Boss Focus: Netherspite
In a Nutshell
Netherspite is a mostly tactical fight. As long as everyone knows their roles, pays attention and stays alive, it’s a walk in the park. If something goes wrong, you better adapt quickly or things will start to look rather grim quite fast. The fight involves precise player positioning and rotating those players in over the course of the phases.
Rundown
Netherspite will alternate between two phases based on a timer. Those phases are the portal phase and the banish phase.
Regardless of phase, there will be two abilities that you will have to deal with throughout the whole fight.
- Netherburn is active during the whole encounter, putting quite some basic stress on the healers. Shadow resistance helps, so make sure to hand some Prayer of Shadow Protection to everyone.
- Occasionally Void Zones will appear beneath someone’s feet. They last a few seconds, dealing around 600 damage per tick, Just move out of them as soon as possible.
Portal phase
This phase will last 60 seconds and it will be marked by the spawning of three portals in Netherspite’s room. 10 seconds in the phase, each portal will start to emit a beam towards the dragon. Each beam can (and should) be interrupted before hitting the dragon. This is done by a player standing between the portal and the dragon, interrupting the beam. The beams will generate different effects depending on their colour and whether they hit a player or Netherspite.
Since the Boss Focus columns are about healing I will focus on the only beam that may play a role for you as a healer, the green beam.
Standing in the green beam (named "Serenity") will apply a stacking debuff each second. This debuff will increase your healing done by 5%, reduce the mana cost of your spells by 1% and reduce your maximum mana pool by 200 per stack. As you can see this is quite massive and helps a lot if your mana pool can handle it.
Leaving a beam (and letting the stacks tick out after 8 seconds) will apply another debuff, called Nether Exhaustion. As you can see, this will make you unable to intercept the beam during the next portal phase.
However, it’s perfectly doable, and maybe even recommended, to omit your healers from beam duty completely. Any non-mana user will be able to interrupt the green beam without suffering from any ill effects. We always used our two tanks to switch between green and red, thus simplifying the whole thing significantly.
Banish Phase
During this phase Netherspite will kind of banish himself and remain mostly stationary. This phase will last roughly 30 seconds. He will melee anyone within range according to aggro and cast Netherbreath on seemingly random targets. Netherbreath will hit everyone in a cone towards the target, deal moderate damage and knock everyone affected backwards. Spread out to avoid this splash damage.
Watch out for
The player who will intercept the blue beam will receive a stacking debuff that will increase his vulnerability to magical damage. Keep a close eye on this player, he will need a lot of healing while "tanking" the beam.
Tanks that are on red beam duty are able to do beam-hopping. This means, they will enter the beam for a few seconds, leave it and re-enter before the debuff runs out. This will enable them to take the read beam for the whole portal phase without taking a too big hit to their maximum hp. As a side note, entering the red beam will heal the tank to full health. If your tank is well geared, he will hardly need any healing if he is stepping in and out of the red beam.
At the start of any portal phase, during the 10 seconds before portals spawn, there is an aggro wipe. So be careful during that time frame. Wait for the current tank to grab aggro before you start healing. Either that, or have a Fade ready.
Also, note that, at the start of each portal phase, while the placement of the portals if fixed, the colours may change on each portal phase after the first.
Healing Roles
There aren’t any hard healing roles for this encounter. As long as your tank is stepping in and out of the red beam, he will need no dedicated healer, only some attention.
However, be aware of who is tanking the blue beam. The person will need more healing than anyone else.
With this said, just heal through the Netherburn and don’t forget to watch your own health. 
Rewards
If you don’t stand in other people’s beams, watch the blue beam tank and don’t forget to heal everyone else, you may be able to acquire the Shining Chain of the Afterworld or the Pantaloons of Repentance.
Good Luck. 
