Correct me if I’m mistaken : I think borrowed power refers to any power that you don’t get to keep, right ?
So, how, exactly, almost everything is not borrowed power ?
- That trinket with an on use/on equip ability, you don’t get to keep it forever. You keep it until you get something better.
- That ability in your spell book that gets buffed/nerfed all the time, or even completely reworked, removed or replaced by something else, you don’t get to keep it forever either.
So, yea… Some “powers” are arguably more “borrowed” than others, because they are more obviously “not linked directly to your character”… For example, the artifact weapon in legion. Or the azerite and corruption stuff. Or covenant. Or any kind of legendary (which are just items, so it’s obviously going to get replaced, like any other item).
But…
- The artifact weapon was also just an item.
- azerite powers were tied to items.
- corruption are like more complex enchantments, so it’s not directly part of your character either, but in no different way than a flat stat increase, for that matter.
- covenant abilities… Hey, this one’s interesting, because it actually require some effort to change covenants. So, they are arguably less borrowed than a legendary item.
Yet, you have no issue with legendary items. But there’s an issue with every other “system” that you see as “borrowed power”.
What is borrowed power, exactly ? And why are they a problem ? Isn’t borrowing stuff from the environment one of the core ideas of RPG ?..
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I suppose you could be pedantic and say technically everything is borrowed huehuehue 
But for reasonable people the criteria is simple:
- Is the core of your class/spec designed around this system?
- Is this system intentionally developed as an expansion feature?
Tier sets? No. classes aren’t designed around them.
Trinkets? Same as tier sets.
Gear as a whole? Same situation.
Also the above isn’t replaced until you upgrade them. Unlike below, where they’re simply taken from you:
Artifact weapons? Classes were designed around them and they were intended to be for Legion only.
Azerite gear? Classes were designed with these traits in mind and it was for BFA.
Same story with SL regarding covenants, conduits, and soulbinds.
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Borrowed power is whatever people want it to mean.
Technically gear is borrowed power, as it is very sensitive to change. However there impact isn’t huge on individual pieces (except trinkets).
So to me, it seems that borrowed power is understood as stuff you don’t own, acquire on a temporary basis that has a fundemental impact on how your class plays.
A bracer giving you haste and mastery doesn’t do that.
A trinket giving you an activatable big haste steroid you can sync with your Cooldowns does.
A covenant ability that changes your rotation does.
Many active trinkets and passive ones too are what I would call borrowed power.
Tier sets were borrowed power
I see nothing wrong with borrowed power. Keeps game fresh, but i enjoy cov spells And to say goodbye will be hard. I love ashen hallow, my priest enjoys Boon of Ascended, my monk very much likes having an extra brew to manage and my DK likes having his obliterate cleave due to deaths due. Will be sad to give them up.
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Spells are actually long term addition besides some exceptions.
As regarding bonus sets, some were made talents or given as baseline passive.
However, I’d associate this word with expansion features with classes being build around those instead of the other way around. Also, some of those powers were things we actually had prior to legion. For instance, blessings of season is a blessing, which used to be core to paladin class. Not to mention warrior’s necrolord banner, which warrior had back then as a baseline class mechanic.
Technically everything is borrowed power, even class/spec abilities, because there’s a good chance they’ll be reworked/removed/replaced in next expansion.
upgrading a trinket is nothing compared to losing an artifact, a legendary, or a set of azerite gear, as the sheer impact they had on your class gameplay was on another level.
a trinket is not a core and central part of your progression during an expansion as artifact weapons, legendaries, azerite traits, covenant abilities, etc are.
and when you upgrade the trinket you do it because you find something better, not because the core feature you built and progressed your character for 2 years simply stopped working.
you didn’t find a “better weapon”, your old one simply stopped working, and you had to replace it with something else, something that gave your class less stuff.
and who said legendaries were not borrowed power as well?
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Maybe the issue is less about “borrowed power” than transition from one scheme to another ?
For example, I hated (and I think it’s likely I’m not the only one) the very end of Legion and start of BFA, because when we broke our artifact weapons to save azeroth, we basically lost our ability to do what we were doing until this moment.
Then, I hated the transition from Legion to BFA, because the legendary items “magically” stopped working at lvl 105 (if I recall correctly), without any reason. And with nothing to upgrade their effect, turning my character less powerful all of a sudden.
Yea, I know, but my point is that the presence of borrowed power may not be the real issue, because everything we have in game is borrowed power.
