Veil of Alaris is generally considered a difficult expansion. All the zones are unlocked so there is nothing stopping you from jumping straight to Tier 4 zones. For the group side progression is gated by Skill with Alaran language, it controls what spells you can buy, what armor you can make, what quests you can request, and what AA you can purchase. For the raid side keying is done by evolving Records with raid wins. A raider only needs to keep their record and click it after each victory to be able to go on future raids, no dealing with a certain number of keys. Furthermore VoA introduced raid currency allowing for raiders to accumulate enough to buy any item from a raid they've defeated even if the item had never actually dropped.