Patchwerk

[Air]

Patchwerk is the first boss of the Abomination Wing, also known as the Construct Wing, and is one of the most challenging bosses to initially learn in Naxxramas.

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Patchwerk Stats and Mechanics

    * Health: 4,300,000
    *Melee hits: Aprx: 4-5k
    * Mechanics: This is a non-aggro fight, once the initial tank and off tank have aggro the DPS are free to put as much DPS out as Patchwerk will continue his hateful strike rotation until he’s dead or a dies. If a tank dies he will then hateful strike the next highest HP target within melee range (not the main tank though)

Patchwerk Abilities

    * Hateful Strike - Patchwerk will use this ability every 2.8 seconds on the melee target with the most health. It does 19975-27025 physical damage and can be mitigated or avoided.
    * Frenzy - At 5% HP Patchwerk goes into frenzy, doing 25% more damage and attacking 40% faster.
    * Berserk - After 5 minutes Patchwerk goes into Berserk mode, increasing his damage output by 1000%.

In reality, this is a very simple fight…at least mechanics wise. There are two difficult aspects of this fight. Number one, learning how to properly time and space your healers in such a way that your tanks are always going to be topped off before the next hateful strike lands. And secondly, doing enough damage that you kill him before the 5 minute berserk.

Ideal Group Setup:

For new players I highly recommend a group setup that includes 3 healers. With gear and experience you could certainly 2 healer Naxxramas, but while learning I believe it’s necessary to go with 3. Additionally, you’re going to need 2 tanks. What you choose to tank with is up to you, there really is no huge advantage in the class you choose for your 2 tanks.

My guild has cleared Patchwerk using death knight / warrior and warrior / paladin thus far. In my opinion the paladin tank was a bit easier simply because Blessing of Kings added a nice chunk of heal to both players. Now, if you have another paladin in the raid with kings this would not be a factor.

Maximizing Your DPS

Your DPS absolutely has to be on their A game here. Unlike most fights, additional aggro is dumped onto both tanks upon engaging, so once you have a rotation of tank and off tank receiving damage and hateful strikes you should not have to hold back at all.

Start fast with a blood lust / heroism if you have a shaman and immediately start pouring on the DPS. All DPS should use a potion to further increase their DPS (mana pot if you’re running low on mana for casters). Ideally, you’d want to have the entire raid flasked up. Granted, this may be unnecessary, but some guilds that just need that extra bump will find this appropriate.

A good benchmark for DPS in a early level 80 gear should be around 2000 DPS, while many classes should exceed this number.

Healing Rotations

There’s no right or wrong way to effectively heal on Patchwerk, but here’s how we did it and the method I suggest you try. First, we use a tri-healer setup of double restoration shaman and restoration druid.

    * One shaman watches the main tank
    * Second shaman watches the off tank
    * Druid keeps both tank and off tank hotted with an extra careful eye on the off tank, who is taking hateful strikes

Generally, the tank who is receiving hateful strikes takes more damage. For this reason the hateful strike tank healer may be running out of mana. This happened with my group initially and as a result we conducted a mid-fight healing switch. For this switch each of the shamans simply traded healing targets, so the shaman who had been healing the hateful strike tank could get a break on mana.

Since the damage is very periodic (…very small periods though), you can really time your heals for maximium effectiveness. I constantly started and stopped my healing waves throughout the fight waiting for my tank to drop to around 20,000 health (of his 27,500) before letting a healing wave go off. Using this method my mana held up throughout the fight and we were able to successfully make it through after a few practice attempts.