My idea is that the issue is more related to how blizzard handles the progression of our characters.
And this is obviously a difficult question for a game that is so old. How can they keep things new and refreshing, without breaking what we had before ?
Because, breaking things to reconstruct them in another way is not really fresh, it’s recycling ideas. Look at legendary effects, for example. Many of them are recycled ideas from tier sets effects, sometimes as old as the game itself.
yeah ofc the problem of borrowed power is not the power, it’s in the word borrowed, meaning you lose it at some point.
It can mean any things on its own but in WoW it was usually understood that we meant the major expansion systems that deal with power and that will be changed/removed with the next release of an expansion.
Ion taking it further than that was just a bit of deflection or an abstract view. Don’t be like Ion. 
I’d say it depends on how much a “Borrowed Power” affects the spec or how big of an importance it is to the output, whether we call it one or not.
A trinket doing 1% of one’s damage you can hardly call a borrowed power, but a covenant ability doing 35% clearly is a borrowed power which makes the entire spec. And those are problematic imo.
They should add flavors, not be the main source of one’s output.
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When twilight devastation or tentacle stack was abused, instead of nerfing the power of the corruptions by design (like the amount of damage or hits it does), they implemented aoe cap, to not proc the corruptions so fast.
BFA is now past but we still have the remnants of its borrowed power (corruption be gone) in form of AOE caps unevenly treating some classes while others not.
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The words themselves can be stretched and expanded upon quite a bit, without a doubt… but that isn’t really truthful to what Blizzard themselves described as borrowed powers before.
You are correct that everything is borrowed power however people refer to systems like azerite armor; artifact weapon etc.
I don’t mind borrowed power but it would be great if some features stay permanent like torghast for example.
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Of course there is no clear definition of “borrowed power”. It is a temporary system that increases power.
Trinkets’ effect, legendary effect, set bonus or any piece of gear do increase characters’ power.
But artifact, azerite, covenants are the CORE system of each expansion, not just a piece of gear. They require expansion long constant farming and upgrade. And they are only usable in the specific expansion.
There is fundamental differences between them. And you don’t spend 2 years long to farm or upgrade a trinket.
I sure miss my fury warriors odyn’s fury power, that thing was a nuke.
Gone forever since bfa, borrowed power.
Becaue you get an upgrade.
Thats gearing.
Borrowed power is artifact talents, heart of azeroth, and now soulbinds + covenant abilities.
Its systems that take blizz too much effort to balance and then still dont manage to, and things that will be thrown out in the next expansion for the next system of hoops you need to jump through on a weekly basis via content no one really would do if it wasnt giving you the thing that makes your class function.
Borrowed power is designing a class to 50% then having the remaining 50% come from expansion specific grindy time gated tideous systems.
Borrowed powers are anything with spells/powers/effects/buffs that is intended to be used only for one expansion for so to be replaced in the next. And there are three main cateogries:
1 - Powers that get straight forward disabled completely. If I remember correctly Corruption got completely disabled at 9.0.1, and plenty of older legendries and epics have their effects disabled.
2 - Powers that only will work within certain zones/continents/regions. We have plenty of Toys that only works within the zones that came with the same expansion as the toy. Also we have Azerite powers that works anywhere but in Shadowlands.
3 - Powers included with gear and trinkets that works and can be used like before, and the only thing that makes them temporary is their state as static item level gear which through the expansions becomes less powerful compared to current gear of higher level.
Everything but lightning bolt is borrowed.
Only Druids, Holy Paladins and Mages borrowed the new power though… 
You could use different definitions, and what we consider borrowed power can also depend on the context in which the word is used.
In most situations, borrowed power is a concept or system that is unique to this patch or expansion, meaning a system that won’t be here next patch or next expansion.
So in that sense gear or trinkets aren’t considered borrowed power, cause it’s a core concept that has stayed the same throughout the game.
Same goes for talents and the like, it’s considered core to your character, even if those change.
If we’re talking borrowed power in the context of why some classes are strong, then effect items (mostly trinkets) can be considered borrowed power as well. Perfect example could be the mechagon bracers on fire mage in BFA S3 onwards. Those buffed fire immensely, the problem was, fire was not a good spec in of itself. It also heavily changed the playstyle, so soon as new expansion rolls around, even though fire barely got reworked (PF baseline and ignite change), it still didn’t even feel like the same spec anymore.