Remove Borrowed power

[Lohal]

I might be mistaken, but I was under the impression that some of the abilities that are added through the "borrowed power" systems, if they successfully make a class play better, they are caked into the base spec/class in the next expansion. It's not something that completely goes away. It's a method to offer different options to members of a class and add the most popular ones to the base rotation (or as a talent).

[Palapop]

No they are additional progression nothing els. Its same thing as gear you just dont see it thats why you dont like it. Do you know what is alternative to not having expansion features with power progression? Nothing to do and casuals leaving game in masses. Yeah becouse you would get WoD 2.0. This entire systems are there becouuse of WoD.

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It doesnt matter how much % dmg. Borrowed power is there since vannila and if players see borrowed power as concept of ,,oh this system gave lot of dmg" and now they remove it from me so its beorrowed power then its completly made up issue by entilted playerbase what play wrong kind of game for wrong kind of reasons.

Gear progression IS NOT THE SAME as concept of borrowed power!

[Thundering]

Gear progression IS NOT THE SAME as concept of borrowed power!

This is true!

[Amarys]

I hate it too but they should remove massive power leaps between patches as well. I get that new things should be a bit more powerful but not as they are now.
You grind and work hard to get your perfect gear. New patch hits and everything you have is completely worthless but good news, here's some new stuff to grind! No thanks.

[Heartbreaker23]

Yeah it's absolutely horrible. The main reason I don't care about things like artifact, azerite armor etc, is because I know it is going away anyway. It's already bad enough gear gets replaced so quickly all the time.

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In this case it's: If you keep adding stuff to something that works well it will go kaputt eventually.

Wasn't the solution to that to just balance things? If an ability is overpowered, nerf it. I don't see how borrowed power is required and I don't see how it fixes things in the first place.

[Nerovar]

I think borrowed power is alright, if they just keep giving us new permanent abilities they'd inevitably have to do another pruning and we all know how many rivers of angry forum tears flowed after the first round of ability pruning, Hell Blizzard is even unpruning some of it now. I am certain they want to minimize the need to prune stuff in the future and borrowed power from expansion to expansion is a way to do that.

This is a fallacious. People didn't hate pruning solely because of the concept of losing abilities (though that played a part). They hated pruning because they got nothing as replacement for the abilities they had lost. Keeping classes in a permanently pruned state in order to prevent future pruning seems like the dumbest reasoning I've ever heard.

Ultimately, Blizzard will probably have to revamp talents once again and create a more horizontal approach to power progression where you don't necessarily get more abilities with every expansion but more permanent choices to play around with (similar to ESO).

[Jaggler]

Yeah it's absolutely horrible. The main reason I don't care about things like artifact, azerite armor etc, is because I know it is going away anyway. It's already bad enough gear gets replaced so quickly all the time.

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Wasn't the solution to that to just balance things? If an ability is overpowered, nerf it. I don't see how borrowed power is required and I don't see how it fixes things in the first place.

It's less about balancing, but more about a tool kit. If Blizz kept adding abilities to every spec each expansion, you're gonna run out of stuff to add. Sooner or later everyone can do everything.

[Thelxi]

I think Blizzard should be more careful with what they remove and how they reduce player power every expansion. Notably going from Legion to BfA some specs didn't just lose power and some utility, but functionality.

PvP Afflock is a good example of this, going from an immobile heal tank with good single target burst to a moderately tanky immobile caster with next to no self-healing that can only burst every 3 minutes. This is severe change in the functionality of a spec, and changes like these should not be occurring as collateral damage every time an expansion comes out.

[Makabreska]

This is a fallacious. People didn't hate pruning solely because of the concept of losing abilities (though that played a part). They hated pruning because they got nothing as replacement for the abilities they had lost. Keeping classes in a permanently pruned state in order to prevent future pruning seems like the dumbest reasoning I've ever heard.

Ultimately, Blizzard will probably have to revamp talents once again and create a more horizontal approach to power progression where you don't necessarily get more abilities with every expansion but more permanent choices to play around with (similar to ESO).

