Hm, yeah, I have noticed that the difference between the two versions isn’t very intuitive. Or at least there’s no in-game explanation of the difference between the flags and the skull, which most people don’t even notice. So an indication to people as to whether’s it’s the mini-boss summoner or the passive gain would be nice.
Be proud of what you like. Don’t need to cite it as an unpopular opinion.
After 8.1:
The good:
The bad:
The ugly:
i’ve farmed over 600 ies before, about 150 in 8.1.
Here’s my feedback.
-The difficulty was upped noticeably for all difficulties, ai are more annoying than ever and seem to be reducing the damage you do on them.
I don’t see why the ai needs to be so agressive when people mainly want to explore/be done quickly. It also ask the question, if theres something close to pvp on the islands why are we not getting pvp talents then?
-Mobs: mobs in 8.0 were better done in my book than now. The main problem for 8.0 was the spawning of the events that sometimes would just not happen mainly in heroic or mythic, fixing that would have done a better job than just putting elites mobs in small disingenuous groups. The islands before felt more natural and events felt more like events.
-As for mobs mechanics, I don’t understand why in mythic mobs have to cast their abilities way faster than in others difficulties and why CC has to last 2x times the heroic time. getting repeatly cced for more than 5 sec is not enjoyable, more if it cant be prevented and if the only way to deal with it is just to not be in melee all the time.
-Azerith nodes/chests: really the things I hate the most about islands more now than ever. There’s too much of those, if you’re pulling a bit more than a group or mass pulling, it takes longer to mine/loot chests than to kill the actual mobs and that isn’t really fun.
-Loot: I hate how you can’t really target loot now (and I feel by reducing chests/azerith nodes it would be fine instead of having what we have now), getting the same pets for the 7th or the same transmog, I feel islands shouldn’t drop the same thing again for the same character reducing redundancy.
All rare loot especially mounts should also be buyable on the vendor with doubloons and you should get atleast doubloons each time you do an island.
Azerite Rewards
As a more “hardcore” player, Islands and World Quests feel like the only reliable source for Azerite Power per time spent in the game. To me it almost feels like a waste of time if I’m not doing islands or world quests during my time in Azeroth between raid tiers because the neck level needed for the next raid is ridiculously high. I think you should take a step back from Azerite rewards and look more towards cosmetic rewards for this type of content and up the rate of Azerite gained from Raids and Mythic Plus or at least make them competitive to truly allow the player to choose what they want to do vs the current system of endless grinding of Island Expeditions and World Quests to gain Heart of Azeroth levels.
Island Expeditions Play Testing
The amount of time I spend actually using my abilities in islands seems very low vs other content. The general theme of an island, from my experience, is to have two people run behind a tank while staying out of combat so that they can mount and click all the Azerite nodes and then you eventually mass aoe everything down at whichever “X” you land on with whatever boat item is available that week (or die from getting CC’d by the mobs) and rinse and repeat until the island is finished. This general theme could be okay if the boat items were more diverse and fun to use making it so you’re filling downtime with casts of exciting spells rather than clicking rocks in the ground.
Improvements
I think adding small goals outside killing mobs and clicking rocks to reward Azerite could really improve the overall island experience, such as: small boss fights, more engaging quests, and other small mini game type adventures, etc, the possibilities are endless. Currently: the Azerite extractor, the very short quests, and random portals (that don’t seem to happen every island) are the only types of “events” in an island leaving a majority of the time spent clicking rocks and killing trash packs. I personally feel events like this should be more frequent and the core concept of island expeditions based off the format they’re currently in.
The opposing teams CC needs to be toned down. I feel like I’m fighting classes from MoP with the amount of CC they all have, and with no DR, it gets excessive. The same goes for very punishing mobs (ones that root or stun mainly) that you try to avoid at all costs while mass pulling.
Give players more choice in what they actually receive at the end of an Island.
Currently, you zone into an Island and at the end you receive rng loot items based off the mob types. I think adding a clear reward system such as world quest rewards inside the islands or something alone those lines could drastically increase the players ability to make decisions in an island and give them goals while doing the content rather than mindlessly running around.
Overall, islands do feel better than they were in 8.0, but there is still a ton of improvements that need to be made to make these a successful addition to the game. In their current state they feel a lot like scenarios 2.0 and don’t really allow players to make any fun decisions or do any real meaningful exploration, they just feel like a repetitive AoE fest for 350 Azerite and a spin on a slot machine.
