Island Expeditions are the WoD Garrison to the....

[Dark-Zarupia]

You do realize that Blizzard has multiple teams that do different things, right? It's not like they stop working on all other content while they're designing a store mount.

Guess people don't seem to get the joke.....

[cparle87]

Guess people don't seem to get the joke.....

Where's the humor in going into a fit whenever a store mount is added accusing Blizzard of shortchanging you on the things YOU want as if they can't do both?

[Venziir]

Expeditions aren't so much a precursor, they are pretty much just the newest, flashiest version of MoP scenarios.

[Dark-Zarupia]

Where's the humor in going into a fit whenever a store mount is added accusing Blizzard of shortchanging you on the things YOU want as if they can't do both?

You must be the fun dude at parties...

The joke is that blizzard priorities store mounts over gameplay.

[cparle87]

You must be the fun dude at parties...

The joke is that blizzard priorities store mounts over gameplay.

The "joke" isn't funny. That's the point. Say the Blizz team has 200 guys working on new stuff. Raids, dungeons, gear, quests, etc. The way people act when a store mount is released is like all 200 of those guys quit what they were doing and stopped making new content for the game just to spend weeks making that one mount. Hell, one of the store mounts, iirc, was made by a single dev on his offtime over like 3 weekends. I get that the community is full of jaded bitches who live to complain about every thing in existence, but this level of triteness is insulting.

[Newname1234567890]

Island expeditions could have been a good feature to have as some sort of dungeon mechanic.

Just like how Warfront could have been a good feature for a battlegrounds.

But Blizzard doesn't think that far,they rather throw in another store mount.

Yeah I can't imagine mythic plus runners looking the best times would be happy with random bosses

[Dark-Zarupia]

The "joke" isn't funny. That's the point. Say the Blizz team has 200 guys working on new stuff. Raids, dungeons, gear, quests, etc. The way people act when a store mount is released is like all 200 of those guys quit what they were doing and stopped making new content for the game just to spend weeks making that one mount. Hell, one of the store mounts, iirc, was made by a single dev on his offtime over like 3 weekends. I get that the community is full of jaded bitches who live to complain about every thing in existence, but this level of triteness is insulting.

Ye you are definitely that one guy everyone loves at parties jeez..

[Maell]

The OPs idea sounds like a more convoluted version of M+ to me. Like a mix of M+ affixes and mechagon/ulduar hard modes.

Not bad if properly dedigned and implemented though.

The paths could work the same as affixes either seperate or become one of the affixes.

[qwikz]

Blizzard plays things EXTREMELY safely. They are more or less THE face of PC gaming

Ha. Good joke mate

[fooliuscaesar13]

I like this idea, and I'd take it a step further and randomize the abilities on bosses a bit more. Rather than only having a script that moves the bosses through phases, I'd make the attacks randomized. Some boss attempts would be harder, others would be easier. Either way, it makes the game less predictable and people need to pay more attention to the game rather than to DBM/BigWigs.

To make this successful, though, you'd have to make the tells that the bosses have a lot more exaggerated so that players have the time to react, similar to how Timeless Isle elite mobs exaggerated their attacks.

[ro9ue]

I like this idea, and I'd take it a step further and randomize the abilities on bosses a bit more. Rather than only having a script that moves the bosses through phases, I'd make the attacks randomized.

Completely agree.

I think it would be awesome just by pure experience with the game you can pick up on tells that allow you to play tactically in certain ways.

Imagine that in a certain dungeon it can spawn:

A - Kobolds
B - Quillboar
C - Gnolls

Then there are subdivisons, say it chose Quillboar. Now it pulls from a pool of Quillboar NPCs like:

1 - Summoner
2 - Champion
3 - Warrior
4 - Assassin
5 - Priest
6 - Knight

So before we get to the next subdivision, the tactics you might use vs a Quillboar (similar to the MoP rares that had kits based on race) might make you play in a certain way. Then if it picked say Summoner, Assassin and Knight, that might further change how you play.

I'd like to see them go yet another step further:

The Quillboar Summoner can summon an Ice Elemental, Earth Elemental or Fire Elemental. Based on which Elemental you see, you would play a certain way - Fire does AOE damage to your group, Earth can root and silence, Ice can slow and freeze you if you let a stacking debuff get too high.

The Qullboar Knight can dual wield swords, doing a lot of fast smaller attacks... OR have a big shield, making you do more damage if you stand behind him... or be mounted on a boar steed and can charge and move very fast.

The Quillboar Asssassin might be hidden and you have to pull them out of stealth before they summon other NPCs, or they might use poisons that you need to cleanse.


The more variance, the more game experience comes into play where a veteran player might be like "hey, that Quillboar Assassin is using daggers that have a poison dripping visual... get your cleanse ready" or "Hey hunter, try to flare around or Rogue, scout around and try to find any assassins".

