Guide to high level PVE instances-
Bastion Stairs
Bastion Stairs is a 36+ dungeon (Best if tank is 40 though) which can be found in the NE corner of Praag. It is an open zone with 3 basic wings, numerous quests, and several bosses.
The bosses drop bloodlord gear sets, equivalent to the annihilator pvp sets, and each piece gives a lesser ward, 10% less damage from instance bosses.
There is also an influence bar that is filled up by participating in publich quests in the zone. It is necessary to complete each tier of the influence bar in order to get to each of the 3 main bosses. So the first step is.....grinding influence. I've linked a map of each of the 3 wings. Any public quests within add towards influence. The only quests that are necessary are Blood on the Steps and Infinite Patience....and they're only necessary if you want to face the final 4th boss for the chest piece. Our first group never bothered. Once the tank has 3-4 pieces of bloodlord you can move onto Blood Enclave in the Inevitable City.
Once everyone in the group has enough influence for the 1st boss you can proceed towards him in the left wing. If the group is high enough level you can usually avoid all the mobs along the way. Once the 1st boss is on farming mode this is usually the best way to approach it. Each boss will be on a 20 hour lockout timer, so it can be done approx. once per day.
Here is a map of the 1st wing I stole from the stunty stomper
Everyone zones into the portal of Thar'lgnan, and once finished can take a left and the portal back to the entrance of BS. Now defeating Thar'lgnan....
The first thing you will notice is there are numerous dogs sitting around the instance. Using ranged attacks pull most of the dogs and kill them before pulling the boss. When you pull the boss fight him roughly in the middle of the instance. The encounter is pretty straightforward tank and spank....using taunt when necessary. Occasionally he will knockback the tank and randomly aggro someone else. Otherwise its pretty simple. Defensive specced tanks shouldn't have much trouble...hold the line, taunting, etc. Hopefully you didn't get screwed and get pieces for none of the classes there.
Ok, now its back to inf grinding....once everyone has enough inf to do 2nd boss you can proceed through the portal to the right....or if you are already in there doing the inf follow the map below to the 2nd boss.
Ok, Lord Slaurith. This one is a little more complicated then the 1st boss but as long as you are on your toes it shouldn't be a problem. This is mostly a challenge for melee dpsers and healers here.
Every 10 seconds he will do an ability called Bloodpulse, a stationary dot that ticks 1/sec for 3 sec doing 1500-3500 corporeal damage per tick. It targets a random player. Now there is basically two ways to handle it depending on healer makeup. The first is to stand there and take it, its a lot of damage but if you have a good single target healer and everyone has roughly 6000 health each this can work. If someone takes all 3 ticks of the dot, they then get a debuff called bloodscent where they will get 100% hate until tank taunts boss back. This would be a good time to use detaunt(though really should be using it all the time) This is where threat management is important.
The other option is when he casts it and if you start taking damage, run away from him...it only has a aoe range of about 10 ft. You won't get hit for any remaining dots, but after its over everyone will get a dot called blood shout. It is an instant AOE dot. So everyone in the instance is hit for about 300 to 900 a tick every few seconds. If you have a aoe healer you can usually overcome this no problem.
Otherwise just kick him around and get more gear.
Ok onto the 3rd boss. Unfortunately I couldn't find a map for this one and its kind of a pain to get to. Kaarn the Vanquisher is pretty buggy but is a straight forward fight. Don't bother unless the tank has a few wards. This is essentially another tank and spank fight....however, Kaarn hits extremely hard and will rage at certain points, doing basically double damage, its usually best to have an offtank. Good luck with this one.
Ok the 4th and final boss. As I said earlier both the attunement quests need to be completed. We never actually bothered with this and I don't recommend it but for those who want to... The second quest you need to find like 100 of each of these skulls to spawn the collector. Once both quests are done you can go through the 3rd zone portal to get to Skull Lord Var'Ithrok. Don't know anything about him personally but apparently its a pretty easy fight. I guess they figure anyone who goes through the trouble of actually doing the quests shouldn't be challenged any further.
Sidenote: There are a few tricks to some of the PQ bosses so if anyone is having trouble with those we can add some info here. There are about a dozen PQs in here so plenty to do.
Blood Enclave
Coming soon....
