Playing with Fire

I have this issue too and it's a real pain.

Exact same problem. There are plants around the statue and the quest never triggers.

I've run around the statue at least a hundred times at various distances, speeds, and with all of my characters and it absolutely refuses to trigger.

I've watched videos of others doing it so I know I'm not doing anything wrong, I've got the letter from the body, I'm moving in the right direction, and I've covered every reasonable distance from the statue itself. I did notice that there are no plants around the statue in every one of the videos where I've seen the quest completed properly. I tried lowering my graphics from Ultra to very low, and every setting in between hoping the plants would go away, and they remain even at the lowest settings.

Whoever put those plants around the statue broke the quest. They need to be removed.

EDIT: Fixed. Turns out it wasn't the plants at all, it was Mantle. I switched over to DirectX and the quest suddenly worked. If it's not working for you, switch over to DirectX. If you prefer Mantle, you can switch  back once you complete the quest.

Note to devs, Mantle breaks this quest for some reason.

do any of you have the quest marked as the active quest in your journal?

and are you running around the statue in a clockwise direction?

always keeping the statue on your right side?

and do you have your party members stand a little bit away, and hold postion while

you, as your main character, run around the statue in a clockwise direction?

Yes to all of that.

I'm not using a guide to play, so I wouldn't have even known about the quest if I hadn't activated it by picking up the letter from the body. It was incredibly obvious what I needed to do, so I didn't look the quest up online until it failed repeatedly to work. It was then that I learned that others were having similar issues and that it was a bug and not something I wasn't doing.

One of the very first things I did was use the hold command to keep my party out of the way. I spent more than an hour trying to figure it out trying various settings, characters, distances, and speeds. I restarted and tried every graphics configuration from ultra to very low. Nothing worked. I know the difference between left and right and the difference between clockwise and counterclockwise, so that wasn't the problem, I had referenced Youtube videos of people completing the quest to make sure I was doing it correctly and I definitely was.

I fixed it by switching from Mantle to DirectX in the Display options menu and restarting the game. The quest worked immediately after doing so on the very first try.

I had saved just before activating the quest and switched it back and fourth between Manlte and DirectX loading the save just before activating the statue to confrim this was what fixed it. It continued to refuse to work using Mantle and immediately activated using DirectX. Mantle breaks the quest, but it works fine in DirectX.

The problem is Mantle, I don't know what it does, but using it does something to prevent the quest from working. I'm not sure if it does this to everyone, or just people on certain configurations.

I'm running a 6Gb 7970, and i7 3770k, with 16Gb Ram, on Windows 7 if anyone from Bioware is interested in my config for reference purposes in regard to this bug.

I don't even have mantle as an option, I'm running in Direct X 11.  For my human warrior, this quest is broken.

Edit:  User Yentsee found a fix for this quest: Circle the statue on horseback 3 times and it will work.  Seems to work every time.