First week after the patch, my group killed Netherspite after a couple attempts of getting used to the breath phase. Last night however, had about half the same people, half different, and we could not get Netherspite down because we had too much difficulty and deaths within the breath phase. Obviously blizzard has recognized some problems with this encounter and is changing it in the patch, but I'm looking for some tips that might help make this a cleaner kill until then.

Our strategy has been to have everybody run in close to Netherspite and have one Tank attempt to get aggro on him. Then whenever he starts his breath, which is a 2.5 second cast, everybody runs through or around his body to avoid getting hit by it. The reasoning for choosing this was because trying to stay at range and avoid the breaths did not seem to be working. People would consistently get hit by breaths and get killed. I think the first week we just had good luck with the Tank establishing aggro quickly, and DPSers knowing to not have DoTs up when he banished.

The problems I'm experiencing are many. First of all there is always awhile before the tank can establish aggro on Netherspite during the breath phase, and during that time he will melee the DPSers that have leftover DoTs on him, or even healers that happened to cast a heal right after the banish. These people are usually clothies and thus take significant damage from his auto-attacks. Also, because the tank himself is running through the dragon to avoid the breaths, the way the dragon is facing is constantly changing and people get hit by breaths. Even more, when he unbanishes, since he resets aggro again at that point, if a healer happened to cast a heal right at that moment, he might grab aggro, get melee'd, and die.

If anybody has had some success with this fight since the patch and would share some strategy tips, it would be beneficial to me, and probably others.

Run to the other side of the room.

We have everyone continue to dps and stay close to him so the path away from his frontal breath is shorter and it ends up being easy to dodge.

You can't tank him in his second phase. If you put a Searing Totem at the one side of the room, Netherspite will shoot most of his breaths at the Totem.

My guild tried initially to do the "stand almost on top of him approach" but it didn't work out well at all. What we ended up going with was the tanks standing inside of his hitbox (dodging breaths) while everybody else spread out around him and tried to avoid breaths. Having anybody not wearing plate / shaggy fur in melee range of him has reliably led to having to scrape someone off the floor for us. Doing this meant that fewer netherbreaths got avoided (more healing needed), but that the casters could generally DPS more without worrying about getting meleed, and that the tank usually had time to pick him up at the start of the next phase.

I really don't think you need to think this much about this fight. We just spread out and everyone just fends for themselves during this phase. In fact we have a dedicated crew of people who try and kill each other when they get the breath attack on them. We still one shot him every week. As far as the aggro goes thats not unique to this fight, it sounds like the people in your group just need to learn better aggro management. If you have a hunter though, a well timed missdirect won't hurt.

Its really easy to just run away. Tank him in one corner (we start in the corner on your right as you run in the room). When he banishes everyone just runs like 60 yards or so away. 5 seconds before breath phase ends whichever tank is gonna hold him till red spawns runs back in so he gets initial aggro, everyone else follows him 10 yards or so back.

This is definately not true, you can tank him during the breath phase. The problem is that DPSers will often have DoTs left on him after he resets aggro, and it is difficult for the tank to establish aggro over that damage, especially since when the aggro reset actually happens is rather sketchy. Our tank does establish aggro during the banish phase everytime, but it takes a little time to do so, and during that time netherspite will get in some melee attacks on the clothies that have aggro from DoTs.

Yeah, that's what we do. Problems arise when Netherspite charges people, but the tank drags him back to the door side so we usually have space.

If you're having problems with people dying because of DoTs up during the transition, perhaps you should tell them to stop having DoTs up during the transition? The length of the phases isn't random.

My shad priest had some difficulty gaining aggro in the early parts of the banish phase when we tried the "everyone in melee range" dodging strategy. i would stop dots with 20 seconds left in the portal phase and do no dps at all in the banish phase and netherspite would still melee me a couple times (e.g. to death).

I mostly concluded that aggro is only reset at the end of the banish phase and that the aggro I built up dps'ing in the portal phase was now greater than the aggro built up by the tank in the portal phase. The tank holds aggro with the 'taunt' aspect of the red portal, but once that is gone, netherspite returns to normal aggro mechanics. Is this correct?

The only solution that worked for me was to dodge breaths from outside his melee reach since he is not moving during the banish phase.

Dodging breaths is easy if you're in close to the model. However I can't quite figure out his aggro during the banish phase. We have a tank on him that tries to get aggro, and sometimes I get meleed. Almost *always* the shadow priest will get meleed.

What's a good idea for my group? Should we stop DPS earlier than the banish? Try the out-range trick?

This is the only fight in KZ that's giving us any trouble.

Sounds like two problems: Clothies getting aggro after the banish drops. Netherbreath killing people.

Stop DPS a few seconds before the banish ends, have the tank ramp his threat up to where it needs to be to keep it. If he ends up aggro'ing onto a clothie, don't hesitate to pop Blessing of Protection. If this isn't available, start spamming heals. Misdirection helps here too, but it is definitely not the total solution.

