Rewards seem to be slightly more frequent, although there are still stretches where doing a full weekly’s worth of islands (all normals on my horde paladin, usually all mythics on my alliance demon hunter) will net you nothing but dubloons, and even those aren’t consistent. RNG is RNG, so it’s hard to say how expected or not that is. For what it’s worth, I also have yet to see any of the mounts and I think only one of the toys (and that I got before 8.1 dropped), and the pets I’ve gotten since 8.1 have all been duplicates, unless I’m mistaken. Good for my friends who are also trying for the achievements and are pet collectors, but it’s not doing ME any good, plus the quests seem to be practically non-existent still ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
I like the changes to spawning on the islands so that you can avoid packs of mobs that are more or less “worthless” to get to the higher priority targets more easily, and I like the Azerite extractors (though the one that you have to click to spawn waves is less entertaining than the one that gets a steadily-increasing aggro radius and can be killed by the opposite faction). The fact that there are more high value sources of azerite on the islands is nice, too.
I really like that random events happen more frequently and sooner into the island than before the patch, as that makes the islands feel more different (and gives more hope for some of the event-specific rewards, even though the method for getting those rewards changed so it’s not quite apples to apples). I do not miss the Azerite rare event at all, and don’t think I’ve seen it happen since the patch (though I assume it’s still in the pool somewhere).
My biggest complaint about 8.1’s changes is the change to the weekly world quest.
First: I miss having access to the WQ to win an island on my lower level characters; it was a fairly significant experience boost that made running a weekly island on alts feel rewarding in a way that chain running islands does not (leveling exclusively through islands is just like leveling exclusively through pet battles or, to a lesser extent, dungeons—you can absolutely do it but you better have a plan for when you hit 120 and are still in Legion-level gear or worse). Having the incentive to run the weekly island also meant that when you got to that point in your war campaign/faction order hall/whatever we’re calling it research tree, you weren’t stymied for an extra week or two waiting for the islands to rotate and for RNG to land you on an island that you needed for the unlock, because you’d already done the RNG waiting game while doing other things.
Second: I don’t like the WQ reward mission for max-level characters. Partially this is because I have very little desire to spend the large amount of time required to farm up enough resources to grind my alts’ champions through “useless” missions so that they’re good enough to successfully complete the island missions, and partially this is because I keep getting the Titan Residuum reward on my Horde paladin, who cares even less about the stuff than my main does. 16 Residuum does not feel like a reward comparable to 5,000g or a pet or piece of transmog, all of which can often be sold for about the same price, or a mount or toy which can’t be sold but still feels like it’s worth about the same.
(Then again, I don’t like Residuum in general—I appreciate it existing for people who care about gear and I suppose at some point in Dazar’alor’s cycle I’ll have to care as well, but right now I don’t want it and the fact that I can no longer just vendor my spare world quest azerite pieces, whether they’ll give me residuum or not, is incredibly aggravating. It’s fine on my paladin who can disenchant them but not my demon hunter, who can’t.)
The enemy AI seems to have been jumbled up a little bit as well; the teams that were “toughest” to be against before (the tauren team when you’re Alliance, which I think is the draenei team when you’re Horde?) because they were very good at getting azerite quickly seem to have shifted; my group had no issues against the taurens after the patch when they were consistently the closest to causing us a loss pre-patch, but suddenly the blood elf team (humans/high elf team—double mage+paladin analog) got crazy difficult, because they were more efficient at collecting AND their damage/CC (when you engaged them) was still really high.
I’m also a little miffed at the class choices for the new teams; they can be a dark iron dwarf/mag’har death knight but I can’t? c’mon now, that’s just mean
Overall I think the 8.1/Tides of Vengeance patch improved islands significantly BUT the world quest change took a lot of sparkle out of it for me personally, and I’m neither collecting dubloons quickly enough nor getting other BoP rewards at a frequency which makes me want to do them more often than “just enough for the weekly and then not 'til next week,” which is a shame.
Edit: Also, I still don’t understand how the weekly’s counter fills up; you would think that if you won an island your counter would be at 6k/9k/12k (depending on difficulty) but usually it’s more like 5326/8993/11035. Where do the bizarre numbers come from, and why is it not consistent?