Obviously they also need to bring back a lot of tactical abilities they removed over the years to really make a system like this shine.

[fooliuscaesar13]

*snip*

This is pretty badass also and has a lot more detail than I had. Blizzard could pull this off. Depending on how it is done - the randomization alone would add a new level of replayability to dungeons rather than just being "I need to run this for my blacksmithing quest" or "need this for my bis helm".

I think they need to change boss loot as well, like maybe adding bundles of crafting reagents to loot tables or having recipes drop from bosses again.

[Nefarious Tea]

Ha. Good joke mate

I mean you can jerk it to the Fortnite flash in the pan all you want, but for more than a decade if the media had heard of a video game, it was from Activision/Blizzard.

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This has nothing to do with AI, but with scaling. AI enemies were already outgeared back in previous patches and it has only gotten worse since essences became a thing. That's not even mentioning island specific items, which are pretty crazy in some cases. If the enemies had a proper amount of hitpoints and damage, they could become an actual threat, but as it is now, they're more of a nuisance that slows you down. Even a healer can instantly kill them with Cyclotronic trinket.

It's not even that. They don't have tactics or adapt. They don't interrupt. They don't CC. They just stand there (or maybe jump like the idiots blizzards thinks its playerbase is) and cast/melee.

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To me the Island Expedition are just a feature laboratory where they experiment their new system and look at the player's reaction about it. You get the "random" (because this shit is not random at all) monster spawns, the new IA (which can be really good in some PvE challenges or even in a bodyguard system) and the "dynamic" events (which is again a lie since those "dynamic" events spawn at a certain amount of azerite reached) which were used in the Season 2 of MM+ dungeon with the reaping affix.

And what triggers me is not the fact it's experimental, but that some rewards are so rare you need to do them thousand and thousand times. (2000 try for me, 0 mount).

Fun fact: do a little googling (or read on wowhead). Almost everything in island expeditions is pretty close to guaranteed to drop (ie. sub 20 attempts), but most of them require specific island and mob combinations. So yes, it looks like that sick purple Storm dragon mount has like a 1/10,000 drop chance, but that's not true because it simply WON'T drop from most islands. You need a specific island, with a specific invasion, with a specific special extra dragon mob to spawn (which doesn't always happen in that invasion), and after a handful of times of finding that special mob you will get the mount. Every mount is like this. The pets are easier. They generally just require one specific thing instead of all three; either it has to be a certain island, or a certain mob type, or a certain invasion. Mounts require the stars aligning.

If you're doing 2000+ islands without getting the item you want... you're simply doing ones where it's NEVER going to drop because you're not doing your research.

[Aphrel]

Yeah, because everyone knows that the same people that come up with concepts for game systems also program them and also make art assets on top of that, which is why they don't have time to come up with better game systems because they are all making mounts.

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Take into consideration the 3.5k AP bonus for weekly, as well as the mission.

But thats just it. outside of the weekly reward, the rewards for doing actual islands is terribly low. which is why so few people do more than 2-3 to get the weekly done.

And that is a pretty bad design tbh.

[Shadochi]

But thats just it. outside of the weekly reward, the rewards for doing actual islands is terribly low. which is why so few people do more than 2-3 to get the weekly done.

And that is a pretty bad design tbh.

Weren't Islands the best AP/HR at the start of 8.2? I remember guildies spamming them like crazy

[plz delete account]

Up to their old tricks again, huh.

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I believe it, these 1% drops are the worst thing about wow... well besides I guess 0.1% drops.

0.01% drops (which do exist) are even worse.

[ro9ue]

Up to their old tricks again, huh.

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I believe it, these 1% drops are the worst thing about wow... well besides I guess 0.1% drops.

Yeah I agree the droprate is horrendous, but I'm just looking at the content itself as a foundation. The reward structure, pretty much across the entire game, needs work.

[Powerogue]

I'm not sure it'd work for the dungeons of BFA but they could easily structure future dungeons around the idea and I'd be for it. What about the AI? What if you actually had a few intelligent mobs stalking you throughout the dungeon?

If not implemented in this way I kind of like the thought of that as a mythic affix.

[ONCHEhap]

As long as they keep trying to make M+ their new esport,they will never do such a thing,sadly they consider making an esport out of anything they can touch to be a better choice than making things fun

[Vlaid]

It makes me very sad to see how under developed and under utilized the underlying design philosophy of island expeditions is.

As a side note if we go through another expansion of a barely changed world quest system, I'll be sitting out another expansion.

Also as was touched on above, M+ e-sport was a massive mistake and just drew a large spotlight on the balance issues that the vast majority of players would have gone on happily ignorant of and enjoying clearing content at a competitive pace.