Prince Pwnd

This past week in Karazhan has been unusual for me - unusual in that I was actually able to attend all three nights and "finish" the instance (at least from a quest perspective). Woot! Last night we picked up at Chess, continued on to Prince, then back-tracked for an attempt on Netherspite. Again, some notes from an Enhancement Shaman's perspective:

The Chess Event
I've read strategy notes, seen the videos, but it makes much more sense after having done it once. This is a fun encounter where you basically choose a chess piece to "become," then you do battle against Medivh's pieces. (It reminded me of the quest The Fel and the Furious, where you become a Fel Reaver for a bit and your action bars get replaced with Fel Reaver-specific actions.) I chose a pawn, simply because I didn't really know what to expect - and thankfully it was pretty simple: move or attack. Funny thing is you can move sideways, so don't expect strict chess rules here. My pawn died, so after 30 seconds I ran back to the board and chose another to control. Pretty straightforward, nothing Shaman-specific here.

Prince Malchezaar
Mean Mr. Malchezaar is the objective of A Demonic Presence, so I was pretty excited to get to him and have a chance to finish the quest line. We wiped a few times due to unlucky Infernal drop locations, but in the end got him down. Being a melee DPS'er, the thing to watch for is his Enfeeble ability, which drops you to 1 hit point for seven seconds (during which you are unhealable). The strategy here is to run away from the Prince immediately as he follows up with an AOE (you'll also want to avoid the infernals). I found that facing the direction to run was the best approach while I fought, so I didn't waste any time turning before running.

The 2nd phase is when things get hairy for the tank, as the Prince summons axes increasing his melee damage and applies Sunder Armor's. This is the phase when I chose to pop Heroism and Fire Elemental, for faster heals and increased DPS - getting past this phase ASAP seemed pretty critical. The third and final phase is pretty much a DPS race, as the rate of infernals dropping increases.

Netherspite
Probably the most gadgety of all gadget fights I've seen, this encounter was pretty wild. Netherspite is a big ol' dragon that calls three portals which shoot buffing beams at him. A red beam that tanks should intercept (by simply standing in front of), a blue beam that DPS'ers should interecept and a green beam that pretty much anyone available should intercept PDQ, since it heals Netherspite at some insane rate. We didn't actually get him down, but it was clear that having beam assignments (with backups for each assignment) was the thing to do. More research is warranted, but it seems like any non-mana-dependent class would be good for the green beams since you lose mana while in it - but Enhancement Shaman are also good since we can regain more than half our mana within 15 seconds by using Shamanistic Rage.

Hopefully in some future post I'll be able to report on downing Netherspite and a few other bosses that I've yet to see/finish (Nightbane, Big Bad Wolf), but it's been great to get this far and I'm definitely feeling like any future Kara runs I get to go on will be gravy. :)