Feedback: Island Expeditions

[Cacyte-argent-dawn]

In theory IE could be fun but there are lot of problems that increase the frustration instead of the fun:

1. Why must we be 3 to do them? Why not make them flexible 2-5 for example, now that you have scaling for lots of other contents?

2. They are called Island Expedition, the “pirates” thematic is often present but… We loot ZERO gold! It feels strange to kills hundred of mobs and have nothing to loot. From level 1 to 120, during quest, during dungeon and raids… everything in WoW rewards you with gold… except the ONE thing where you play a kind of pirate exploring island and opening tenth of treasure chest!

3. Rewards are random. Random is horrible. Random is frustrating. Random is the main reason I want to quit the game. You added purchasable stuff with doubloons in 8.1, and that’s… actually good! But why not have every single pet/toy/mount available this way??? Or at minimum, why aren’t the rewards tradable with your teammates? You can trade the pet or the transmog you just got, but not the mount, why that??

4. When you queue with random people, when the IE ends, you are separated right away. What if those people were friendly (or just good ^^) and you want to team again for another IE?

[Willard-doomhammer]

1. It is better now for pugs, since you don’t have to argue with your group whether to go for rares only or just finish the island. Sadly it also makes them a bit less exciting, since you got absolutely no control over what loot you might get now.
2. Rewards feel extremely underwhelming. I did 10 heroic runs and got a grand total of 9 dubloons and nothing else. That does not make me want to do more islands. There are hundred of rewards from the islands, so up the drop rate please.
3. Make dubloons a guaranteed reward for winning (can be a random amount). Then you at least could feel you can farm for some of the vendor items.
4. The amount of cc is way too much and there doesn’t seem to be any DR on it. Spending 10-15 seconds being chain cc’ed is not fun. Fighting a pack of yetis and spend 80% of the fight being feared is not fun.
5. Let us sign up via the dungeon finder. Would love to do random islands in between questing, but that is impossible now, since I have to constantly go back to the table to sign up.
6. Why only 3 islands pr. week? That seems like a completely random decision and it doesn’t serve any purpose. Just let us sign up for any random island from the entire pool.

[Aboose-pozzo-delleternità]

Islands should be a single player scenario, maybe it will save em.
And make us queue the pvp one without sitting in lfg for ages.

They are still the most boring, yet the most efficient way of farming ap, except i stopped farming ap ages ago

#soloq

[Niixten-ahnqiraj (Niixten)]

I am a mount collector and I have done over 3000 expeditions, 95% of them are normal runs. I run with three accounts so my attempts are little over 9000 right now. I got 5/9 mounts.

It would be good if we can buy the mounts from the dubloon vendor or target the right mobs.

Most elites and rares does huge damage that are supposed to be avoidable but they turn and face you on the last second and you get hit.
In 8.1 mobs have much more hp and their damage are insane compared to 8.0

Mining and looting chests feels poor and slow. Azerite rupture is slow and the time you stay there are not worth the azerite.

Make the AI hunter pet less anyoing. It can target you from the other side of the map and stun you and keep you in combat.

Remove the random tentacles that can spawn during faceless invasion because they keep you in combat…

[Gombado-the-venture-co]

Items sold on the ship at the spawning area are more a trap to waste currency than a viable option. Should just give everyone one of the items at spawn imo.

The islands themselves have gotten more fun with more events, the rewards are still rather infrequent, but its hard for me to see just what would be balanced there. (I suppose it depends on how long are these rewards supposed to last)

The opening of chests is a rather boring and time consuming grind - they should rteward buffs or (temporary) items to use on the island (perhaps rework the spawn shop items into this)

all in all id say the island expedition has gotten better.

Feedback and eu 2nd customer sentiment is still at an all time low however, its probably because a dev hasnt interacted with the eu community since ion’s picard facepalm funny funny joke. We’ve actually mastered the secret art of communicating in english, it’s beyond stupid the forums arent merged.

[Mahmeya-darkmoon-faire (Mahmeya)]

I agree with the fact that there should be at least some tiny bit of gold. Also, queuing from finder would be nice - not only for islands but for warfronts as well.

Edit: another idea I have is that when there’s an invasion (typicaly with a miniboss in a portal), having a better loot if you get him would be nice as well.