I only wish I had more ![:heart:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/heart.png?v=6" ":heart:")
's to give for this post. You pretty much nailed my frustration with Islands from the perspective of someone who wants random goodies. I dare say I’ve got at least double your total runs on record and my reward spread is about the same (minus the mounts… Seen 5 of them drop for others in my runs, including 2 mogu mounts in the same island…but none for me). And the more I run, the more duplicates I amass. When you get that Saurok Helmet for the 7th time, and you still don’t even have the full set…
None of it feels great.
And the only reason I even bothered doing Islands in the first place is because I absolutely KNEW that as soon as this expansion was over, nobody would be running them. And the rewards would be even harder to obtain, since you need 3 people to even queue.
I agree with the Azerite rewards part, either reduce it to be on par with mythic+ and raiding or increase the latter to be competitive with islands.
I understand its the new content and you really want your players to play it, but making it the primary most efficient AP source is just a step in the wrong direction. You’re supposed to open up more “choices” rather than shutting down old methods of farming AP, like Bertmx said, allow the player to choose what they want to do instead of making that decision for them.
While this may only affect the top % of players really pushing to get as much AP as possible on multiple toons before the raid release, I don’t see how changing it would affect the rest of the community either, its just a win-win for everyone.
Islands are still another “job”, kinda like doing that 1 damn Mythic 10+ (Thank you for atleast making it stop at 10).
But I have to express my annoyance for the new “azerite extractor”. If it isn’t the annoyance of having to run across the bloody map to kill the thing when horde start it up, its the having to try and keep it protected, neglecting me from actually running around and enjoying the murdering crap.
Otherwise, I enjoy the map reward and feeling like I don’t have to murder every mogu and troll for a missing quest drop.
I’ve ran numerous amounts of Island Expeditions in 8.0 and 8.1. So my opinion is based off the two. Each patch has at least a 1000 runs each patch to compare data.
To me they feel the same now as they did in 8.0. At the start of 8.1 they were a lot better in terms of dropping gear, yes they were dropping if you were afk’ing too but I really don’t see that as a problem as there are 312 items (in 8.0 so now counting 8.1 additions) alone. So getting them all will take forever.
Dubloons rarely drop and when they do you get 1-4 at most, sure it can go higher and such but this is based on the average of all the bags I got. This is a really low amount especially when you have the trait that can double them. Every island should give you 2 on victory, a chance for 1 on fail. The chance for the satchels, however the “Seafarer’s Coin Pouch” should be removed or all the bags have their base values doubled. This will give you a reward that is tangible other than menial amounts of Azerite that most won’t even notice as a drop in the bucket.
Which brings us to the next point. If Azerite values are going to be as low as they are for wins then the requirement for each island should be halved. Normals: 3000, Heroic: 4500, Mythic: 6000, PvP: 6000 and lowering the weekly quest to 18000 to align the new values. Currently they are extremely grindy for very low return. While I enjoy Islands as a base, the gain per effort isn’t comparable in value. There are individuals who enjoy islands, but aren’t fond of how long and grindy some can take. If you are decently geared or with lower levels in Normals then they’ll go faster, but that shouldn’t be the point. Personally for current Island Win conditions to be worth it the amount you win per week should be roughly tripled and the weekly amount increased by 1.5-2x. We are after all mining Azerite literally and see very little of it. To only get 150 out of the 3000 you mined is rather demeening. 150 is only 0.05% of what you mined!! It’s not much to ask for more.
Next we fall to the rewards. There are at 312+ items, yet drops are extremely low and refuse to drop. While making all items possible to drop from the Island you are in was a nice start, the drop rate is still really low. I know a lot liked the values towards start of the patch and even afk’ing, but after the “afk fix” items have gone back to being as bad, if not worse than 8.0 based on multiple attempts. If we aren’t going to be able to get a guaranteed item or something on each victory then let’s just move all the rewards to the vendor and give that as another option.
Lastly, the XP value for leveling alts is a bit low. Prior we had the weekly giving XP and isn’t now, well more like doesn’t exist. Many people who level alts will already have done the story and some don’t enjoy just straight questing. Once you hit 116 it opens up Islands, after doing the quest, for all your alts so there is some semblance that you did the zones or something. Without flying most don’t want to quest again, due to slow speeds from terrain that just sucks but that is a different story. So leveling via Islands is a nice mix. Bumping their XP up to match dungeons would be a decent start. Dungeons at 111 give 98.7k XP while a Island gives 75k. Making them on par would be a great start since both are roughly equal in length and difficulty.
