Feedback: Island Expeditions

Community General Discussion
162

I enjoy islands. I have everything from the vendor. I just wish a coule things could be changed.

  1. stop letting multiboxers queue into islands unless they have a full group. I should not have to do double the work because players want to level their alt.
  2. Put an afk check in: people should not queue up if they are going to just afk and expect rewards. it’s insulting.
  3. if im going to get kicked for being off on my own when I can clearly solo most things: please don’t give me a 30 minute debuff or atleast tell me why im being kicked.
  4. please consider putting nerubian and murloc mobs in more frequently as those seem to be the hardest pet types to get.

Other than that I don’t see many problems with the system I like the variety that can be in the island I like that its not the same 3 every werrk.

3 Likes
163

No mounts on 7 toons in since launch. Do you really expect us to farm this till the heat death of the universe to get all of the mounts?

15 Likes
164

The lack of rewards is what makes me not want to bother. It’s rare to get anything at all for me, just feels like a waste of time.

As for the gameplay of them, they still feel too brainless. It isn’t fun to just go kill a bunch of mobs til you fill up a meter. There’s nothing interesting there.

15 Likes
165

They are less boring than they were, but still not what I’d call repeatable fun. Just a different version of a treadmill. The best thing you could do would be to remove the necessity of using Islands as the sole AP farm. Allow AP to be acquired at a decent rate in dungeons from Normal on up through M+. Then for folks who cba to do M+ they can run Islands and vice versa.

1 Like
166

Only did normal and Heroic IEs, but here goes.

AI - Post 8.1, AI seems only focused on 2 objectives. Grab the azurite machine, and hunt down the players. Their combat style seems to boil down to Impersonating Tigger while spamming voice chat. I’m a slow clicker and keyboard turner, and on Heroic I have no problem dealing with the AI group solo (Yes, I’ve been left to fend for myself several times.)

The only threat is from their ship bombardment as they run away.

Dubloons Post 8.1. - Have the talent from the ship to increase Dubloons. IF I get massive RNG luck I might end the week with (5 runs) with less than 10 ) Highest total I ever received was 3 on one IE.
A toon that does not have the talent for increase Dubloons has received several 10+. ??? WHY ???

Diminishing Returns!
Don’t you guys remember the problem of the Halloween Masks when they were added to the loot table for candy buckets? Before their first season on the loot table was over, players complained, and pointed out that getting LUCKY getting 1 mask actually lowered your chance to get a new different mask, until it was near impossible to get all Masks (which were part of an achievement)

Since IEs launched, I’ve been rewarded with 5 pets on one toon. Great luck, DUDE! No. 3 of the pets were repeats.

Now, with the removal of focused farming for pets/mounts, I have a very bad feeling that IEs are heading into the same situation as the Halloween Masks.

Hopefully, before 8.2 hits, you’ll realize the detrimental affect of diminishing returns and add in a vendor for all the items on the IE loot table. Just figure out a workable Dubloon cost, and a decent drop rate for the dubs.

1 Like
167

I’m sure on the technical side things have changed but from a gameplay standpoint you turned a targeted grind into a brainless one. You go in and kill everything you see, loot every chest you see, and mine every piece of azerite out of the ground. There’s no coordination or pathing element anymore. It’s how much of this can we aoe down without dying?

7 Likes
168

Rewards still feel disjointed, i’ve been doing islands for the weekly on 2-4 characters each week. I’ve had characters that got 2-10 doubloons and maybe a green bracer, and some characters that got pets, sometimes blue weapons, and over the course of the last month or longer a few bonus azerite quests i’m sandbagging for dazar release.

There are enemies that are more imbalanced then others, off the top of my head the void guys who use shadow crash do WAY WAY WAY WAY too much damage, thats more then 4 times as much damage as the shadow crash should do. put into actual units its most of a 370 protadins health bar in magic damage so 200kish damage. The azerite guys that disorient are a nuisance, same with all of the sources of upfront 100k or more magic damage.

People forget about these but I feel that shrines could be implemented better, like having some way to get ones that are relevant to your character, or at least not having that cursed vers shrine that increases your vers stat by 30% instead of your actual vers % by 30% everywhere. I list this because one of my favorite island experiences was getting the shadow shrine as a shadow priest and becoming a unstoppable void lord pulling 30-50k dps for 10 minutes.

The game items costing coins, while there being a vendor for massive coin costs, combined with low coin droprates is a problem. There are many ways to solve this so i won’t continue on this topic.

