but we have equal healers on all the warriors, so 4/4/4/4 - some of the warriors are better equipped than others, but it basically means that the healing output on all four of them is the same, and that none of them take HS's when they're not topped up.

More than many other fights, Patch is about finding what works for you - do your healers lag or dc a lot? Are they all robots? Are you druids undergeared (lol as if)? Are all your shamans enhancement? We've gone through 3-4 different strats now, and while we've killed him with more than one of them, we are still constantly tweaking our approach to the fight to give us more control. But what works for one raid doesn't necessarily work for another, and Patch is one of the clearest reflectors of that.

Awesome Trindad that is exactly the information I was looking for. I think a lot of our healers were confused as to what rank heal to be casting and most priests were using Gheal2. Also the 4/6/6 setup makes a lot of sense.. as we were having problems with HT2 not getting healed fast enough and then getting peaced out or patchwerk turns around and whacks a DPSer.

So HT healers just spam nonstop? Overheal like a maniac? Don't interrupt cast etc to conserve mana?

Oh don't worry, it's not like patchwerk will let you overheal that much ;d
Interrupt on patchwerk is very dangerous for obvious reasons. After a few kills, your healers will "feel" when they can interrupt and that will let them use less potions and such (I heal ot1 on patchwerk with just a mana pot now, could probably do it without anything) but for a first kill, tell them to spam cast. It's not really interesting, but heh, if it gives a dead patchwerk then it's all good I suppose.

We tried doing that, and found that the loss of that one healer from one of our tanks imbalanced it and everything would fall over after a relatively small string of no avoidance. Additionally, the healer on the third HS tank would go oom by ~ 70%

What you say makes good sense.. on our best attempts with 2 OTs we had the problem of DPS getting hit by HS, and that one buffer tank with one healer would take that rare HS when the other 2 OTs aren't topped off fast enough? Hm.

Yeah, you can see it on my SCT on this video:
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=29420

Just start with a rank like heal rank 4 and adjust up or down depending on healer mana levels.

Have you tried a 5/5/4/3 distribution? Or something similiar. Even 4/5/5/3 could work.

I suppose the 2 healers on your 3rd OT cannot top him fast enough , so your first and second OT keep getting HSed two times in a row, in the event of a string of HS hits.

Keep in mind that because of HS mechanic (going for the target != MT with the most HP), the damage distribution on your OTs is not the same. Your first OT (the one with the most HP) ends getting hit the most. While the 3rd gets hit way less.

This is because of misses/parries/dodges which make it that the first OTs are at full health (hence > OT3) before OT3 would have "his" turn.

We use 3 OTs and we scale the number of healers assigned to the OT depending on the OTs position in line.

I'm going to close this thread and link to it from the other thread. At this point this is basically just a discussion of Patchwerk healing strategies.