[Nyarlatothep-nemesis]

Honestly what’s the point? Even if we do give honest feedback and blizz listens to us by the time they implement the changes it’s going to be 8.3 .
By then the expansion will be over, Actiblizz will announce the newest exciting Overwatch/Diablo content and everyone, especially Blizzard, will move on and forget about WoW…
Until the next Big Expansion that will change everything and introduce a new stupidly undertuned and overhyped mode/mechanic repeating the cycle.

Devs are too proud to admit they f***ed up. The company will yet another time fire everyone involved with this expac (it already started) and blame it on the new team if they keep bleeding subs.

[Rockette-wildhammer]

I’ll start by saying that adding doubloons vendor was a mistake. It should have been different currency and doubloons should have stayed for consumables.

How have the changes felt?

• Mob variety feels good, finally get to kill something other than crocs.
• Anti-masspull measures feel a bit too much, with each and every mob having some sort of “avoidable aoe” that either stuns/fears/disorients/roots you for 6 seconds resulting in almost certain death because what follows is another “avoidable” attack that does well over your health pool of damage.
• Some non-elite creatures (troll casters, faceless) do excessive damage (faceless also have HP of an elite mob), and being non-elite, they don’t even drop the healing spheres.
• Azerite creatures have an arsenal of super annoying abilities - spamming a bubble that absorbs excessive amount of damage, spamming the knockback spell and finally throwing those little sparkles that do damage and knockback, possibly chaining the effect.
• Enemy teams seem to gather Azerite at higher rate than before, making you rush even more than before.
• Enemy team also seem to be more intelligent, they go for healing spheres that heal/rez, which on one hand seems fair, but combined with the fact they have the upper hand when it comes to damage and spammable CC, makes the encounter much harder. Fact it, they were collecting them before, but the spheres had no effect on them. Now they actually get healed AND rezzed too.
• New islands look pretty.

Have things improved?

• Total amount of Azerite required for the weekly is a nice change.
• Not having to target specific creatures to get a chance at a reward is good if you run with random people.
• Invasions happen earlier and more often.

Has anything gotten worse?

• Difficulty in general seems to have gone up, part thanks to anti-mass pull mechanics, as noted above, and part to some creatures having CC or excessive damage that actually can’t be avoided, unless you just stun and kill them asap. Namely yettis that spam targeted fear, trolls that spam uninterruptable shadow/venom/sand bolts and basilisks that spam targeted stuns.
• It felt weird before and it feels weird now, that enemy NPCs are supposed to imitate players, but we can’t use PvP talents. Combined with their general improvements in terms of damage and AI, it makes for a much more annoying and difficult encounters.
• Going with the points above, if you get a fire elemental invasion and get caught by the enemy team that has someone with a stun, you’re more likely to end up dead because of the constant flames and CC that makes you eat it all.
• Using doubloons on consumables now feels like a waste thanks to past consumables nerfs and addition of the novelty vendor.

What rewards have you been getting?

• Feels like I get less rewards than before, but in higher amount - for example, I get nothing for 4 expeditions and for 5th, I get doubloons, an armor and a quest item.
• Finally obtained a mount (a bat).
• It feels like thanks to the loot not being dependent on kills means less of a chance to target the reward, for example I would really love to get that Vrykul twohander sword, but since I can get only one transmog item (feel free to correct me) per run, that one spot gets taken by a pirate hat or cultist gloves, even if I don’t touch either of those while slaughtering all of the Vrykuls. I understand that the change was generally for the better, but it makes the rewards even more random than before.

As for general feedback…

• There should definitely be a “Play another” button for when you meet the right people. You can do so in dungeons and skirmishes, why not expeditions?
• More events that require something different than pulling a pack of mobs, AoEing them down while dodging their AoEs. For example jumping puzzle or Kirin’tor and Tortolan-like quests. Or dark caves and tombs, that require you to carry a torch to able able to see around you (similar to Vault of Wardens) while avoiding deadly traps to get to a treasure.
• Add a way to see where the shrines are, consumable or a toy that would reveal their location. I realize finding them is a part of the “exploring” but you either find it by the time the expedition ends or get votekicked by your teammates for not contributing because you went to “explore”. The shrines are fun when you get the right one.
• In that regard, maybe make Archaeology involved too. Either as described above, to reveal shrines, or as a way of obtaining Azerite or target rewards by collecting fragments.
• For reward targeting in general - similar to how Archaeology works, you would start a project and if the creature in question is present, you would get the fragments. Basically what legendary essences in Legion did, you wouldn’t get stuff instantly, but at least you could see yourself getting closer.