They did get a replacement, the borrowed power. They weren't in perma pruned state, since each expansion added some new stuff, and certain borrowed power elements went to talents. But if you think they should add baseline abilities to recompensate for pruning, then it defeats the entire purpose.

[Heartbreaker23]

It's less about balancing, but more about a tool kit. If Blizz kept adding abilities to every spec each expansion, you're gonna run out of stuff to add. Sooner or later everyone can do everything.

Well yeah I mean that is right. The game just ran too long for its own good. But just taking everything back again all the time isn't a solution either. Best thing they can do is just come out with a World of Warcraft 2.

[Jaggler]

Well yeah I mean that is right. The game just ran too long for its own good. But just taking everything back again all the time isn't a solution either. Best thing they can do is just come out with a World of Warcraft 2.

The problem is, that it is a very fine line between keeping gameplay stable and keeping gameplay stale.

Also I doubt a "WoW 2" would solve a lot of these issues. Imagine the outrage, if they wouldn't include the same classes with similar mechanics. I honestly don't mind burrowed power, personally. It gives the devs a "playground" to experiment with few strings attached. Stuff that doesn't work can get thrown out easily and stuff that does work can be baked in as talents or a core ability.

Button Bloat is an issue, FFXIV started pruinging with its third expansion, just like WoW cut down talent trees in Cata. It's not an easy issue to solve: You want to give players something to be excited about, but you also have to take care not to overload a class or spec with abilites.

[Nerovar]

They did get a replacement, the borrowed power. They weren't in perma pruned state, since each expansion added some new stuff, and certain borrowed power elements went to talents. But if you think they should add baseline abilities to recompensate for pruning, then it defeats the entire purpose.

Except they didn't. How many active abilities did the borrowed power from Legion add to classes? One from the Artifact and if you add PvP talents that's an addtional 1-3 abilities. So you get a maximum 4 abilities when you have lost (in some cases like DK) a double digit number of spells.
Same thing in BfA. You get your essence ability and the rest of the borrowed powers is just passives.
In Shadowlands you'll get two active abilities from borrowed power (and a few from unpruned abilities).

I don't see how 1 or 2 borrowed power abilities (that don't really interact with the kit of your class) make up for losing 10+ spells.

[Makabreska]

Except they didn't. How many active abilities did the borrowed power from Legion add to classes? One from the Artifact and if you add PvP talents that's an addtional 1-3 abilities. So you get a maximum 4 abilities when you have lost (in some cases like DK) a double digit number of spells.
Same thing in BfA. You get your essence ability and the rest of the borrowed powers is just passives.
In Shadowlands you'll get two active abilities from borrowed power (and a few from unpruned abilities).

I don't see how 1 or 2 borrowed power abilities (that don't really interact with the kit of your class) make up for losing 10+ spells.

10+ spells? Exaggerating much? And no interaction? Phoenix Flames didn't interact with fire rotation? Consume didn't interact with Blood? Test of Might didn't interact with Arms? Packed Ice? Master Blaster?

[Jazzhands]

Gear progression IS NOT THE SAME as concept of borrowed power!

How? You get gear, you use it, and it goes away eventually and gets replaced.

We got our Artifacts, we borrowed it's power, and now it's gone and replaced with BFA's borrowed powers. BFA's powers are leaving, and we're getting SL powers.

"Borrowed powers" simply last an entire expansion, where as gear is replaced more often. That's about the only difference, they both evolve and grow over the expansion then eventually get replaced. Gear is a bit more static compared to borrowed powers, but all gear is temporary until you quit the game. This is the reason mounts, titles, and cosmetics are the actual things that have value, they're one of the few things in this game that isn't temporary.

Borrowed power is also an absolutely horrible name for the concept. We borrow the power of our gear, I don't see what makes magical gear that increases our capabilities different from the magical necklace that increases our capabilities. They should just be called Temporary powers, because that's what they are, and what all "power" is in this game.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Borrowed power adresses one of the principle design flaws in fantasy genre fiction and RPGs, especially MMORPGs; Character growth. One of the devs at the time already said why they do it, they realized as early as vanilla that with their easy-mode approach to mmorpgs wasn't going to work if everyone reaches max level sooner than later. Their first attempt to remedy this was during wrath development, but they scrapped their path of titans solution back then. With legion they found a concept that somehow works with artefact weapons and legendaries and to date is also their only attempt that made sense imho, because it was tied to classes and specs intimitely, instead of just being just generic bullshit. They had to sacrifice some of the classes' kits to make room for it but with all systems in place I'd say it was by far the most satisfying playstyle to date (with a few outliers), at least during the second half of legion when everyone had their legendaries and their weapons maxed.

