Borrowed Power : We’ve seen some bad ones, but also some good ones. For example ; BFA essences was awesome aside from a few aquisition problems (looking at you Conflict and strife)
Instead of tier pieces they could try giving us a class themed relic slot. The relic could be composed of 4 parts. Each part gives a certain effect that benefits your spec.
Example : you aquire the shaman’s ‘‘Witch Doctor’s Wolf Bones’’ from an end game activity. You put it into 1 of 4 slots of your relic and it gives you this effect : ‘‘Increases the chance to gain a stack of Maelstrom Weapon by 3%, and whenever you gain a stack of Maelstrom Weapon, the cooldown of Feral Spirits is reduced by 2.0 sec.’’ Maybe 2 of the relic slots would be a minor/resource effect (like a mini ‘‘Memory of lucid dreams’’) and the 2 other slot would be a major one like the previously mentioned ‘‘Witch Doctor’s Wolf Bones’’ or current Tier set bonuses.
These could be fun to hunt and puzzle together for synergy without interfering with our talent path, and alleviate some frictions we currently have in gearing. They could also be built on in seasons after.
the reason would be to make gear optimizing less restrictive. specs look for the correct 4 of the 5 slots to have their tier in due to stat differences, that answer can then change when you change specs for example. it also restricts crafted gear options and makes things more of a hassle than it needs to be. i think getting a gear upgrade drop should just be good news, and immidietly applicable to be equipped and enjoyed. rather than having to go back to a catalyst or changing an embelishment slot or whatever peoples case might be.
That’d be lovely but let’s not forget that Blizzard create race specific haircuts and beards that somehow manage to clip with the one race they’ve been designed for.
We had more options in the past, MOP had more gemslots, more enchants, we had those Meta gems for our head pieces, we had reforging.
For some reason Bliz went cold on this and starting inventing whole new systems every expansion that they then threw away every time.
They could introduce more options around gearing choices but they don’t need to be Borrowed. Keep them in game and improve them every expansion rather than build a whole new system every time.
yes, those systems are different as they are layered ON TOP of your gear. Which is good. its straight forward. get gemslots, get enchants, get ilvl upgrade or good stats, that should just be ‘‘Bang !, feels good !’’. find your sought after pieces, relic pieces, relic upgrades or what have you and just feel good about it.
it can be fun to study your class and spec to the core and seek to acquire the proven ultimate BiS setup, and this wouldn’t eliminate that. it would just remove the friction we have already felt
Example : in the beginning of season 2 of DF, we all had our season one tier set. I looted a massive glove upgrade that was a S2 tier piece, but i couldnt equip it. because it would remove my current set bonus, and i had no way of replacing the 5th tier slot with s1 tier piece to compensate (because the only way to do that was to get a lucky drop in the Season 1 raid that nobody was doing). Time went on with really bad luck on getting another s2 tier piece, and there was no catalyst to help me out. all i wanted was to engage with the new power of this new patch, but i just had to wait while others luckier around me were playing with their new shiny toys.
if this had just been a relic, instead of tied to my glove, i could have either just equipped the gloves, or slotted in this new power i got. whichever of those two it would have been.
Nor RNG Legendaries for that matter
Grindig out that darn titanic gem was painfull, and in SL that trice cursed Bow never dropped for me, and only the Dinar-system saved my Hunter and was able to finally buy that thing
but we can also all agree that they can’t infinitely build upon the specs themselves.
we all (or most) want something fresh and new to our specs every once in a while.
we literally are currently engaging with borrowed power : Tier bonuses. they go away and a new one comes in every season.
it’s hard to know how they can tackle this problem and consider both no borrowed power, and also keep people engaged with and excited about their spec.
Tier sets are fine, you farm them, or convert gear into them and you’re done. No power grind, what people don’t like is things like the neck/artifact and an AP grind.
I also didn’t like when it felt like borrowed powers became about 50% of your kit/performance if not more. With corruptions people felt useless without infinite stars/twilight devastation.
