Conquests is not where it's at (in 7.0)

I've been reading some news, and while I was just about to think about migrating from grinding heroics to grinding conquest for gold and XP, it was announced that conquests in 7.0 will give neither. You'll still have to grind them for gear updates, but they won't give you anything else.

Sigh. It seems like that's only going to increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the game to me. I'm not sure what'll be the appropriate grinding avenue in the future. And it's not just that I need the credits to spend on the GTN, although reasonably priced GTN items would be great. I'm grinding credits to unlock all of the species on the legacy menu right now. 1,500,000 a pop, and there's; what eight of them to do?

There's always something.

Anyway, Alderaan went very fast when I was just doing the class story with no world story and no exploration, but I think my XP gain is too slow. I'm still not quite level 65 with either character, and if I want to spend the majority of both characters end game planets (and by end-game, I mean the last whole half or more of the normal story) at level 75, then I'm going to have to step it up when it comes to getting XP. I'm going to have to either do the world stories for the next few worlds, go back and do world stories that I didn't do on past planets, or grind heroics or something. The latter has some additional advantages; in addition to XP, I'll get more gold, and I'll get more crates so I can get that one piece of remnant armor that I've still been trying to get for the last several months. Plus, those crates give me loads of companion gifts to spend, so I can rank up my companion ratings, which I'm woefully behind on too. Both my trooper and my bounty hunter have more companions still to acquire and every single one of my characters could use some improved companion affection on all of their companions. I don't think I have a single companion into the 30s when it comes to companion level, of a max of 50.

I also breezed through Onderon pretty quickly, although I'll probably come back for more exploration and dailies. It seems like it was a short planet, though. I suspect Mek-Sha will be as well. I really am coming up on the final finale (so far) for at least one character. Finally. So that'll be nice. I'd like to take my Sith Warrior up to that point too at some point. And, of course, if I do my recording project, I'll probably take my recorded Jedi Knight through it too.

I'm really kind of bummed about some of the content that I can't seem to figure out how to do, though, because it requires grouping, and I'm either not having much luck with that, or don't want to do it because it's too much trouble and too stressful. Not everyone you can group with who's done this stuff before is friendly and helpful. The Dread Masters storyline is really kind of only hinted at if you don't do a bunch of dread masters operations, for instance. Really unfortunate.