Conquesting After 5.9

Unlike many very vocal people, I rather liked the conquest revamp from the start, with some reservations about certain aspects of it still needing tweaking. Since then Bioware has made some more adjustments to scores, objectives and rewards, with the biggest of these changes having been implemented in patch 5.9.

And in a nutshell: they seem to have worked! At least the medium and large yield boards are actually populated with guilds capable of hitting their targets now. I never did find out whether that guild who won the large yield planet without actually hitting their personal guild target ended up getting any rewards, but since 5.9 this has become a moot question anyway.

I think the biggest thing that has helped has been the addition of many more easy daily objectives. While I think that this has generally been a good thing, I have to admit that some of them seem to encourage somewhat dull gameplay. Somehow it doesn't feel quite right to me when one of the best ways of easily gaining points is to just farm random mobs on Alderaan...

That said, it's been hard to gauge the full impact of the daily objective changes as they've been hilariously bugged since their introduction and constantly reset more than once a day, which has allowed some people to basically just farm mobs for points indefinitely. The funny thing about this is that Bioware has claimed to have fixed this bug twice already, yet it's still there. The resets have just become more inconsistent / harder to predict. We'll see what difference it makes whenever daily objectives actually become limited to once per day.

As it stands, my guild managed to complete its target on a large yield planet for the first time last week, and I felt proud. I even revived an activity that I used to engage in back when conquest was new, which is to tally up all the scores of individual characters in the guild in a spreadsheet at the end of the week, in order to add up the contributions from people's alts to see who made the biggest impact as a player. It's quite tedious actually, but I'm currently sufficiently curious to put up with it.

The one thing I still wish they would change is the number of available planets, as three to four every single week just doesn't provide enough variety. At least on Darth Malgus, things seem to have settled down into about half a dozen guilds competing for overall top score, and while most of them do go on to compete on the large yield board nowadays, one each tends to go for the medium and small yield planet still just to occupy the top spot there. Basically the only way smaller guilds will stand a chance at winning first place is to have more planets available at least occasionally.

This does bring me to another thing I noticed that strikes me as a little odd: that there is no more limit on how long you have to invade a planet anymore. It used to be that the button became greyed out after something like 48 hours, forcing you to make a decision - but now you could secretly collect points without anyone knowing your score and then invade on Monday morning for full impact. Since there is no invasion bonus anymore, you're not missing out on anything by waiting until the last minute. Admittedly the fact that you would have to manually keep track of your guild's score until then to be able to gauge your chances is a considerable obstacle, but still...

Anyway, I'm continuing to enjoy conquest for that feeling of collectively achieving a goal, and seeing the events put a stronger focus on their eponymous themes has been refreshing (though I don't get why the former Iokath conquest, now renamed to "Mechanical Warfare", gave points for repeating the KotET chapter on Nathema instead of the one on, you know, Iokath). We'll see how long it'll last - when I got caught up in conquests for the first time, the 3.0 expansion eventually served as enough of a distraction to largely wean me off my conquest habits, but 6.0 is still very far away, so know knows what the coming months will bring?