Overall, while I like Island Expeditions (and yes warfronts too), I feel the amount of time and rewards for them are completely out of touch and could use tuning more in favor of players especially with how many items are associated with them. No one is asking for mounts to be handed out left and right, but more of a chance to actually see them or possibly put them on the vendor. Putting the mounts for instance at the price of the highest mount now would be a welcomed change for people.
You say you heard player feedback on adding a vendor, but you did so by putting new rewards on it. Sure we all appreciate that, but we’d like to see more of the previous items added as well. Mounts, pets and toys especially. Keep them as drops, but add that fail-safe in so those who are unlucky can still work towards it and not feel like its all been pointless. Getting it on run 1271 or so doesn’t make it feel special or anything and instead just makes them breath a sigh of relief and causes them to hate the content more, even if they enjoyed it.
An idea we just had on our discord was even if you don’t want to make all the rewards on the vendor available at once, and would be understandable. You could make the vendor operate like the Curious Coin guy. Where either option works:
This way the items are still limited in a capacity, but available still. The armor sets that you get from the vendor could be BoA as well if you wanted to avoid people from farming and reselling, but that would be a different debate altogether.
You INDEED stealth nerfed the drop rates for all difficulties and here you’re again asking for feedback after you said the “you will roll from all creatures in the isle regardless if killed or not” “higher difficulties=more rewards” more like more repair bills and AP.
And yet all I see is more difficult mobs without DR on CC and repair bills, barely “rewards”.
It’s sad how even patch notes are incorrect these days.
So I am enjoying leveling 110 - 120 doing the islands.
The issue with that is the gear I’m wearing gets a bit outdated from 117 on, scaling worse every level.
There isn’t always gear in the AH to buff you up a bit, and when there is, it can be obscenely expensive.
My reccomended solution would be, add some bandaid gear to the dubloon vendor. For cheap, like 5 dubloons a slot. Make it 115 gear, that will be good through 119, then at 120, you can put on that 310 island gear.
Random drops are out when you need that new bow now. The dubloons are already super random as a drop.
There are other ways, like a bar that fills up, yes another bar. But this would give you gear every 5 or so islands?
Either way, gear is needed if leveling via islands is going to be viable.
i agree that it’d be nice to have the island rewards put on a vendor (or multiple vendors). back when tol barad was current, the fox kit was only available from killing and looting foxes in the zone. it had a super-low droprate and was terrible to farm (i’m allowed to say that because i spent literally over 24 hours of my life farming it while getting murdered constantly). the fox kit was eventually added to the alliance/horde quartermasters, so people could earn 200 of their faction’s tol barad currency and buy it that way.
the cost of the fox kit was still high, but it feels less punishing imo to collect something and work towards a tangible, guaranteed reward – and maybe while you’re doing the dailies for your tokens, you kill a fox and it drops the pet, and then you can spend your tokens on something else.
with island rewards being solely RNG-based, it feels kind of cruel when you’re hoping for specific rewards. it’d be amazing if there was an additional way to save up to buy something specific rather than throwing yourself at the mercy of RNG over and over and over… and over again, even if it was “ahoy! a vendor from XYZ Island is in boralus this week!” and not all rewards were on one NPC/available at all times. i feel like islands would be popular as people who might not want to deal with the RNG saved dubloons for specific items, and it’d give people a reason to log in to see if the vendor they’re waiting for is up.
i do like the change that was made where the rewards are just based on completion of the island, not on the specific mobs killed, and think that was an amazing choice. i also feel like the amount of loot i get, personally, is all right. i haven’t seen a mount yet, but i’ve gotten a ton of greens and pets from normal islands while leveling. i guess my issue isn’t with the amount of loot itself but with the way it’s distributed. RNG is annoying enough when it’s “will this specific mount drop from the one boss in the game you can loot it from?” but when it’s “will i get one of the 50 items i want or one of the 250+ others?” it becomes overwhelming and disheartening.
editing to add: i also wish that the greens obtained from islands scaled to the level of the player. it’s frustrating leveling via islands when you get close to 120, especially if you can’t even use greens picked up by your 120 alts… because those have scaled to 120-only.
