You know, there are regularly complaints about borrowed power here.
And every time I read them, I’m wondering “ok, but what’s the essential difference between borrowed power and an item ? Both of them, you get for a short amount of time. So what ?” And… I also want to admit, before anyone jump on me for saying that that I can recognize a borrowed power when I see one. It’s just that giving a clear definition was kinda hard for me.
And clear defintions matter, because without them, you can’t think clearly about things.
Then, I’ve seen this video (not mine again, obviously). And suddenly everything about borrowed power makes sense.
It’s clearly not that. And it cannot be that. Your class’ existence predates the borrowed power, so it cannot be designed around this borrowed power. You can tell me that class updates buffs and nerfs do exists. Yea. But the core mechanics of the classes predate borrowed powers.
every piece of item you acquire in WoW is “borrowed power” since it becomes worthless the moment the next expansion launches and you replace it with leveling greens.
the reason is simple: blizz doesn’t want new players to be at a disadvantage.
sure, WoW could use more core mechanics on the level of breaking line of sight, interrupts, stealth etc. Having more depth gives designers more room for making more complex encounters or balancing PvP. but as he said, this is extremely hard to design.
PS: for someone this smart it shouldn’t have been difficult to consolidate this in 5 minutes, but I guess lenght=ad revenue, and this shows where the heart of content creators truly lies
There’s quite a few specs that had their core mechanic redesigned every expac, or at least every other expac, since MoP. And at least four specs have never even existed before the advent of ‘borrowed power’ in Legion. Pretty much every spec had some piece of ‘borrowed power’ integrated into the talent tree after Legion or BfA because the playstyle felt incomplete when it was taken away. As much as Blizzard denies it, specs are very much designed (and later tuned) with the current expac’s ‘borrowed power’ system in mind, it’s really quite evident if you look at spec design going through expac transitions.
whats more insulting isn’t the borrowed power, but how with expansions we used to often than not keep those abilities we’d get with every new expan. Now if you’re lucky, it becomes a talent in place of a DUD.
The only borrowed power gear-wise I saw was a WoD trinket from HFC for arcane mages, which dealt so much damage that it completely changed Arcane’s rotation, and broke the spec as it was.
Basically, this trinket gave some hefty boost to the explosion from damaging Arcane Crystal, a talent at that time, and the damage of the build was so big that some raids managed to kill current tier raid bosses under a minute.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t hotnerfed immediately. So, not only abilities can be borrowed powers.
Except the game is developed around gearing and progression while borrowed powers like azerite and covenants can be ripped out and not a single thing about this expansion would change because they were designed to last only for the expansion.
If blizzard were to remove gear from the game. A core mechanic of WoW they would have to change the game itself.
Exactly, when this expansion ends and 10.0 launches - SLs will be part of Chromie time and no one will ever notice the systems we’re having to deal with now unless they choose to stay in beyond lvl 50.
i gotta admit i watched more than half and it kinda makes sense in the void, as some abstract discussion.
What HoA was basically - temporary talent row ( when essences were added ) which enabled you to use other items with build in passive talent choices ( azerite pieces ). What was bad about them is to not get the right passive talent option from azerite loot and be forced to play with “wrong” azerite perks due to it. that was my main issue with azerite.
Yet few of that talent choices were implemented in new talent rows like Lights Decree and Empyrian power are added to retri talent tree in SL. so top azerite choices were integrated into main system ( talents ) after.
The corruptions were a real hard to get random power creep nonse i hated a lot.
Current power creep additions like Covenant spells, soulbinds and lego powers has very little rng in terms of getting the right ones. So its better than it was with azerite. I see the improvement on that side.
Sadly we have another wierd change which directly drags all experience down - loot nerfs. That was uncalled for. Nobody likes to spend twice+ the time to get an alt into playable state.
The covenant optimisation isnt really my biggest concern, since i generally pick them up on the pvp utility and switch only once per season. But its easier to switch a covenant than to farm a TD rank3 M+15 ilvl piece for me. After very RNG 8,3 i cant be mad at this. its just on the insignificant side of things. I do hate that alts takes as much time as main to be playable.
in my book if i have seen all the stories on main and passed all the roadbloacks like renown there shouldnt be same issues on alts. cause its not fun. dont milk my gametime on boring repeatable things, let me get my alts running faster so i could actually play them in the end game where i want them to play, not korthia or campaign or else daily sadness.
loot nerfs were already partually reverted, but not enough imho.
Well, gear offers mostly stat boosts, or dmg procs… borrowed power lets you have NEW abilities/talents/passives that are gonna get stripped away in next expansion.
…Yeah blizzard, where is my destro lock rift spell? Nowhere. Gone. Poof.
The borrowed power is there mainly to prevent ability bloats, experiment with talents and keep what works in the next expansion.
Tho this way of doing things has major issues, atm its a… necessary evil? I understand why they are doing it but generally i dont like it.
lvl up get new abilities and do this for 8 expansions and things need to go. An alternative would be no more lvls and abilities but that would lead to other problems no?
Edit: Tho in pvp i think they started to experiment more with pvp talents like the ice wall for frost mages and the portal thingy for Locks… broken and abusable as it is (getting ppl stuck behind bookshelves so they cant get out).