[Starpior-stormscale (Starpior)]

I actually like the “reworked” island expedition. It is not something I would farm, but it is not as frustrating to do as it was before. Lowered weekly cap feels nice and encourages to do mythics for cap.
Did weekly cap on 2 characters. On main I did 3x mythic IE (island expedition) and on alt all heroic runs.
From 3x mythic runs I got Twilight drake mount (first time saw and killed the Boss of that invasion) and some azerite quest items, dubloons.
From HC runs on alt, got azerite quest items and dubloons. It feels like drop rate is increased.
Didn’t feel any big change in difficulty like someone states, that the mobs deal big damage or AI is too strong. Navigation through island got easier, rare spawns are more packed, quest items are near quest givers, bigger mining nodes overall QoL has improved. Well I have mixed feeling about azerite extractor it feels that it is not worth to do that event.
I must agree with ship vendor currency change, tied currency for pets/mounts/cosmetics and power boost on IE is bad idea (my opinion).
Before 8.1 I lvled 2 alts purely from IE grind, so comparing with past experience reworked IEs are better, not awesome but better.

[Quemundo-agamaggan]

• How have the changes felt?

Barely noticed any improvements

• Have things improved?

Removed from the game, there’s nothing worse than transparent, perpetual systems designed to take load off designers, being trust at us.

• Has anything gotten worse?

Once you’ve hit rock bottom, there is only one way left. But yet you’ve managed to stay rock bottom, and not move.

• What rewards have you been getting?

Quests for AP that I do not need or care for.
One or two green gear items.
AP; see above.

[Kew-tarren-mill]

How have the changes felt?

• I don’t feel much of a difference. They are still pretty much just a PvE stomp with no real mechanics except for “Don’t stand in fire* because it 1 shots you.”
  *Fire or other such mechanics that 1 shot you

Have things improved?

• They are basically still the same.

Has anything gotten worse?

• With the removal of AK and forcing people into IE to reach a certain level instead of just make playing the game a viable way of sustaining your neck levels possible, it just feels like you had a set of very angry developers complaining about how their content was never played, so when BfA came around they suggested this and then threw a temper tantrum in the office until someone decided that “Island Expeditions will be the ONLY viable source of AP.”

What rewards have you been getting?

• I completely stopped playing because of AP farming and I am not even supposed to hit something like 41-42 like Method is. I was just put into a spot where I would need to reroll, but I cba farming all those neck levels that I had on my main again. And my main is only like 36 atm because AP farming earlier on also made me take a break

[Adlian-twisting-nether (Adlian)]

I like the changes in 8.1 but i don’t know who decided that every elite and rare should one shot (even a tank). That’s such an annoying mechanic and often i’m not even able to run out fast enough as a DK.

Dubloon drops should be increased, im often finishing an island without getting anything. At least give us a bag of dubloons when we get no item.

Item drops feel kinda low too, especially on mythic.

[Dardan-kazzak]

delete any ap generation from islands it shouldnt be the go to tool for grinding ap.
Apply ap from raids like in legion
Add more AP from m+ weekly cache or each dungeon completed

[Varuuna-der-rat-von-dalaran]

A few things that need to change to make them bearable:

Rewards

• They need to always reward doubloons, always. It’s already annoying when you don’t get anything special, so at least a larger amount of doubloons needs to be baseline.
• If you fail and lose an expedition, you can’t be rewarded with anything else but doubloons, AFK-farming can’t be a thing.
• Put the old/pre-8.1 rewards on the vendor, try to explain to a new player why half of the rewards are not on the vendor, it just does not make sense.
• Vendor consumables need to not cost doubloons, it always feels bad spending them on consumables, taking a chunk of progress away from the next item you wanted to buy from the vendor. Maybe create a secondary currency for them.

