Conquering The World

Are you all sick of me writing about Conquest yet? To be honest, I am... at least a little. However, my guild's Master of Conquest knows no mercy. After we just managed to add Nar Shaddaa to our list of conquered planets last week, he drove us right on to try and conquer Oricon this week. And despite of starting to feel a bit burnt out on the whole thing, I'm still right there going along with it all. Have I mentioned yet how much I dislike the rampage objectives (to kill X mobs on planet Y)? If only they didn't grant so many points so easily...

I do have to say though that on the plus side, rampaging has got me to take a closer look at the "outside world" again (feels weird to use that term when we're talking about space stations vs. planetary surfaces but you know what I mean). I spend so little time on the original planets these days, not just because I haven't levelled an alt from scratch in a while but because even when I do, there just isn't much reason to hang around considering the speed at which you fly through the levels nowadays. And I haven't been too fond of heroics - the one type of endgame content that has you going back to a lot of lower level planets - ever since they effectively turned them into just another set of dailies.

Racing across Yavin as a group, killing everything in sight.

Chasing conquest objectives though, I've been looking for ways of combining the planetary rampages with actual "useful" things (instead of just trying to find a spot where I can kill the highest number of mobs in the shortest amount of time, like some of my guildies have been doing). So when Tatooine was a target last week for example, I exterminated a lot of sand people because there is an achievement for that I don't have yet. And this week's Rishi objectives got me to finally take a character through the first part of the Shadow of Revan storyline who had never done it previously. It's been so long since I last did that, it was a veritable trip down memory lane. (Oh snap! There's that jungle wampa that I always aggro by accident because it likes to lie down and I keep mistaking it for a corpse!)

What's even better is when I can find an excuse to do some of the open world stuff for Conquest in a guild group. We've actually done a few rampages as a full ops group, to finish off the evening after an actual operation, and it's been hilarious to charge across the landscape that way. We did it in the PvP instance too, so any Imps that just happened to come our way ended up being chewed up by the mob almost incidentally.

Raiding the Imperial base on Oricon, because Conquest told us to. There weren't many people in the PvP instance, but what few arrivals there were, were... surprised.

The best thing have been the world bosses though. I was very pleased when the introduction of level scaling turned those into proper enemies again, but incentives to actually kill them have long been lacking. (Why does the weekly quest to kill three world bosses give you nothing but a tiny amount of CXP and some credits? Not even a CXP pack? Come on.) However, people bloody love fighting over bosses for Conquest points and it's been great fun.

SWTOR's MMO aspects often go underappreciated (if they aren't getting brushed off as supposedly inferior to other games in the first place), but fighting for world bosses makes for some surprisingly old school fun. I've played games with open tagging as well and do like it for what it is, but in a system where guilds and factions are actively competing with each other, a certain degree of exclusivity makes sense. Sure, that also means that you can get things like griefers, who might try to get your boss to evade and reset so they can steal the tag, but I've only really encountered that a couple of times throughout the years, while experiencing many a happy rush just trying to beat the competition to the kill by "fair" means. During a recent Gree event for example our whole ops group charged into one of the side caves on the Western Ice Shelf and managed to snatch a world boss kill away from a group of Imps that was twice our size but still in the process of assembling and therefore too slow. You bet that was an exhilarating moment!

I only wish they'd include a greater variety of world bosses in the Conquest events. I get that Bioware wants them to fit a theme but there are still so many world bosses that still don't see any action at all (vs. Trapjaw on Tatooine for example coming up as a target what feels like every other week).