Feedback: Island Expeditions

Community General Discussion
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The changes are a step in the right direction. I like the greater variety in terms of events and creatures you encounter. It’s fun when you’re fighting a pack and then suddenly a bunch of pirates or vrykul ships land on you and you have to change what you’re doing to deal with the new mobs.

I also like the changes to rewards. I’ve been getting noticeably more pets and transmogs, which makes the islands feel more worthwhile.

However, islands still have some problems. The system still boils down to just killing a bunch of mobs until you fill up a bar. It’s like a rift in Diablo 3. It’s boring gameplay. I’d rather have more interesting objectives, like holding a strategic position while waves of mobs invade, or escorting, or something like that.

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The vendor is a great addition–so great, in fact, that it should be expanded and have everything from islands added to it. It should be a deterministic and finite loot table like the pet battle dungeons have, but more things than those instances have obviously, it’s fine if it has even enough things to keep a player busy doing islands all expansion. But it should be achievable in the end by work and not luck. I don’t completely understand why Blizzard is going increasingly toward randomized loot and rewards, but as you can tell by many people’s comments, this design philosophy is not welcomed by most players. We generally want to know what we are working for, or there is no reason to “work” for it if you’re not working for it but relying on luck.

I like islands, I like doing them with my son and my wife, but I wish the implicit timer were removed, or that there were an option to do islands without facing an enemy team, or, if Blizzard doesn’t like those ideas, at least not have the forced automatic close-out after the island ends (with no more azerite rewards past that point, since that’s the point of the competition). The implicit timer acts against exploration: on mythic mode, it seems like within seconds of the start the Horde team already is hundreds of points ahead, and the thing is a forced race to catch them / overtake them. This is not enjoyable to me at least, I don’t care a whole lot for super fast-paced or hectic gameplay (that’s why I still play an MMO and not Overwatch or something more modern).

Just my $.02 based on what I have experienced.

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326

Of course, I mean a huge chunk of AP for very little effort? You’d be stupid not to care about it, especially for alts.

Regarding the rewards… I agree they’ve done a pretty bad job on how they are obtained … but meh, I guess I don’t have an issue ignoring rewards when they are from content I don’t want to do. Seems like the logical approach.

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I’ve been waiting for this thread. Also, I’m at work so I may not get names and technical things 100% correct.

The changes have been underwhelming to be honest. The inclusion of azerite shale spiders and the like is terrible. I thought getting to the azerite extractor first was supposed to be a good thing. Losing 4,000+ azerite to the opposing faction because one person didn’t get out of aggro range when all the azerite mobs popped is awful. I much prefer “The azerite detectors going barmy” with the 3 huge azerite deposits and a rare mob with some adds we had prior to 8.1.

Also, shadow crash (I think it’s called) does over 100k damage on normal, in addition to some other enemy spells I forget the name of. That’s ridiculous. I know some will say, “You should move” but that brings up the constant stuns and lack of diminishing returns with enemy spells. If I had a dime for every time my screen has said “Arcane locked” during islands I could retire tomorrow.

Completely removing the new azerite mobs (or completely redoing them) and the inclusion of diminishing returns on enemy spells/abilities would greatly improve island expeditions in my opinion.

As far as improvements, I guess points for invaders being island-wide is a nice addition but it’s hard to notice with how rare good rewards are. I like how quest items are highlighted. They were a pain prior to 8.1. I love how portals work. They’re a nice change of scenery. There may be a lot of criticism in this post but overall I like how islands work.

Not nearly enough dubloons. Do they still spawn on the ground in islands? They should. They should also be rewarded EVERY TIME for winning an island. I also believe they should be rewarded on a loss for hitting a certain threshold.

As far as pets go, some are super common and some are ridiculously rare. Maybe a bit of a middle ground would be nice.

Mounts are way too rare. I’ve run hundreds of islands across my account and I just got my first mount the other day. That seems ridiculous. I’m sure some people have run hundreds and have zero.

Since (I hope) someone from Blizzard is reading this, islands are what keep me playing. They’re one of the only things I do in game with friends and that makes them one of my favorite things in BFA. Please make them more enjoyable and rewarding.

Edit: I liked the daily quest for 110-119 toons where we got a good amount of XP prior to 8.1. I get that the new “invasions” have replaced that but I enjoy doing islands more.

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328

Are mounts really that rare? I just started doing them in earnest on Tuesday and already got the Bat and Mogu mounts

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I would say you got extremely lucky.

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You should buy a lottery ticket…seriously.

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331

Loot from islands is still non-existent. Mob scaling is out of control, they need a nerf.

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332

There is some insane damage coming out of mobs on islands which paired with the stuns and DR issue brought up is a nightmare sometimes. Having islands be a bit challenging is nice, but nothing is good about long stuns repeatedly and getting nuked. This definitely needs to be looked at.