Monsters

(echoing a few of my fellow posters here because I could not have said it better)

• Anti-masspull measures feel a bit too much, with each and every mob having some sort of “avoidable aoe” that either stuns/fears/disorients/roots you for 6 seconds resulting in almost certain death because what follows is another “avoidable” attack that does well over your health pool of damage.
• Some non-elite creatures (troll casters, faceless) do excessive damage (faceless also have HP of an elite mob), and being non-elite, they don’t even drop the healing spheres.
• Azerite creatures have an arsenal of super annoying abilities - spamming a bubble that absorbs excessive amount of damage, spamming the knockback spell and finally throwing those little sparkles that do damage and knockback, possibly chaining the effect.
• Ability visibility, some of the ground AoE spells are SO hard to see on water covered floors or in general, that makes it even harder to dodge them
• Azerite extractors are a nice idea but mining them is not worth the time.
• Too. Many. One-Shot. Mechanics.

Enemy Faction

• It felt weird before and it feels weird now, that enemy NPCs are supposed to imitate players, but we can’t use PvP talents. Combined with their general improvements in terms of damage and AI, it makes for a much more annoying and difficult encounters. They have way too much CC. And enabling PvP talents here would just make sense.

Systems

• Add better AFK-Detection and disable the vote kicking system. It gets abused all the time, sometimes people just think it’s funny to kick the 3rd person right before the end because reasons.

The Azerite Farm Problem

• Azerite Knowledge increase should not have been paused
• Increase Azerite rewards from M+
• Increase Azerite rewards from Raids

[Wimbert-die-aldor]

1. Azerite acquisition does feel smoother now.
2. Randomizing the rewards even more made it easier for pugs to stick together and pursue the same thing instead of everyone splitting off and searching for whatever mobs they would like to kill.
3. Randomizing the rewards also took the little control players had over the loot away. There is even less exitement than before, where you at least might be happy about finding a random spawn/invasion that you were aiming for. And you can’t properly target anything.
4. Buyable rewards are great. Randomly dropping currencies are not. It actually feels as if the dubloon drops decreased with the patch.
5. No one buys buffs/items on the island ships anymore. Since the buffs/items were something that was sold as a big plus of the islands (I remember Blizzcon-talk about items that would make a mage heal and so on…), that’s quite a sad state. It makes no sense to buy short-term buffs with the currency that you want to use for long-term rewards. The buffs/items made islands a bit more fun before, that’s gone now.
6. They still don’t feel like “expeditions”. They Feel like a testing ground for new random spawn techniques that might bring life to the open world one day, and better AI that could be included in a number of ways in other systems. You don’t have any time to explore, you just rush and kill, while the island has many more invaders than inhabitants. There is also nothing distinctive about the individual islands, apart from the optics. Even the inhabitants are randomly selected each week, there are no special events, and in the end all the islands feel the same.
7. Azerite extractors are a nice touch. But mining azerite seams isn’t worth the time.
8. Giving shale spiders a shield they cast all the time makes them really annoying in pugs. You could easily take them down with focus fire or despell them, of course, but you won’t get that in the AoE-rushes that are the usual gameplay.
9. It’s great that the same azerite spawn event that almost every island had before is gone.
10. The other faction still mostly feels like a timer, making you hurry up. Not a threat in themselves. I would like the experience much more… if they weren’t there at all.

[Lightslayers-draenor (Lightslayers)]

The new events and the fact that we’re going away from the always repeating “collect azerite until halfway done,azerite elementals spawn,finish island” makes them much more enjoyable to do over time I feel.I enjoy the addition of new mechanics such as boss portals or azerite extractors too

[Exris-silvermoon (Exris)]

I have doine exactly 5 island expeditions. Just to get past the gatekeeping.

Iv hated it since the 1st second of the first one I did.

I cant stand race against the clock content. I despise PvP. Im not much of a fan of random groups. And I utterly wanted to puke when I saw quests in there where even reading the quest log drained time, and the randoms I was grouped with were wandering aimlessly around the map and would be of no use in helping me make the objective.

I hope we dont see anything remotely like this in 9.0.

[Nerathion-argent-dawn (Nerathion)]

I’m one of those people who loved Islands before 8.1, at least doing rare farms. That was more interesting to me than just mindless farming of everything (though that can be fun itself every now and then, too!).

