Cartilage piercings are very different from skin piercings in terms of the type of pain, pain duration, sensitivity, healing time and also care. I don't have a conch but I have tragus, nose and rook piercings.
The first thing is that people have different personal measures of pain and react to different causes of pain in individual ways. For me, cartilage piercings always ache more than anything, because the cartilage is being pushed out of shape. My tragus piercing hurt more than my lobes, but that is probably because the pain lasted longer, the guy didn't freeze the inside of my ear properly and he couldn't get the ball on the ring so he kept on pulling on it. For me I would put lobes at 3 and cartilage and 5/6 out of ten for pain.
Generally, the skin heals as quickly as no-cartilage piercings, but even once you've thought it's healed it may take a while for the cartilage to stop closing up. That happens because it is spongey so it goes back to it's original shape.
My tragus cost me £25 including jewellery.