Patchwerk mechanics: Whoops

It appears we were wrong about the mechanics of Patchwerk. I posted about it on EJ a few days ago and got chewed out for being dumb. Here are a couple posts from Gurgthock, the GM of Elitist Jerks. The first one was from Naxx40, the new one is updated to current

Praetorian wrote:

There are only three viable targets [this was from 40 man, it's two now] for hateful strike, and these are the three people 2nd, 3rd, and 4th on his aggro list within melee range. Hateful strike will hit the highest HP person out of those 3 2. Additionally, hateful strike will add threat to the target it hits all the tanks, which helps keep these tanks on that hateful strike list. This is the reason where if your hateful tanks are low hp, he would still hateful one of them and kill them, disregarding the fact that there were melee dps with higher HP.

Typically, the threat added by getting hit by a HS is more than enough to maintain these tanks on the hateful list, however there were occasions where tanks dropped off the list due melee dps pushing more threat than what HS gave your offtanks, but that was only seen during times where you'd run the old Naxx with level 70 people.

Sinking your melee into the slime doesn't help anyone, it's just stupid and you should quit doing it.

Praetorian wrote:

Two corrections:

1) It's only the #2/#3 in 25-man, and #2 in 10-man.
2) When he HSes it actually adds threat to EVERYONE currently in the top 3 (or 2 for 10-man) on the threat-list. This is 100% transparent now. Just watch Omen or other threat-meter, during the fight. Every time he does an HS, everyone at the top of the list will see their threat jump upwards.

From what I've been reading, they are encouraging the three-tank strategy. We might try putting Everzh on the boss and have Ag and myself on Hatefuls. The reason threat isn't an issue for the DPS is because the three top threat get a massive threat boost every hateful, so DPS can go balls out after the first hateful and NEVER have to dip into the slime. The guilds that were trying the two-tank approach in 25 did so because they didn't understand the mechanic and their third tank wasn't starting the fight on the hateful list. With this new method, we stack everzh, ag, and myself on the same spot, Everzh gets a misdirect, we all smack him once, the first hateful goes out, and all three of us are set for threat for the rest of the fight and melee comes in and STAYS in... no stupid slime dipping. The only possible concern is me overaggroing with my retarded broken pally threat.

One guild actually claimed to have done this on their first night with five healers. Since the two hateful tanks only take every other hateful, the closest together each tank could take them would be two seconds, and that's an absolute worst-case scenario. With a couple of holy pallies with beacon on one hateful tank and healing the other, it's EZmode.

My own forum browsing has revealed two viable strats, the one just posted, and a modification of what we were doing last night exploiting the Warrior talent Safeguard in order to give the one Hateful soaker high uptime on 30% damage reduction.

Tonight we will be using the three tank strategy. I am a bit concerned about dividing our healers up further considering lowish throughput, but as long as we have multiple Holy Paladins (Rolandox may be respeccing; the DPS check is not a problem), I think we can manage.

The only other thing to consider is Everzh vs. Durindal as the second soaker. Everything I've read suggests that Prot Paladins are superior tanks for Patchwerk himself due to 100% uptime on blocking and the fast nature of his hits, so I lean toward keeping it the way it was. We can evaluate stats in-game though; I'm not positive where Everzh stands.

That works for me, I think Everzh has more health than me anyway because warriors are haxx. The only concern would be armor and dodge/parry.

It's also worth mentioning that our 15% last night would have been a kill if we'd known that DPS doesn't have to dip in the slime. Another benefit of the three-tank strategy is that AoE heals become viable.

Strategy? I always thought the strategy for Patchwerk was "move forward, push buttons"

No, I'm not being a pretentious jerk, that's a joke in the fighting game community whenever someone brings up a strat for whatever. As far as I know for Patchwerk any strat should be okay so long as you're not trying anything fancy.

I always assumed the same, and we one-shotted him both weeks in Naxx10. But the strategy we were using last night, having Ag as the only hateful offtank, was not working. We wiped around ten times. At its worst, he was taking 25k damage per second, and if he took three hatefuls in a row that's 75k damage to be healed within two seconds to save him from death. Fuck that noise.

A little late, I know, but who's the tank tanking Patchwerk normally?