As a final note I feel like islands could use a little more mechanical depth. Items or upgrades that can be interacted with to change the way and island works, and not just the ones that no one currently buys because they want a seagull mount. I’m talking more along the lines of the rare cases where you get the right shrine and it isn’t stolen by a ret paladin who wants to do 30% more nature damage. More items besides all this food that is just sorta there. Also the events are all different, but ultimately very samey. There are some exceptions like the kvaldir, which give me the enjoyable experience of having melee range and cripple any ranged dps i play, but for the most part its flynn’s “ITS AN ENEMY I HATE BUGS/DRAGONS/ELEMENTALS AND I’M HIDING UNDER THE DECK” and you see those enemies and grind them into azerite paste. It’d be nice if those special enemies had exploitable buffs, special item events, or just something else that made each one worth noting rather then background noise that doesn’t really change anything.

2 Likes
169

The more freeform farming has been more enjoyable, but still feels a little rushed. I still haven’t fully explored the new maps because I’m afraid to “waste” time exploring nooks and crannies.

Not having the anxiety of crossed beliefs about where drops come from is very welcome. But the one thing I miss is the excitement of finding a portal as they have gone from being an exciting “this has a good chance of dropping loot” to “this may not even be an efficient use of time”.

Some small nerfs were welcome (such as longer windows between interrupts when lootiing air elemental chests)

The azerite extractor feels like a trap (slow to spawn, regenerating shields of elementals are a pain to deel with).

I have had a couple of encounters with afkers and people who initiate kicks without even attempting to communicate. These bad experiences are quite rare, but make up a disproportiate amount of my memories.

I’ve stopped running them on levelling characters or poorly-geared characters (this is not because the weekly exp quest was removed, but rather because invasions are a much better environment for that). It’s not uncommon for me to end up setting off in my own direction (more by accident than by design) because I tend to have a low tolerance for hesitation and indecision (by others, I’m perfectly fine with my own indecision) and want to always be doing something, anything.

I have not attempted heroics in part because I don’t feel like I’m overpowering normal difficulty, so I can’t comment on any differences between difficulties. Sometimes I wildly outgear my teammates, sometimes I have trouble keeping up with people who wildly outgear me - not a complaint, variety is the spice of life.

The “high value” follower maps are huge and I expect them to drive me to do a lot more expeditions eventually, but at the moment, I just don’t have enough hours in the day to all the things on my todo list and RNG-rewards tend to end up lower on my priority list.

It feels like rewards are a little rarer after Christmas than they were before, but that might just be a superstition - that nagging little paranoia that the treadmill is constantly being tweaked beneath me is a bit corrosive.

Still no mounts yet, but I’m inching closer to completing the original pet and quest sets. Checklist achievements are nice for tracking collecting progress by the way - I have absolutely no idea what my progress on sets is (a lot of gathered but not yet equipped gear is still sitting on alts still slowly levelling). It’s going to be a long time before I’ve accumulated enough doubloons to go spending, but I think I’m on pace to get there (assuming I don’t go outside or get a life)

2 Likes
170

I strictly do islands for the AP they provide & do so with the goal of completing them as fast as possible, I have relatively little interest in the cosmetic rewards etc. and am principally interested in how enjoyably they are to actually complete with other players who share my mind-set.
I think from a game-play perspective the new islands are slightly worse than the previous form simply because mass pulling mobs has been significantly dis-incentivized. This was actually far more enjoyable than focusing on looting chests or completing the quests since pulling the whole island involved far more skill and coordination across your group. Running around mining & looting chests for 5 minutes is not enjoyable content.

The change to the events and the azerite extractor were good changes in that they helped reduced the repetitiveness of islands. I still don’t know why a rotation exists, it doesn’t seem to make any sense to have only 3 maps available at a given time since it simply makes the islands feel repetitive if you’re doing significantly more islands than the weekly cap.

In terms, of things that can still be done to improve islands I think the main thing is to look into fixing/re-balancing the abilities of many of the mobs present. The unbreakable 12 second fears and roots are stupid and frustrating especially when every other mob has an AoE 1 shot. A tuning pass of sorts simply needs to be done to remove/fix absurd NPC abilities (i.e. howler fears, excessive unbreakable roots & nearly invisible ground AoEs).