I haven’t gotten anything noteworthy in 2 weeks (some random mog mace and maybe… MAYBE a pet?). Doesn’t feel good. Can we have a better way to try for mounts besides waiting for the right week, spamming them to get the right map, then having a very slight chance at getting it to drop? It’s worse than the llothien prowler because there’s repetitive maps in between that I don’t care about. That’s all I’ve got for now.

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333

preach on brother

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I agree they do too much damage which almost makes it necessary to use those special buffs bought with dubloons.

Some of those mechanics those mobs put out would be better suited to mythic raiding than a bunch of people who play this game only so-so.

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335

My feelings toward Island Expeditions is also the same as what I have toward Warfronts. During the actual content it does not feel rewarding. You have quests and objectives but you are never “rewarded” for doing it. You are rewarded for finishing content ASAP which makes it almost always a race, no time to just enjoy it.

IMO there needs to be rewards or at least breadcrumb rewards along the way to finishing each island. Maybe rares have a small chance at dropping mounts or pets etc but right now you feel like you have to do 15 minutes of work for a chance at a reward.

Take for example the Darkshore/Arathi WQs. You know you will be getting a reward and you know you have a chance of an additional reward for killing the rares along the way. It’s enjoyable because you at least get something with a chance of an additional reward.

Island expeditions feel like you get a small chance at a meaningful reward with nothing along the way. Especially since the reward is not ilvl based and it’s more focused on cosmetics. At the very least rares or some mobs could drop Dubloon’s along the way.

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336

Been doing heroic difficulty and been getting alot less dubloons, i did 5 Ie last night no dubloons and 6 this morning and got 4 dubloons from 1 of those IE, somethi g isnt right, and the mount drop rate needs to go up.

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337

Ever since 8.1 came out, Island Expeditions, Normal and Heroic have been a pain to do. Everything is hitting like a truck and the fact that anyone can que without selecting a role makes it worse.

As a rogue, I did a heroic one, i was dying to some pack of mobs, just because they deal too much damage and have more HP than usual. Getting stunned over and over is not fun. Maybe its just me but i feel like they are overtuned.

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I don’t want to grind mobs (otherwise I would queue for a dungeon). I want to solve puzzles and use my professions to do cool things while I explore. This is why I am disappointed with the current state of Island Expeditions. I do enjoy killing the enemy team though.

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Maybe if you’re a mythic raider, or have a huge army of alts you need to gear quickly. But for the average player? My alt has 385 shoulders that dropped from a warfront, and everything but the center was already unlocked on them the day they dropped. That’s without doing more than a handful of islands for fun, the occasional emissary, and a handful of low mythic+ dungeons (that she ran for hydrocores). Outside of players doing bleeding edge content, I suspect the most people don’t have a lot of things they still need to unlock via the heart.

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Doing the new islands as a caster is a nightmare. There are too many mobs that can quick stun/interrupt/knockback/area denial. Getting hard casts off is almost impossible in some situations. Even heroic feels overturned. If it’s supposed to be puggable by randoms, it needs to be re-tuned for that style player. Or the requirements need to be raised.

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Either nerf the mobs and go back to pre 8.1 drop rates (which already happened the drop rate nerf)

or buff the drop rates again (like it was on 8.1 launch week) and leave the mobs like this.

Stop slowing down players progress because your scaling system is bad.(everything is done for the glory of the play metrics).
Stop punishing players that are trying to collect items.

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342

I know it is probably not possible, but maybe implementing some really cool looking unique sets for xmog. Maybe this is based on the races that drop them like mogu, troll, etc. I like a lot of the recolored tier, but maybe something new would make it fun or really unique items for certain slots(shoulders, helm).

Some form of bad luck protection so you don’t continue to get the same pets/mounts. I got like 5 Thunderscale Whelplings after doing some back to back and I just gave up cause I was tired of getting only those pets when there are SO MANY OTHERS.

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First up, honestly, it doesn’t matter the environmental layout or the mob arrangement, Island Expeditions are too basic in their objectives. Right now, all you do is mow mobs down. There’s no structure beyond that. Which means the layout of the islands is wasted. There should be unique objectives to each island to provide actual variety to the game play. For example, having to hold one location against multiple attacks. Or, having to attack and seize the enemy vessel. Right now, all the islands feel the same and are nothing but a race.

Secondly, there should be solo versions. This would facilitate individual challenges and allow the expeditions to have game play value for alts and new players once the expansion has ended.

Thirdly, the reward structure is far too stringent and too lackluster. The coins are a step in the right direction but the doubloons awarded are too small in number to incentivize repeat game play. There should feel like some sort of progress towards a goal so more of the rewards should be on the vendor, if not all of them in case RNG is unfavorable to a player over the long-term. Scenarios in Pandaria worked better in this regard with justice points that allowed players to predictably plan out what they wanted to earn with those points.

Lastly, allow players to pick the island they want to run.

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