The Karazhan Guide Part 10 - Netherspite

Of all the bosses and events in Karazhan, Netherspite is the one I love the least. We usually do him last in the night and then only if people can be bothered. The fight is easy, in theory, if your raid co-ordinates. If it doesn't or if something goes wrong, then it's pretty much doomed.

There's a detailed description of it here which I'm not going to repeat. Instead I'm going to focus on the things you'll need to know as a Tanking Paladin. Tip one: don't bother with Blessing of Salvation on this fight. He'll only ever aggro on the person who takes the Red Beam.

Portal Phase

This phase lasts for one minute.

As either MT or OT, I'm assuming you'll be on the Red Beam during this phase. The Red Beam is the tanking beam, and the following rules apply to it:

Red Beam

* Perseverance (red) - Tank beam:
o Lasts for 20 sec after leaving the beam.
o Hits Netherspite:
+ Damage taken reduced by 1% per tick.
o Hits Player:
+ Netherspite will aggro you.
If no one is standing in the Red Beam, Netherspite uses his standard aggro table.
+ Damage taken is reduced by 1% per tick.
+ Defense is increased by 5 per tick.
+ Health is modified - the first application gives +31,000 maximum health, with additional stacks reducing maximum health by 1000 per stack.
+ Replenishes full health every tick.

(Quoted directly from WoWWiki.)

Now ideally you don't want to take more than 31 stacks of the debuff, so you'll have to get used to dancing in and out of the beam. The best thing to do is to strafe in and out of the beam (using your Q and E keys), returning into the beam when you need healing. In this way, you should be able to avoid getting too many stacks and ultimately dying to the splash damage doing the rounds. Don't stay out too long, or you'll pick up the Nether Exhaustion debuff and you'll be unable to enter the Red Beam for 90 secondss.

The only real complication to this is, because you're using the Red Beam for healing, you won't be getting much mana back via Spiritual Attunement. However, since you don't need to generate much aggro (you have aggro as long as you have the beam), I'd reccomend just using Holy Shield and maybe Seal of Wisdom in this phase to keep your mana up.

The only other thing to keep an eye out is the Void Zones. Like the first boss of Arcatraz or the first boss of shattered Halls, he'll peridoically spawn big black holes on the floor that do shadow damage to everyone standing on them.

Banish Phase

This phase lasts 30 seconds.

Spread out to avoid the Nether Breath cone and get your DPS to open up as much as possible on him. Make sure the next Red Beam Tank is ready with some burst threat to get his attention before the portals appear.

After a Banish Phase, he goes back to the Portal phase and resets aggro. He'll alternate between these two phases. As long as you can keep the raid alive and do enough DPS to kill him in nine minutes, you can get your loot.