Devil in the Details: Velious Progression
Destiny of Velious introduced an unparalleled strict progression to both its group and raid zones. Players wanting to group up in Velious instances have discovered that there are 3 sets of group zones which each require completing the one before it in progression before being granted access.
For instance, you must clear Tower of Frozen Shadow: Shadowed Corridors to gain access to ToFS: Umbral Halls, which must be cleared to gain access to ToFS: Haunt of Syl’Tor. And aspiring raiders must clear all 3 of these group zones in order to gain access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone. And as we also saw in The Shadow Odyseey expansion, raiders who wish to take on the most difficult x4 Raid content in Velious must first acquire a clickable debuff item by clearing the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2.
With such a daunting interdependency on all Velious zones from group instances through x2 raid and onto the x4 raid zones, you would think that Progression Quests would have been fully tested through QA and ready for players on day 1 of the expansion. Alternately, you would expect that if bugs were discovered, some of these quests would have been passable through other means. Any MMO is going to have adjustments, tweaks, nerfs, etc. after the launch of an expansion. But it’s quite another to release content that MUST all work smoothly end-to-end, yet doesn’t.
Necretia the Widowmaker
Tuesday’s Update restored Necretia the Widowmaker, a boss of Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 nearly a week after she was removed from the game due to two problems. First, it was noticed several weeks ago that she could be killed and respawned. However it was when an extraordinary item on her loot table, the Necretia Bow of Webs was discovered that she was despanwed. This bow had inflated stats and effects such that it was equivalent to a “level 300 item”. However the issue here is one of progression. Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 cannot be completed without her.
It took several days to get this resolved, and guilds who had already started the zone must wait for their zone to reset and start over to get a chance at fighting her. Until then, certain guilds remain unable to raid Velious x4 content through no limitation of their own.