However, I do like the chance of loot dropping from everything that you kill, so it sort of takes away the pressure you had in rare farms and gives purpose to farming all mobs instead of just rares.

I’ve seen a decrease in events aside from just basic extractors (that seem to be in every island), and very few portals or such, while I loved them before. However, both extractors AND portals aren’t interesting. Extractors do have the fighting-over-them aspect to it, but even on Mythic difficulty, you’re just likely going to win vs AI anyway. Furthermore, the effects of extractors aren’t noticeable to me, it would help if the effects were shown better (how much Azerite you gained, some tooltip on what it does/something to show what it does).

Portals on the other hand teleport you to usually a spacious area, but there’s only one rare boss (that’s not special in any way) with two chests. It’d be cool if it had more stuff to explore in like, Mogu rooms, because most of the time is spent on running from one side of the large room to the rare, and then back to the portal, which is very boring.

Some other negatives… The new azerite mobs with shields are a huge PITA. It would be great if newer mobs were designed without the ‘How to make the islands even more unappealing’ idea in mind.

I’ve never used the purchasable items before and because of the currency rewards now, I don’t think I ever will.
Previously, rare farms emphasised the exploration part in expeditions, that has been removed now. It doesn’t feel like an exploration any more. Quests do nothing but give azerite, it would be great if they also gave you something / some advantages?

In general, even with newer locations, they still feel very same-y. Perhaps each different island could get their own thematic stuff to them. Could at least be something like weather, the snowy ones could get snowstorms, jungle ones rainstorms? Mechanically they don’t differ enough. The randomisation that was promised also feels very shallow and running enough of one island doesn’t show a big variety in the layout of the island, if there even is one to begin with.

However, the treasure map is a nice addition. It adds more incentive to do the expeditions. The loot reward you get from them can be disheartening if you get only gold or a piece of mog only, though. I know it’s a chance and I’m generally unlucky anyway (hello Dancing with the Dark Rangers mission not showing up after half a year for the achievement to be completed), but as quickly as the motivation to run them again came, it also went fast.

It’d be great if differences between Normal-Heroic-Mythic-PvP islands were shown more. Not only in regards to things just doing more damage and such, but also if they give more rewards or not. Furthermore, at a certain ilvl point, they don’t feel much different from eachother anyway. I think it would be nice, if higher skill levels (Mythic, for example), had more mechanics, abilities on mobs, or just had more stuff to do than on Normal. Even with raised cap on Azerite, the layout feels quite similar to Normal (start -> extractor -> invasion -> done). There should be more happening.

Also, I agree with the other points where dubloon drop rate feels as if it has decreased. At least on higher difficulties, they should drop more than 4 per run. I’ve only been getting pets and toys (and mog pieces) thus far, though. Before and after the patch, so not much difference there.

[Na-confrérie-du-thorium]

I literally saw no differences AT ALL, still no rewards, so I’ve stopped doing useless isles.

But in order to buy all items, we have to farm 2775 dubloons, 2775 ! What the hell were you thinking ? On average, we loot … 0 dubloons per isle.

[Coolgroove-defias-brotherhood (Coolgroove)]

The only change I see - is that now there is no need to look for rares and kill only them first and everything else after if there is a need for more azerite.

Events still only from time to time, because most of the time you kill enough mobs to finish before any portal event starts, or on your way to that portal.

Still no time to do quests on island or explore. If some quest completed passively while you move from pack to pack - ok, if not - nobody cares.

So game-play is still just a mindless AoE grind of mobs, and nothing else.

Rewards - nothing changed for me. I do IE only needed amount for weekly bar, and rewards are:

• small amount of Dubloons once every 2-3 IEs
• bigger amount of dubloons didn’t happen once so far
• one pet since 8.1 launched
• no mounts drops
• no transmog drops
• 2 BoE transmog from treasure missions

Maybe something was changed for those who run a lot of IEs, but for me - it’s still boring activity that I have to do to get some AP, as quick as possible, with no interesting rewards or game-play.

Vendor is good tho - hats are great. Wish there was Gloves and Boots (with BIG lapel) for those hats to pair.