Hi Funcom,
Just wanted to give you guys some feedback on my experience with surges and the maelstrom.
Surges:
I understand there were complaints about droprate earlier and the latest patch definitely fixed some of that (for me at least). I still think there are way too many bearers and dancers in a surge and too few actual crafters.
I wish you would remove the animal pet spawns from surges as well or perhaps add them as drops from the non-tameable guards. It feels somewhat unsatisfying to gather your hard-earned ingredients for a tier 4 surge only to end up with a handful of elephants and camels (spawns that could have been something more useful).
Also in singleplayer the blue progress bars in the leyline control room bugs out after 1 surge and doesn’t show correctly what surge tier you are about to start. Relogging helps.
Maelstrom:
I generally find the maelstrom mechanism challenging and fun, but here is what I don’t get. You can click “allow buildings in Maelstrom” in the settings, but in singleplayer all elder spawns seem to one-shot every building they hit on, regardless of tier. I haven’t met any elder siege things yet, but I would assume that they were meant to be the ones capable of destroying buildings and not all the regular ones. Maybe this is a bug or I have misunderstood the concept, but it might be something worth looking into.
As it is right now, roughly half of the island is unavailable in terms of building a base (at least not one you are ok with getting destroyed in seconds). I would like to be able to build in risky places and having to defend against demonic attacks, but at the moment there is no defending against the rampant one-shotting demonic hordes 
Apart from those two topics my overall experience with the isle are very positive. Resources are spread in a meaningful way that gives room for a nice steady progress, the island is beautiful and fun to explore, vaults are fun and eerie and feels like places you want to visit again. Sure, getting your first thralls from wild surges is hard (if you’re alone), but nothing a little planning can’t solve for you. Looking forward to seeing what you guys can do with this map in the future.