The other major issue with IEs right now is that they reward far too much AP relative to other forms of repeatable content, in particular rated PvP and M+. Although this isn’t directly related to IEs or the changes made to them in 8.1 it does have a major impact on player opinion of IEs. It is just not reasonable for IEs to provide 4 times the AP/hr that something like M+ provides even allowing for the fact that M+ offers the hypothetical opportunity for gear upgrades. The extreme disparity in terms of the rewards is resulting in high-end players feeling forced to do IEs even when they are not enjoying them and would rather be doing other content simply because they give so much more AP/hr.
Amongst high-end players an almost universal consensus exists that at the very least M+ AP rewards should be increased by a very large amount (+200 to 300%) so that players seeking to level up their necks feel they have a choice as to whether they must do IEs.

4 Likes
171

I’ve run a few of them and they feel mostly the same as they had before 8.1… my luck could be worse than others because I do see quite a few of the mounts, but maybe there could be additional rewards added.

One thing I’ve noticed is a lack of gold rewards from doing the actual expeditions and this is something I’ve found myself wanting from doing these since they mostly feel like they reward next to nothing aside from the Seafarer Dubloons. Maybe you guys could consider adding gold rewards equivalent to the amount of time sunk into these things kinda like world quests or other activities that actually reward gold. I know the chance for a potential 5k gold weekly is a thing, but this isn’t what I mean, I’m talking about each expedition should reward some gold amount whether it be random, or based on how much progress you’ve made or whatever.

TLDR: They aren’t very fulfilling, lack gold rewards and feel exactly the same as they have from the beginning. I’ll run them regardless because I want a chance at some potentially sweet loot.

172

I do islands like 10 hours a day my neckless is almost 42.

• Alliance team are way annoying specially the DK almost impossible to kill, also too much CC going on… When you meet the Alliance enemy team you rather ignore them.

• Mobs are extremely non melee friendly, almost all rare do some ground damage that screw melee dps all the time, annoying and not fun at all… I want to DPS the mob and not run and jump all the time avoiding damage to not die.

• Some mobs are extremely OP, hitting for 100k-200k one shooting you, for example Snakes, and many others… Annoying not fun at all.

• Mount drop is extremely low and you should be able to sell them on AH I’ve seen some friends getting the same mount twice.

• Pets drop seems too high… today for example I got the same one like 5 times.

• Island items from weekly vendor should be more useful, powerful and fun, for example this week we have demos, mobs 2 shot them making them useless for islands and a waste of dubloons. Their damage is low as well since now rares have way more HP. So the items from the weekly vendor should be adjusted to the new difficulty.

• New Azerite spiders are extremely annoying for real, remove some spells from them or remove them completely from islands.

Overall Islands are more painful and annoying than before, people do them because they are kind of forced. If anything you guys should try to make them more fun to the players, not giving them a bad experience and more frustration

I know I used annoying many times but that’s the definition of Island Expeditions in 8.1

Feedback is based on Mythic Islands

5 Likes
173

The overall changes to Islands have been an improvement (overall) to the previous system. The biggest change that affects my playstyle is other Blizzard employees confirming how the drop/reward chance functions on islands in 8.1.

Adding a larger variety of creatures on a given island is visually entertaining and appealing. With the new drop system, seeing a black/twilight dragon makes me think, “Even though I only killed a few of those dragons, I have a chance to receive dragon related rewards from the end screen.” The addition of being able to use your Heart of Azeroth or fight azerite themed monsters is also a plus.

There are 2 main negatives I still have with islands. One, with the currency system, and 2, with the monster damage.

Having a currency reward from islands, and a vendor to purchase them from is a positive step forward. However, the drop rate of said currency, and the amount of currency you get when you get it, is not correctly tuned. There are three separate containers that contain dubloons. According to wowhead (https://www.wowhead.com/seafarer-dubloons-island-expedition-consumables),
the 3 different satchels drop 1-3, 4-8, and more, respectively. That wowhead post was made 22 days ago, so the amount of coins might be inaccurate, as I have received far more and far less from the first 2 types of containers. As a player it does not feel rewarding when I receive a container that has significantly less of the currency I expected. Furthermore, it feels even worse when you receive absolutely no reward apart from azerite when you complete an island. People complete islands 1) for azerite, 2) for the table mission after getting 36K azerite, 3) cosmetic or companion/mount related rewards by random chance, and 4) currency for the rewards that are static and fixed in the vendor. If you have a set of items that cost doubloons, a player should always obtain doubloons when completing an island. I need some kind of reasonable way to determine how many islands I need to reach the reward I want to purchase. For example, “Ok if I get X more doubloons in 25 more islands, I will have enough for XYZ”. Players cannot definitely say that, because they do not always receive a doubloon.

