Do We Need a Coffee Bucket List?

Back before WoW came out with its Cataclysm expansion, I felt some pressure to complete certain bits of content before the big revamp of the old world was going to cause them to disappear (seemingly) forever. I even got the Loremaster achievement, which involved the completion of a total of over three thousand quests! Okay, so I had already done a large chunk of those beforehand, but it was still a fair bit of work.

In The Old Republic, I've never engaged in any kind of major pre-expansion preparation so far. I only remember that before Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out, I was kind of hoping to clear EC NiM while it was still current content. That didn't happen in the end, but it was no big deal. I simply went back later.

However, with all the changes that Knights of the Fallen Empire is supposed to bring, I've been thinking about compiling a sort of bucket list. First off, there is the matter of operations getting scaled up. Trying to "finish off" Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice is actually incredibly pointless right now, because with the new level scaling they'll still be current content after KotFE comes out.

Instead it's the old operations that we should be worried about, if anything. The old level 55 nightmare modes are still challenging in terms of mechanics - it's only at level sixty that my guild got a lot of them down, and even so we are still missing a lot of achievements. Since we didn't manage to get them while these were current content, the next couple of months until the expansion are pretty much our last chance to snag them while we are still sufficiently overpowered! After that it will all be scaled up to be current content again, and things like the Dread Council on nightmare will probably be too hard for us again. That's kind of... bizarre.

Unless I'm planning to get a whole lot better at the game, time to complete those ops achievements is running out.

And now the latest bit of news from Gamescom has come in, informing us that proceeding into the new content will come with a warning that any uncompleted, old "story" quests will become inaccessible and go away. Of course this raises the question of what's included in that definition. Class and companion stories, sure, but where do you draw the line? What about things like the Seeker Droid and Macrobinocular missions, or planetary storylines? The only reason to remove access to this old content is that it would become too messy and not make sense anymore if people went back to it after becoming the Outlander, but that would apply to pretty much all the current missions...

However, even if we assume a fairly strict definition of what's a story quest, the question still remains of how to deal with the threat of all those loose ends simply being cut off. I confessed not that long ago that only two of my characters have actually completed Ziost, and the more I look around my stable of alts, the more gaps become apparent. Not all of them have completed Yavin (mostly because I chose the operations ending on some and then never got around to taking them there). A few haven't even completed Rishi! And let's not even talk about my level 56 Shadow who has yet to wrap up her last class mission on Corellia... I also can't help but think of a guildie of mine who plays a Shadow tank in our operations sometimes. I remember looking into his quest log once and was horrified to find that he hadn't done his class story past Nar Shaddaa!

Up until now, I haven't felt too bad about any of this (other than the occasional stab of guilt as I find myself thinking that I should really play this or that character more often), because if in doubt I could always go back and do any content that I had missed later. If the coffee expansion takes this option away, I'll have to think carefully before taking any of my alts into it. It might be worth finishing up some stories now to be ready for the big release in October. Or will I be able to live with simply discarding content that I haven't completed on that particular alt, as long as I've done it on several others? Then again, maybe some of my alts will simply refuse to become Outlanders, level up through flashpoints and PvP and keep hanging out in the past indefinitely...