Master of the Feast

I've been doing pretty well for myself during the seasonal events this year. While I missed out on the coveted High Roller Shades last year, I finally managed to acquire them this year, two days before the Nightlife event was about to end again. I probably should have made a blog post about that, but for some reason I only felt like posting a brief comment on Twitter at the time, something I kind of regret now... here's what it said:

And this week I finally managed to complete the last achievement I was missing from the Feast of Prosperity. I had completed all the basic activity- and story-related ones ages ago, but there's one achievement in particular called "What did you put in this?!" which is hidden until you actually complete it, but at the same time features requirements that you might not hit automatically without tracking and specifically going for them.

Now, there's a very roundabout way in which you can check your progress even while the achievement is hidden, but I'd forgotten what it was. Fortunately Swtorista provided the answer (as usual) - you basically need to find someone who already completed the achievement, inspect them and shift-click their achievement into chat. Then you can click on that yourself and it will show your own progress.

It sounded like the kind of thing I can imagine being extremely awkward (how do you randomly find someone who's got that achievement?), but I guess I got lucky in that it didn't take me long at all to do so while chain-inspecting people around the Feast event area. Finally seeing my own progress was a major revelation as it clarified why I still hadn't got the achievement myself - I'd been barking up the wrong tree all along.

See, it has three requirements: to do 25 of the hardmode cooking missions, 25 hardmode cantina rushes, and to use pepper 75 times while preparing meals. I was convinced that it was only the pepper that was holding me back, since I seemed to remember only using it rather sparingly before I'd become aware of the achievement's existence. However, it turned out that I was actually done with peppers and all I was missing was nine more cantina rushes. I'd been thrown off by the fact that I already had the 25 completions achievement for that mission, however that achievement counts both difficulties, so I had clearly overestimated my willingness to take on the harder version. (To be honest, it's not really harder - it just takes twice as long for little extra reward, which I guess is why I hadn't done it more often.)

So I've dutifully been doing Feast dailies all week (not just the cantina rushes, but also the other types since I do still like the world boss hunts in particular), until I finally managed to tick the achievement counter over on Monday. Sadly I didn't manage to capture the moment of the achievement actually popping up, but it sure felt good to finally hit that 100% score for the Feast category. I've often said that I'm not much of an achievement hunter, but sometimes it just feels good to get that last thing done.

The question is now: Am I "done" with the event? I'm not usually someone to farm a world event endlessly for all the rewards, so once I've achieved everything I personally wanted to get out of it, I don't tend to go back very often. Then again, the Feast only comes around once a year, so maybe I'll feel ready for some more cooking, serving and killing delicious world bosses by this time next year anyway.