2014 VW Passat Wolfsburg 1.8t

It began in March. I was driving to visit a friend a few hours away. The cruise was on and as I was driving I felt myself slowing down. I thought I had hit the brake but the cruise light was still on and the cruise speed showing 65. But the speedo was steadily declining. I shrugged it off, stepped on the gas, got up to 65 and let off and it stayed. Later that spring I was out scouting for turkeys, happened to look down and see an EPC light. I had never seen it before so I stopped the car and googled it. The first hit said to shut the car off. Wait a minute and turn it back on, it should go away. Did that, it didn’t come back on, went back about my scout. All summer, no EPC light but the cruise control issue began happening more often. No frequency to it, sometimes it wouldn’t happen, sometimes it would happen 3-4 on my way home from work. I changed locations end of August and added about 15 minutes to my commute. Sometime in September I noticed noise coming from the engine compartment. Nothing I can feel, not a knock, but something like a tick bordering on a knock. It’s only audible while I’m stepping on the gas coming from a stop. It isn’t there at idle, makes itself known as I accelerate, goes away as I get up to speed and until this last week wasn’t there or at least not audible at highway speed. Mid-October I was driving home, cruise on, 60mph and could feel as I was going up a hill something odd while The car was downshifting to take the hill. I looked down at the tack and the needle was up down up down between 2-3k. I’m talking bouncing up and down fast. I freaked out and tapped the brake to kill cruise and continued on no issues. But in the last week, I can here ticking, not a knock in any kind of pattern, but a tick that’s just barely audible over road noise at highway speed and the EPC light is coming back to haunt me. I did what I did before shut the car off and light light didn’t come back on. Today on the way home came the EPC light except this time I’m pretty sure the turbo wasn’t kicking in. No whine from the turbo and it was a pooch on the road. Stopped at an Oreillys, left it running and asked them to read the code. Told him I didn’t want to shut it off to lose the code but he said it will store it. He hooked up and low and behold, no stored codes. He turned it back on and ran through diagnostics, saw no issues. He pushed the accelerator, I heard the turbo, got in and left. No EPC on the way home and the turbo worked fine but reinforced my belief it wasn’t working before. Any ideas what I’m looking at here?