Feldon 
If nobody in your guild wants to run the Tower of Frozen Shadow progression quests, especially killing Tserinna in the Haunt of Syl’Tor for your access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone, you’re not alone.
The Quests
If you aren’t REALLY paying attention and doing things in a certain order, it is almost a guarantee that you will get gated on pretty much EVERY quest in the 3 Tower of Frozen Shadow zones.
I spent one night doing all the quest updates in sequence, and we had to repeatedly tell people “Wait don’t click that item or kill that mob or we’ll be unable to finish one of the quests.” Even so, we got gated on Alvik the Cold. The 3 ToFS zones seem almost designed to ensure that you need multiple visits to get all the quests done.
x2 Access
Some might say this is 12 month old content and all the raid guilds have already done it, but there are always folks who are bringing up new level 90’s or returning to the game who would like to have access. Just as a matter of convenience, it’s nice to have this access as the Call of the Veteran ability has always been flummoxed if you didn’t personally have it.
For those wanting ToFS x2 access, The Tserinna / Advisor fight has been nerfed a few times, but priests still get teleported and punted across the room, making this a dicey fight for groups with a single healer.
Updates from Gninja:
The Tserrina/Advisor fight should be much easier after the last update. The AEs were toned down and AEs that had interrupts (such as knockbacks) no longer affect priests. Also the rate at which adds spawn from doors was dramatically reduced. Along with a few minor changes that made the encounters break less often.
If there are other things with that fight or the quests within the tower that make it particularly more annoying please let me know with specifics and I have no problem taking a look. I just need more info than “The quests are just annoying”
I pointed out that priests still get ported and thrown a long distance:
The AE and the Summon/teleport are two different things. I can take a look at the teleport and reduce the distance it throws you to possibly help out with that.
I then brought up how most of the access quests are so easily gated:
Yes, this is what I will be trying to fix.
I will try to look into each of these sometime this week.
Still don’t have access on any of my characters because I hate doing the TOFS instances.
Remove this retarded access quest tbh, it’s pointless
why should it go? its not even that hard, can get it done in like 1.5-2hours ish, maybe less.
Why should it stay? There is no access quest required for drunder x2?
Doesn’t matter if it stays or if it goes,people STILL will not do this zone nor will the do any of the other zones that progress into Drunder and then they will go to the forums and cry and cry “It’s too hard!” until SOE bends and nerfs Drunder even more. I honestly can not wait until the crit mit removal goes into effect and these clowns that think they are going to waltz into HM drunder and start killing mobs in there get back to posting on the forums.
I personally don’t mind the access quest staying. It gave us a nice sense of accomplishment when we were finally able to pull it off last July.
It took us months of gearing up from running the tower zones, then pools/ascent/fs, then moving on to the Kael Drakkel zones and then finally we were able to take down the Tserrina/Advisor fight after many attempts. We kept coming back periodically to gauge our progress and kept getting closer and closer until we could finally take it down. We were quite happy when we finally did.
Personal i think it will be good if u no longer needed access to get into it
its a fun zone to do and when u do the casting long shadow quest you get the debuff which is a must for raiding. and eeven tho u can do all the quests to gain access in like few hrs they are all still a pain as i hate doing any of the first 3 tower zones ..
My only complaint is that there is not a way to resummon named mobs that only drop appearance gear and are part of the access quests. There should be no way to be gated from completion of the quests and have to run the zone again, period.
If you setup this zone to be access quests and knowing people all travel at different speeds on doing quests in a dungeon then why not design the mob to be respawn-able but not allow it to drop the appearance gear more then one time? I really wouldn’t give a care if it did drop the appearance gear more then once because people found a way to repeatedly spawn it so they could finish out and farm their sets of appearance gear.
@Lempo I was not making my comment in support of easier raid progression or easy mode any progression for that matter. I am not a proponent of easy mode MMO’s.
My comment stems from: why restrict access to tofsx2 and not have any restricted access to drunder when the later is more difficult and much more generally part of raid progression.
I think it would have been smarter to design tofsx2 as a nice entry into dov raiding, allowing players to gear up a little and prepair for Kraytox, EWx4’s and drunder, rather than the charlie foxtrot it is now (a HM geared 4 man farm zone to earn plat from undergeared peeps that cant run it)
oh and for the record…Tserinna is totaly hot…
@Lempo- I do think you will see a bunch of guilds killing HM haldane rather quickly, since already that fight is already the same as EM except for the crit mit req. Maybe generals as well, to a lesser extent.
“The 3 ToFS zones seem almost designed to ensure that you need multiple visits to get all the quests done.”
I’m pretty sure “are designed” is more accurate. The original strict Crit Mit gating mechanic clearly intended for players to stop and farm each cluster of three instances into the ground to qualify for the next tier up. The sporadic updates (also note the Coldain signet line behaves in a similar fashion) are intended to provide more than just a few more shards by way of incentive to fill out these groups.
On paper in a design meeting, I’m sure this sounded like a good way to make the expansion content last longer, versus having one big tier of content and having players finish their gear grind sooner.
Make TOFSx2 access easier? I chortled when I read the headline. I 6 boxed the x2 access quest a few months ago.
It’s hard to imagine 6 individually controlled players need it to be made easier, when with just myself madly hitting keys on 6 keyboards can do it. I’ll admit it was a challenge, but I’d not rate myself particularly adept at boxing either. I know others who did it long ago.
About 4 days ago we got stuck on the bride’s scorned floor. Killed the priest, died before killing Dizzana the lulled. Gated. Priest didn’t reset and she didn’t stay spawned.
GM response: Try again in another instance.
So yes it’s still very broken.
We had a problem with the mirror update for the progression quest as well but that one would likely be hard to reproduce as we aren’t real sure what happened other than one party member for whatever reason did not get the update for clicking the mirror so when we realized we had already cleared the floor. (Val’sara’s dominion) it was too late to get the update and gated.
Am I the only one seeing the hands groping her boobs?
@Dethdlr – that’s exactly how it went for my guild, and we certainly did feel a sense of achievement. On the flip side, only a few groups out of the many possible permuatations made it through those hurdles, leaving lot of people out after we already had that feather in our cap and weren’t so keen on keeping it in the rotation.
I like ToFS except for one thing, really – the 2nd zone, the one with the wedding, goes on and on and on. Especially if someone is on the HQ (and there was always someone…. arrrg) and we have to speed bump killing those waiters over and over again for wine glasses. OMG. The second zone takes twice as long as either of the others.