It has definitely felt subpar ever since 0.95, so I would like to know what is the secret ingredient to making it good again.
It's been good since at least 0.96a (and probably before) when I started testing player fleets against double Ordos using the paradigm of player-controlled flagship Onslaught as center anchor + 2 Gryphons (or however many is needed for the player fleet to add up to ~200 DP) as side flankers + whatever ship is being tested. The best option, in terms of fastest battle completion time, was + 6 Gryphons (i.e flagship Onslaught + 8 Gryphons), but + 3 Conquests (i.e. flagship Onslaught + 2 Gryphons + 3 Conquests) was the second fastest, faster than + 3 Onslaughts, + 3 Legion XIVs, or pretty much anything else other than more Gryphons. No particular secret, other than maybe sticking a PD in the same weapon group to force autofire on; the weapons were Squall/Locust/dual Mjolnir/dual HVD/dual Harpoons. In 0.96a I used IR Autolance + s-mod Expanded Magazines, but now in 0.97a I'm experimenting with other weapons there as well.
Half of Conquest is two large missile slots which have been nerfed about 4-7 times in last two patches(What was it - three Squall nerfs, EMR nerf, two Missile Specialization nerfs and a buff to Remnant PD?) It's weakest it's ever been, you're probably just getting too much noise from your flagship to even notice.
No, Squalls are important but they only form a small part of the Conquest's damage, like roughly 15%. Mjolnir is the biggest damage dealer, and I use two of them. In fact the shield part of the two Mjolnirs' overall damage is higher than the Squall's shield damage, but the Mjolnir also provides a lot of armor/hull damage while the Squall provides little else. Each Mjolnir provides around 1.5x of the Squall's overall damage.
My flagship Onslaught actually took a heavy nerf, largely due to the PCL nerf. It used to fire at once per second and elite Missile Spec giving +50% fire rate, so the Onslaught with 4 of them used to fire them at the equivalent of 6 per second. It now fires at once every 2 seconds with eMS only giving +25% fire rate, so now the Onslaught fires at the equivalent of 2.5 per second. So I can no longer haphazardly charge in, nor assume that the PCL will kill all incoming Reapers. My overall battle DPS has dropped from around 1600-1800 DPS in 0.96a to around 1200-1500 DPS now, roughly 20% less overall battle DPS. And this is using Cybernetic Augmentation for 12% or 14% extra damage on the flagship and less damage taken (depending on if I'm putting the 4th point into elite EWM or Neural Link).
In 0.96a, the Gryphon was at roughly 430 DPS for 20 DP, the highest ratio I found for ships under AI control against double Ordos, while the Conquest was at around 800 DPS for 40 DP. Since 0.97a, the Conquest's DPS has actually gone
up. In fact the Conquest is having so little trouble that I'm experimenting with putting Pulse Lasers or Heavy Blasters in the medium energy slot alongside the above weapons just to encourage the Conquests to move in closer so that they don't idle at long range so much. I don't know if it's the new Cybernetic Augmentation (because the DPS increase is a lot more than what's expected from just +6% damage increase) or just that the new enemy fleet deploy order actually makes things easier for the Conquest and other player ships in general. At any rate, nowadays this fleet relies more on the Conquests relative to the flagship Onslaught to steamroll through double Ordos than in 0.96a. Not sure if double Ordos has gotten easier for other ships as well, but it's easier at least for the Conquest.
It’s very average in a lot of areas but I don’t think it’s “weak.” I just don’t think the endgame can be won by sustained firepower alone, which is what it excels at. You have to have some burst and/or decent defense to weather being swarmed.
Well the firepower is so high that my fleet basically advances toward the enemy spawn point at the top of the map, meaning that even against Ordos it's killing enemy ships faster than they can march in. The Conquests use Harpoon Pods linked to the Squall/Locust, meaning they'll fire at the beginning of the battle, which is the most important time to burn through the initial enemy fleet as quickly as possible. That's the only time when my fleet (which is only 200 DP) is facing the entire 240 DP of the enemy fleet. After that, my fleet is only facing around 1/3 of the enemy fleet (so, around 80 DP's worth of enemy ships) at any given time, with the reinforcements still on their way to the front lines. So it's basically, burst firepower initially, then sustained firepower for the rest of the fight. I posted an example of this in 0.96a
here; in 0.97a the Conquests are doing
even better.