Regarding netherbreath, you have two ways of approaching this: solve it with raid positioning, or solve it by ramping up healing. Our initial problem with netherspite was ranged dps out-ranging our healers (our healers hugged, our ranged dps did not, and were knocked out of range of healers many times). We solved this by getting everyone as close to netherspite as possible; and if someone saw his mouth, they were advised to move forward and to the side, picturing a cone like effect and getting out of its way.

Our Netherbreaths still typically catch two or three people sometimes, and you just have to heal it. If people are getting one-shotted, then move your warlock to the caster group and use an imp buff to raise HP levels. Swap out BoW and get BoK in, etc. Use stam buffs, if you must. Top people off as much as possible during banish stages. We also position our healers in something resembling a triangle formation (assuming 3 healers) to minimize the range problems of the knockbacks.

From my healing perspective, this wasn't a healing intensive fight, so you should have more than enough mana to last the fight, so don't be afraid to break out the big heals for banish phases, and then regen/use efficient heals for portal phases.

Edit: Oh, and regarding aggro. I'm a believer in that he resets aggro entering the banish phase, and then resets it upon leaving the banish phase. Meaning until those portals come open and red beam is out, he's on a totally new aggro table. So if your Shadow Priest had DoTs up plus vampiric embrace (and its likely his party is already hurting, so 5-way healing), he is almost always going to have initial aggro -- tell him to stop DoTs before the banish phase is over (bigwigs is win for this, watch the timers).

More information can be found in: Karazhan - Netherspite Bugs

I take 1 whole beam phase as shadow and I never had Netherspite melee me. A hunter misdirects the tank right when Netherspite is out of banish or I just fade (in case there are leftover dots on him after banish). Agro resets right out of banish so you can nuke all you want while he is banished.

1-shotted? I've been taking ~4-5k from netherbreaths, and I'm wearing spellfire/strike...dunno how anyone would get 1-shotted. I suppose if you're Dr. Blue Beam.

How does the aggro during banish work? My understanding was that he random-targets people for Netherbreath ala Aran spell targeting, but people are talking as if that's incorrect. That's how he seemed to be acting during banish for us, and I haven't seen any clothies getting meleed during banish despite continuing DPS and hanging out in his hitbox to try and avoid breaths. We've certainly be eating deaths transitioning out of banish when he walks over and steps on a warlock or two before going back to the tank between banish ending and portals starting up again. Am I mistaken in my understanding of his aggro mechanics?

Disclaimer: We're really not progressed at all in TBC raiding, so this is the extent of our progression -- though we're working on him in Week 3 of Kara raiding, so we're not doing too badly.

Well I think that since we dodge the breath basically by standing under his jaw (hardly anyone ever gets hit by breaths) it means our dot casters and maybe me being a little bit jumpy pull aggro during the first bit of the banish stage. And since we're in melee we get pasted.

I don't want to have everyone out range him during the breaths since our DPS can be a bit light and the one time we downed him we were pushing his enrage timer. If it's a full aggro reset and we give the tank say 5-10s to get some aggro post-banish, I can call for people to re-engage, right?

Rotating beams and dodging breaths aren't a problem, just his melee attack killing squishies. ><

We just tank him on either side of the doorway. When he gets banished we all run out. You only get the breath when you go back in too early. If you wait for him to become unbanished you'll never get breathed on.

That door closes when you pull him as of 2.1.

We call it 'Bibdy-exploiting' around these parts. Named after my absolute, unequalled frustration of melee classes running through my character to interrupt my casts which require LOS. The fight is a lot of fun now. We're all running around like headless chickens and mocking the ones that get hit by the breath.

If you wait 5-10 seconds post banish, the portals will have opened and the red beam will be out, which pretty much hardlocks aggro. We typically call for this strategy, but the majority of our DPS'ers have toyed with it enough that they usually wait about 2 seconds and wait for tank aggro and then they open up with their initial softeners/DoTs, and then rip loose once red beam is played out.

Just this past week I ate 2 back-to-back 6,990 Netherbreaths. Not exactly one shot, but when you leave the Beam Phase and he breathes on someone there is a slight (read as: good) chance that they may not be at full health.

I've tried Netherspite exactly once since the patch, and it was a one shot attempt with no deaths.
Ranging the breath works really well. We tanked him close to the door (directly in between the left and right portals) and when he changed to breath phase, every single person ran to the other side of the room near the telescope. This was actually quite nice, as it gave everyone a break so they could bandage or whatever, while Netherspite just stood there looking dumb.
About 5 seconds before the end of the banish phase, the tank for the next phase would run over and get ready to pick him up. Sure you don't get any DPS during this time, but we had absolutely no trouble killing him before the enrage anyway, even making little use of the blue beam DPS buff.

During this attempt, one person stepped too close to Netherspite during the breath phase and ended up getting 6-8 of us hit with the breath, but it was no biggie since he moved back and we still had ample time to heal up. It's just important to note that Netherspite will actually hit people out of range if one person is in range.