The second negative opinion I have about islands is about creature damage, but #notallcreatures. The amount of physical damage the creatures do is fine with me. This applies to melee attacks, and frontal/conal/aoe physical moves. I say that as a 380+ melee dps, a 379 DK tank, and a 375* hunter. What I strongly think is overtuned is the amount of magic damage, and targeted specific ability damage. My worst enemies are the wind serpents, and the earth elementals. The serpents have a tail knock back (fine), but also a single target, unavoidable move that hits so hard it can kill almost any player. My DK tank has been killed from 60 and 50% HP from one cast of an elite serpent. If the damage is going to be that insane, make it avoidable. If I stand in a giant or ettin stomp circle and die, I deserve it. If I get looked at by a flying snake, I should have some course of action if I have no stuns/CC. A similar statement goes for magic or non physical damage dealers on islands. You can always run away from physical damage, but the spellcasters on the island have multiple spellschools, and incredibly hard hitting magical effects.

1 Like
174

honestly theirs nothing new in terms of content, sure maybe two new islands but honestly when it comes down to it it’s all the same. kill stuff and that’s it, it’s really just a mind numbing grind and that’s why i refuse to do them anymore.

175

Thank you for reaching out on feedback.

What’s better:

  • Not needing to target certain types of creatures for loot, but have it based on what’s on the island.
  • Invasions don’t feel like they’re happening in the last 5 seconds of the map.
  • Azerite extractor (not ruptures) feels great as an objective.
  • Vendors have a great start! I love having more things to spend doubloons on besides things that are only in expeditions.
  • The Anti-AOE azerite mobs are a good idea in moderation. To many feels self-defeating.

What could be better:

  • More high-end mounts (Personal preference, but I hate the sunbird model, it’s too small to be visually appealing) - It’s more like riding a hunter pet than a mount.
  • More rewards from the vendor (It’s been 3 expansions since a single water walking mount was introduced another would be nice and a great way to do it). This can be a GREAT way to introduce more transmog (island specific not just recolors maybe? Themed after invasions/mobs) options into the game. We have a great start, but it has a lot of potential.
  • Azerite Ruptures feel like they are a waste of time. You can more easily run multiple rare packs for more azerite than the time that is spent for a rupture. Especially painful depending on the group comp. If they are going to remain as their current state please make them worth the kill time.
  • Differentiate between a rupture and extractor, they are very different events.
  • Additional objective mission types, like assassination/exploration quests for the invasions to make them more integral. Leveraging the invasions for additional objective types making them more involving and shaking up the flow of the expedition.

I really enjoy expeditions as a mode overall and especially with friends. I hope we can fine tune them during this expansion and keep them as a part of the game going forward. A lot of the issues come from the rewards and shaking up monotony of just rare hunting.

1 Like
176

The 8.1 changes were a step in the right direction, however I still find Island Expeditions to be frustrating and often not a worthwhile time investment.

I play exclusively to collect the battle pets. RNG often feels bad, especially when your entire goal relies on said RNG, but layered RNG feels even worse.

I complete the Island Expedition weekly on at least 4 characters each lockout (Heroic IEs), and then run a handful of additional Heroic IEs on top of that. Most of the time the rewards are not worth the time. I almost feel as if my reward is more often an ever-growing repair bill than anything else.

In the ~3 weeks since 8.1 was released, I’ve received 1 new pet. I’ve also received multiple duplicates that, due to being from last “IE season”, don’t really sell well so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to sell them off to earn enough gold to buy any of the newer ones.

I’m still a firm supporter of making Island Expedition cosmetics available on the dubloon vendor. Have higher difficulty IEs drop more dubloons.

To add some time-gating (because that seems to be a big design choice for BFA), lock items behind certain goals that can only be completed by running Island Expeditions. Similar to the battle pet vendors in BFA, items require additional steps before they become available to purchase.

Example: Want to buy the Muskflank Calfling from the dubloon vendor? You’ll need to kill 1000 yaks during IEs first. Want to buy Scuttle? You’ll have to save some named Pirate NPC first. And so on.

This would give players some agency back, and help them counter bad RNG.

