Recently, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes released a brand new game mode, Conquest. We’ve now had a chance to play through two rounds of the event, and I’m ready to say that it’s one of the very best new modes that this game has released in a very long time. In fact, it’s currently my favorite mode in the entire game.
For those familiar with the game, Conquest is a mixture between Galactic War and Galactic Challenges, with a few new features added in. Similar to Galactic Challenges, you play through the event (which lasts two weeks, currently) and earn keycards, which accumulate to higher and higher rewards. There are keycards given for winning battles and gaining stars, but also for completing various feats. Similar to Galactic War, you play through a series of battles, typically with scaling difficulty, leading up to a boss fight. When you start the event you choose between “Normal” and “Hard” mode, and from there you venture into a region with five sectors. You play through the sectors and encounter various enemy teams, with each sector culminating in a boss battle. There are feats for the overall Conquest event, feats for each sector, and feats for each boss battle. As an added feature, Conquest introduces the concept of Data Disks, which are obtained in the event and can be assigned according to the player’s liking to create various bonuses. This functions much like the added environmental effects in Challenges, but here it is entirely your decision on how to equip your data disks.
There’s so much about Conquest that I love. Most significantly, it allows you to use much of your roster and actually encourages theorycrafting. That’s something that has seemed to go a bit along the wayside recently in the game, with each new character seemingly intended to work with a specific team (and if not, hotfixes correcting that…). Even Galactic Challenges requires you to use a specific faction in order to complete it fully. But, while Conquest does have certain feats for you to use a few factions, it’s a relatively small part of the event. Overall, it highly promotes and encourages using different squads and experimenting around, especially with the use of Data Disks – which are a fantastic addition!
This mode also gives you tons of opportunities to play around and fight various squads. For a while there have been players wanting a sandbox mode to test squads and play whenever, and while this event isn’t quite that (since it requires energy to play and stamina to use), it nonetheless is maybe the closest thing we have to it. I’ve found myself refreshing energy even when I don’t need extra keycards just because I want to play it further. That’s a high complement – and something that I can’t remember doing in this game for a long time.
The five different sectors also allow you to battle a variety of squads, and there are always a variety of objectives for you to complete. And then there’s also the element of deciding which path to take, as you can see a few battles ahead often and decide which path to take. Along the way, you’ll encounter stores where you can either obtain items or obtain Data Disks. There is obviously an element of RNG in this, as you may not always find the Data Disks that you’re looking for, but I nonetheless think it’s a really good system. For Data Disks that simply give added bonuses, I don’t mind so much if there’s RNG involved.
So yeah, this game mode is absolutely fantastic. Like I said earlier, it’s my favorite in the game right now, and it’s the best new mode this game has introduced in quite a while. But it’s not perfect, and as we come to the end of the test season of it, I have primarily two suggestions that would make a great game mode even better. (1) First, and most importantly, there are feats that are simply impossible to track. I’m not the first one to point this out, but there are feats for each boss battle, and some of them are things like, “Remove 700% turn meter” – but here’s the problem: it’s impossible to track that, so you’re simply left guessing until you hit it. Without a doubt the single biggest tweak needed to this mode is a way to better track the feats in-game. (2) But second, so far both events have had the same bosses and the like. It’s not a huge deal, but I hope that as Conquest keeps running we will get more variation in the squads we fight. There’s quite a bit of variation already, but I hope there is more.
But overall, this mode is fantastic, and it’s a huge win for Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes!
Star Wars Thoughts 