I’m pretty sure the drop rates were only increased on Heroic and Mythic difficulties. That said, surviving mythic even geared at 370+ in an all guild group on voice is painful; with the new changes we have yet to win a mythic.
Tl;dr whats wrong with IE is almost whats majorly wrong with the game, no attainable goals to work towards, and too many layers of RNG.
The changes have felt bad to me. Now its literally a mindless sprint to mine/kill/loot x amount of azerite and be done as quickly as possible, which is how some people treated them before I realize but not all. I liked the old system for islands aside from the not knowing more info on how to obtain mounts etc until far to late after they were released.
I suppose more rewards that I have seen could be considered a improvement but it just feels completely rng now, before I knew if I killed x rare I might get related x reward as a possible prize for doing so. I think adding treasure maps for completing the weekly quest on 120’s was a nice addition.
The chain stuns and one shot type attacks that packs now more frequently have feel worse.
I have gotten dubloons, pets, transmog and one mount so far since the change.
I would like to see a partial revert to the old system of what you kill matters as far as getting rewards go, people just there to get azerite could still do a mindless blitz to finish as quickly as possible but people who actually explore and hunt for the rares and certain mob types would be rewarded for their efforts. Just bums me out one of the things I did to mix stuff up when I was sick of world quests etc was hunting for rares on islands hoping to score a mount or something is now gone and just a mindless button mash fest.
I still have never gotten anything other than azerite and quest items.
I’ve been going with low level characters lately. Does the character have to be max level to get rewards?
I have run 100s of island expeditions as I’m an altoholic and it’s my favourite way to level toons through BfA.
That said the new changes have made it a lot more enjoyable to level with but ill offer some feedback for a problem that has come up every time.
Many players like myself spam islands to level up quickly as it’s the fastest way to get through BfA on Alts since we don’t want to go questing over and over. The issue I see is that by doing this your character is stuck using Legion and in some cases also WoD items all the way to lvl 120.
The reason this is an issue is as we go higher to 120 the characters damage and survivabilty in island expeditions drastically falls and there is no way to avoid this other than questing to get gear rewards but this takes away from running islands in the first place.
My suggestion for you if you even read this reply is to possibly add like we had in legion gear to the island vendor that creates green level appropriate gear for each slot that could be bought with 5-10 dabloons per item kind of like how we could buy cheap gear on the broken shore from that one vendor.
I’ve been running island expeditions near nonstop since Tuesday to try to get the Island Thunderscale before the weekly reset so here are my two cents.
Please tone down the CC. It’s incredibly annoying getting chain CC’d by the enemy team or getting killed because the elite basilisk can use its petrify ability again before its previous one wore off.
The RNG is ridiculous. You have to hope you get the island you want, the specific mob you need, and then hope you get the mount to drop. So far I’ve only seen the Stormdrakes spawn on Jorundall, and they’ve only spawned about 5 times total so far. It feels like you are playing a slot machine just to win a chance at a slot machine. It’s incredibly frustrating to keep getting the wrong island, or the mobs you need don’t spawn. So please add in the ability to queue for specific islands so I don’t have to slog through 2 islands I don’t care about so I can try again for the mount I want.
I mean island expeditions are really fun when you see that one mob you need to roll the dice to get the mount/item you are after, but all other times? It’s just a boring and frustrating slog for like 10 minutes until you can roll the dice again in hopes of getting the island/mob combination you need.
This RNG loot is so horrible that I stopped playing WoW for now. Please, give us some feedback on how this loot system really works, increase the drop rate for mounts or let us buy them with doubloons.
I seriously hope you are trolling .
We were promised tons of rewards for doing them . That is why people are mad . Do you really think people care for ap ? ![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")
The Jourundall map alone has a chance to drop the drake (I’m farming it as well) the way Blizzard “says” this new way of doing islands works. Even though it’s claimed to help due to the inhabitants, I’ve notced that just the map type can drop a reward based on it as well. For example the Rotting Mire with the pirate ships - there’s been ZERO pirates on that map even as a rare spawn or invasion before and I’ve gotten a pirate hat and the pirate pets. The issue is their ridiculously beyond crap drop rates. They just need to make the damn pets and mounts ALL available by vendor. No one wants another seahorse.