Right now, there’s no way to target specific cosmetics. It’s way too random as the loot table has expanded to include all mobs that spawned on the completed island, killed or not. Putting the cosmetics on a vendor would help players have some control over what rewards they receive. The element of RNG is still preserved, as it’s still random what mobs spawn on an island, and it’s still possible to receive cosmetics as drops. But in the event that a certain one just isn’t appearing, a player can choose to focus on working toward it rather than sitting on hopes and dreams of RNG actually being in their favor.

3 Likes
177

Personally I am not interested in running Islands. I don’t find the content fun and as someone who is actively collecting everything in this game, I find this content to be extremely frustrating. I want to collect Tmog, pets, mounts and achievements. But with Islands I don’t know how long it will take me to do that. Everything else in the game has a timeline I can analyze and plan my life around. Even the most grindy content was ok as I could do it when I had the time. Such as insane in the membrane. But Islands is just a big mysterious waste of my time and I never know when it will end. Similar to equipment drops in legion invasions and argus invasions, I could run this for 3 months and get everything or 10 years and get nothing. I don’t want to play World of Warcraft the slot machine, I want to play World of Warcraft the RPG where I have a linear progression. Not dropping stuff in islands and switching to a currency would solve this issue as I could then figure out my average coin collection rate, how many coins I need for all the items, and then calculate how much time I need to play and plan my life around that. At this point, I just cap the weekly minimum and hope by the end of the expac I have everything and don’t have to farm this horribly boring content when the next expac comes out. Randomness is fine in small doses, but multiple layers of randomness that end up in content with no perceivable end is not fun.

2 Likes
178

  1. Drop rate is definitely feeling higher now, unfortunately, what I’m getting is mostly stuff I don’t care about - xmog. Would like to see far fewer xmog drops in exchange for a higher pet/mount drop rate. I have very few pets and no mounts after MANY runs (I even broke down and bought a couple). For something that takes this much time and gives no gold or rep, and only rarely doubloons, getting a “transmog” item - one that isn’t even a character gear upgrade (and is rarely for your class/spec) - feels like a slap in the face, not a reward. PLEASE also fix it so we don’t keep getting the same pets or mounts (not that I’ve gotten any mounts personally) over and over. The loot table is so huge and consists of multi-layered RNG. It’s so demoralizing to need MOST of the pets and ALL of the mounts and to receive a dupe that won’t even sell decently.

  2. AI needs tweaking. Sometimes the other (AI) faction won’t stop coming after players, and since the devs make them more powerful at PvP than actual players (tons of CC and defensives with short or non-existent cooldowns, and no apparent diminishing returns), they can be annoying as heck on heroic or higher - especially for melee. No, you likely won’t die unless there are other, hard hitting mobs on you, but they can take way too long to die for too little reward - and they’re back in seconds.

  3. I flipping HATE the azerite extractor, because the mobs it spawns are annoying, and I find it less interesting than exploring the island and killing various types of mobs/rares. I’d rather roam the island killing stuff, but someone in the group always decides to click on the extractor.

  4. Sometimes the group comps (I usually PUG) are just deplorable. Let’s have a mage, a priest and a rogue. Who in the world is supposed to take the beating from the elites? Especially if people aren’t very geared? It’s why I prefer to do these on my tanks and my affliction locks (using voidwalker tank pet).

  5. The free-for-all setup of IEs can lead to extremely frustrating LFG experiences. There is no incentive to stick together as a team, and worse, people sometimes pull a ton of mobs, dump them on the tank, then loot chests or otherwise take off instead of helping. If they help and die because of their idiocy, they often take off and do something else upon rezzing, instead of running back to continue helping the tank. In heroic, that usually means I die on my 353 or 365 ilevel tanks. Heroic is tuned so much higher vs. normal, and these newer mobs seem to be a lot tougher (heavy aoe and/or stuns and/or fears), so I can only handle a fraction vs. normal mode. I can suck it up and keep dying and eat a huge repair bill because of the actions of others, or I can leave. If I leave in frustration (yes, I first try communicating and then try kicking the offending party), I get nothing for my time and effort, except a huge repair bill and a 30 minute deserter debuff. The perpetrators, having essentially trolled me, suffer no penalty for their poor behavior.

    The fix? Off the top of my head: have mob difficulty (and the quantity of azerite they drop upon death) scale up or down with the the number of players actively dpsing the mobs. Maybe you already do some scaling, but you also need to take into account the sheer quantity of mobs simultaneously in combat in that spot. As mobs start to die off, remaining mobs get stronger, and correspondingly drop higher amounts of azerite. This way, there would be no benefit to dumping a ton of mobs on another player and taking off. Even if that does still happen, the abandoned player would be more likely to survive, with character and sanity intact. You could make rares exempt.

