For the List of Buckets

So on Monday my guild did something insane; they listened to one of my ideas. We had sixteen people and had just tried (and failed) to locate an alive version of the Revanite Command Walker following a Temple of Sacrifice run and were after something else to do. I jokingly suggested 10-stack Dreadtooth.

It's in situations like this that I now plan to have one of the Cat's quotes from Red Dwarf on immediate standby: "You're going to go with one of my plans? Are you nuts? What happens if we all get killed? I'll never hear the last of it!"

Red Dwarf has so many quotes which suit a good number of our guild's extravaganzas.

Long-story short, we did eventually kill it on the third attempt, resulting in me completing the Big Game Hunter Achievement at long last; this was the Achievement which has formed the main spine of a sort-of "bucket list" of Achievements or stuff to do before SWtOR ends. With this having been accomplished, it's time to start focusing my attention to other Achievements on this list.

There's just one small problem; this list never actually existed as a proper list. It always just rested on my desire to complete Big Game Hunter and, until last year, I Am Death Incarnate.

With these two big Achievements now out of the way, it's time to actually create a proper official bucket list. Some of the items included are Achievements, while others are more random bits-and-bobs that I've had on my mind for a while without being 'official' Achievements.

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I Mean It! No More Bormu!

Bormu are one of my favourite species in SWtOR. I don't know what it is about them, but something has always made me rather feel sorry for them with their home being turned into a never-ending battlefield.

So of course they also form the crux of one of my least favourite Achievements in the entire game.

This is the third Achievement for killing Bormu on the plains of Balmorra, and this particular one requires you to kill a grand total of five hundred Bormu.

Firstly, no, how dare you. Secondly, good lord that's a lot of dead Bormu.

This one is not at all hindered by needing a group or anything like that; this is just requiring me to get one of my (preferably Imperial, given the amount of Bormu on Imperial Balmorra compared to Republic Balmorra) characters off their arse and send them to just grind the ever-living whatevers out of the peaceful caterpillar-stegosaurus-hybrids until the Achievement finally pops.

Which I guess makes it all the more frustrating, but oh well.

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Gearhead

Gearhead is one of my targets for one main reason. Accomplishing it requires getting to Legend rank with the Reputation faction associated with the Heroic Space Missions; this is something else which I've wanted to do as it's the only Rep faction which isn't at Legend, but as doing this leads to Gearhead I thought I'd lump them both together rather than keep them as separate entries.

Wasting words by repeating myself is a habit of mine on this blog, but this time it shall be avoided!

This target has become a lot more feasible with the advent of Galactic Command. If it weren't for the Crates having a chance to drop the Space Mission Reputation trophies, I would still be stuck at just on the cusp of Outsider. Thanks solely to Command, I'm now just entering into the final 30k to get Legend.

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Lord of the Raklings - Completed on 2nd June 2018

Long-time readers of the blog may remember that in the early days of the Rakghoul Event I would make a post about it every time it came up and that each time without fail I'd mention my hope that I'd get the Symbiote Rakling - the final pet I need for the Lord Achievement - at long last.

As you can work out by the fact that I'm including this Achievement in this list, this pet still eludes me even though the Rakghoul Event has become far more common since 4.0. This is because of three factors: The pet is still a rare drop, I've developed a severe aversion to Pugging, and in general the Rakghoul Event lost its charm a long time ago and this has caused many veterans to just stop going there altogether.

Although I am glad to not be getting up close and personal with the massive backside of the Eyeless every time the Event's up nowadays. Unlike the first year...

Update:

Finally this Achievement has been completed, courtesy of the generosity of a Guildie who won the pet who already had the Achievement.

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Divine Demolition

This one's not an Achievement, but something I was planning to do the moment it became clear what specific drops from Gods from the Machine would allow Players to do.

If you aren't aware, the most recent Operation has four boss fights which drop "Control Modules" for all five of the humanoid 'Godkin'. These can be used to create copies of the associated boss's power cores and these can be used to become a copy of one of the bosses. The player-boss can then romp freely around Iokath for an hour and can be used to kill mobs and even Players (there are Achievements for doing the latter with TYTH, ESNE, and AIVELA, by the way, but these aren't things I desire).

Ever since this became common knowledge, I devised a scheme to get myself and four guildies to become each of the five playable bosses (NAHUT and SCYVA being the remaining two) and just have fun on Iokath for a bit, be it just taking screenshots or bringing the wrath of the Gods down upon either of the two Colossus Droids.

Sure, the guild has changed a bit since my initial plan, so not everyone I'd originally envisaged being there will be there, but I'm sure I can still get the majority of these people to tag along (I already know of one, maybe two, at this stage). Then the Gods shall descend and make everyone weep with unworthiness! Else they shall be smitten with Rage, Envy, Passion, Apathy (I guess...?), and Sorrow.

Not an Achievement, but just something silly that when all is said and done I would regret not having done by the end of SWtOR.

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The Astronomical Odds

The Czerka Crate-O-Matic is infamous for its very low chance to drop, and I for one don't actually know if it can still drop from anywhere or anything or whether it's now been tied to specific locations in recent Updates.

Even though I do now own the Achievement for 'finding it' - in reality, of course, I was given it by a guildie for a few seconds - actually finding one myself is something that I've been wanting to do ever since I learned about it. A fool's hope, to be sure, but it would still be an accomplishment to be proud of.

Pride and accomplishment, damnit!

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Fully Operational

Basically this pertains to killing every single Boss in every single Operation and difficulty mode.

This was technically already completed prior to 5.2, although I'm not counting my sixteen-man Veteran Coratanni kill as a 'true' kill: I was invited to it after someone in an originally-eight-man group (who I believe was rather drunk at the time) suggested turning the Cora pull into a sixteen-man as the Guild already had the eight-man kill. With not enough people from the second main team being online, I was one of two people invited just to fill space and was, at the time, very much the runt of the litter.

In other words, I spent about 67% of the fight as a corpse.

Besides my desire to see Coratanni and Ruugar die in Veteran Mode while also pulling my own weight successfully as well as actually killing them in eight-man VM, the new bosses from Gods from the Machine have upped the challenge considerably. My guild has yet to see beyond the twin Sisters in VM, and even if we do manage to kill it eventually it will take a great amount of work to ensure that we can kill any Veteran boss in this Op regularly.

As such, this is a challenge which I'm putting very much at the "dreams" end of the bucket-list rather than something which I view as an inevitability. It might get done eventually, but I really don't see it being particularly feasible at this moment in time.

Besides, any potential future Ops will probably be exactly the same difficulty-wise, if not harder due to advances in fight mechanics becoming ever more noticeably increasing, so this objective may very well only increase in difficulty from this point forth. We'll have to wait and see.

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I find it naturally quite hard to come up with long-term goals for anything that I'm doing, unless it's something where the result is the long-term goal. This is mainly the reason why I've only been able to think of six - okay, seven if you count 'getting to Legend with that one Reputation faction' - things that I really want to do before the game's end, and they're all fairly inconsequential.

At the end of the day, we don't know exactly when SWtOR is going to end. It definitely will end at some point, but it's pointless setting goals up to be rushed through prematurely. Sure, when the end does get nearer that will certainly put some pressure on, but for now I'm content to just take these goals at a leisurely pace and try to accomplish them slowly but surely.