A returning player attempted to zone to Anguish last night, one who had absolutely never done Anguish to loot the Seal of Mastery or had done any of the six raid trials to create the Seal via the normal way, and had not completed his signets yet. He was given a message along the lines of 'Although you have the key to anguish, the caustic environment inside is too dangerous'. This message suggests that he is flagged by the older content unlock, but it appears that Anguish is still requiring characters to finish their signets in order to zone in. This seems like a bug or an oversight to not require the trials or the backflag, but to still require the signets when they are not needed on live servers for the similar older content unlock. Could we get a clarification if this is the expected behavior or if this is something in error please?
On the progression servers, you still need the signets to zone into Anguish. Considering we're up to Buried Sea and requirements for Time and Tacvi were removed a long time ago, it stands to reason that Anguish should be unkeyed as well.
The level bypasses are just that, level bypasses. As a rule, the original flagging mechanisms still work just fine. However, in this particularcase, you cannot complete signets without being level 69 first (minimum level to zone into Riftseekers Sanctum), so they are indeed pretty useless on normal servers.
This is why from the moment they announced that specific unlock by level all those years ago, I was saying it should be 70 (or at the very least 69), not 68.
I can confirm you still need signets to enter Anguish. You don't need the raid flag, but do need the signet quest done. It's not that big a deal, we got a toon done in 1 day. We had to do this just a couple days ago, so as of December 27, 2013 you still needed signets done. He tried to zone in without sigs, and got the message. We did sigs, and he can get in fine. We've helped a number of guildies through them to catch up. It helps with the bonding that goes into members anyway. As someone on progression server living with this, I have no issue with requiring it to gain entry to the zone. It seems to me any raid zone should still require the group / solo tasks to enter it. It's part of what makes the raid zone worthy of recognition over open world zones. Removing the raid requirements on old content, I can see. It's not practical to think people will go back and raid flags. But even there, there's usually backflags available.
With the next expansion bringing group gear that rivals or exceeds anguish gear, I'm fairly confident in saying that this is an oversight and it would make sense to unlock anguish completely by now. But it will probably happen in whatever expansion it originally happened in.
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=13137 4/17/08 midway between SoF and SoD releases was the original date. Yther Ore.