  6. Would like to see Doubloons as a bnet account-wide currency. It’s way too punishing for altoholics, especially with the stingy doubloon drop rate. They also need to drop reliably. Vary the amount per run, sure, but players should get at least a few - more if there’s no other reward but azerite.

  7. You promised lucrative treasure map missions for completing the weekly.
    This should have meant GOLD. A LOT of players do NOT care the slightest about azerite. Getting an azerite mission (for me) is infuriating. Getting a transmog mission is also a huge disappointment. Give. Us. Gold. Missions. Or heck, let us PICK what kind of mission we want: Gold, Xmog, Azerite, Doubloons, Pet Charms or that new warfront currency. Players finish their weekly and get their treasure map as a quest reward with choices for the week’s mission. Then, EVERYONE could be happy with their reward. If a player’s priorities change, so can their reward.

  8. As other people have stated, it would be nice to have ALL of the island maps as a possibility all the time. It’s boring getting the same few maps over and over all week, and would make it better for players interested in loot that is only possible from certain maps.

3 Likes
179

They’ve improved greatly from the most recent changes, but there’s still almost no point in completing them after you finish your weekly reward. There’s a massively missed opportunity to have more of a PvP involvement with this system, more objective type missions to be involved, and still more tuning to be done.

It seems to be a consensus that a lot of the creatures still do too much damage. Why are they doing damage that kills players instantly on a 1 second timer in a 360 degree circle in melee range only? Or get paired with trash mobs that root you with no diminishing return for 8 seconds with an elite that casts a cone one shot?

Why is it still far more efficient to avoid the enemy faction NPCs and just AFK farm and collect? Especially on mythic, where the damage reduction applied to the faction NPCs and the amount of health they have just doesn’t line up at all.

The “lucrative” treasure map is still RNG based on whether or not it’s “lucrative”. The value placed on straight up gold, when RNG determined that someone else gets a parrot mount or a large amount of azerite, versus gold or 19 titan residuum is not engaging or fun at all.

All in all, some simple changes in the short term could help this “major” piece of content tremendously. Simply lower the damage of mobs throughout the island helps lower geared players and doesn’t make it so you’re tip toeing around specific packs of absolutely horribly designed mobs.

More emphasis on the PvP aspect could actually benefit the game. If there was a more dedicated version devoted to PvP, it could have some merit since finding an efficient route, targeting the enemy team, and managing the items from the vendor as well as knowing the enemy position, etc. There’s a lot of factors that can play in when fighting REAL players that would be entertaining to watch.

The idea that AFK farming is still the best option needs to be looked at. Make it so the more creatures you kill, the faster your azerite “bounty” in the island increases, so it will be worth targeting the NPCs at some point that’s a lot quicker than 250 seconds into the damn match, if not longer.

Instead of one lucrative mission, give us three based on the three islands for the week, with different rewards, that WE can choose, so that RNG doesn’t determine whether or not the single mission we get every week is another waste of time.

1 Like
180

I’m out of likes, but you have a good point. This is our second island themed expansion, and would be an excellent opportunity to introduce a new water-walking mount. Preferably in a different style, since some people seem to think the water strider isn’t adorable.

1 Like
181

A couple more thoughts after doing some islands tonight:

  • Healers have nothing to do in Normal/Heroic islands. When you inspect someone and find that they’re a healer, you are disappointed. This leads to…
  • Shrines. You found them by exploring, but then you have to remember what type it is, the debuff aspect is pretty strong, and if you guessed wrong you might be a tank with no dodge. I never see anyone take one in my groups, even pugging. That’s unfortunate, because they were supposed to have buffs that make different specs viable, like healers doing more damage or dps healing (according to Q&As from before launch).
  • The vendor items from the merchants on the starting boat. They cost dubloons that could get you pets and mounts and stuff, so they’re kind of just a new player trap that people will regret spending money on. It’s unfortunate because, back when we thought dubloons were just a brawler’s guild-esque buff currency, they made the expeditions more interesting.

On a positive note, I like that islands get you to use skills that you otherwise wouldn’t while soloing, in Mythic+, or in a raid. There are situational uses for some of my abilities in those, but I use single target snares, taunts, ranged pulls, etc. way more often in islands on Windwalker Monk than I do anywhere else.