Since the industry trend is to go for more of the RPG crutches even in games where it barely makes sense, I very much doubt Blizzard will relent on it any time soon. It is their solution to allow for charcter growth, their BfA approach was just woefully lazy and stupid by the virtue of relying to 90+% on generic rubbish. SL will try to give some class/spec flavor while also going for more than one generic theme (which in BfA was yellow-blue piss all over the place). While I think it's still far behind what legion offered us it seems at least a step back into a more desirebable direction.

The question is, how else would it be adressed? We already know that endlessly tacking on new abilities isn't going to work. Sadly no one at Blizzard so far has thought about making more abilities upgradeable either. The later obviously also is limited because at one point each ability would do multiple things making it convoluted to say the least. A game that has lived for 15 years will always be stuck in a design hamster wheel where constant redesign and reshuffling is simply a neccessety. It's not like any of the competiton has found better systems yet. The only thing that Blizzard could and should fix is that some specs lack in the basics. DH is one such an example which just is missing basic spice in the gameplay loop without external systems. Same for shadow and some shaman specs. I'm not even talking about tuning here (which fire mages suffer from), I mean flat out missing interesting things to do by default.

And no, gear (as in stat progression) is not an interesting replacement for that. Tier sets were the very first borrowed power system but even they became stale as the game opened up to more endgame avenues.

[Kralljin]

How? You get gear, you use it, and it goes away eventually and gets replaced.

Gear is always more powerful, Azerite armor of BfA was not necessarily more powerful than the Artifacts in Legion.
Besides Tier set bonuses from old tiers, legacy gear doesn't suddenly become "grey" and unuseable, you get more powerful stuff.

Same as Azerite & Essences in SL, it's just disabled, not necessarily worse, whereas gear from a previous expansion is almost always worse.

[Skildar]

Except they didn't. How many active abilities did the borrowed power from Legion add to classes? One from the Artifact and if you add PvP talents that's an addtional 1-3 abilities. So you get a maximum 4 abilities when you have lost (in some cases like DK) a double digit number of spells.
Same thing in BfA. You get your essence ability and the rest of the borrowed powers is just passives.
In Shadowlands you'll get two active abilities from borrowed power (and a few from unpruned abilities).

I don't see how 1 or 2 borrowed power abilities (that don't really interact with the kit of your class) make up for losing 10+ spells.

what you call borrowed powers is not limited to active abilities. And most of the the spells (active and passive) played with your class/spec mechanics or very least character stats. We can expect the same to happen in shadowlands through the covenant system.

Btw, we already know that covenant abilities will include one generic utility and one class specific. So it's confirmed that it will impact your gameplay.

I don't remember what abilities the dk lost but it was a very welcomed change. As a lot of his abilities didn't have much interaction with one another or overlapped with other skills. A few key utility abilities got removed like lichborn and antimagic shell. But this was done to create a chink in the armor.

[Nerovar]

10+ spells? Exaggerating much?

Frost DK alone lost Plague Strike, Soul Reaper, Outbreak, Blood Boil, Death Coil, Lichborn, Death and Decay, Icy Touch, Frost Presence, Blood Presence, Unholy Presence, Strangulate/Asphyxiate and Army of the Dead going into Legion alone (they already lost abilities like Necrotic Strike and Raise Dead in the transition between MoP and WoD). This doesn't take Glyphs or Talents into consideration.

Phoenix Flames didn't interact with fire rotation? Consume didn't interact with Blood? Test of Might didn't interact with Arms? Packed Ice? Master Blaster?

Artifact Weapons had interactions with Class kits (Azerite Armor to a lesser degree and Conduits even less) but every other borrowed power system is generic powers that have pretty much no ties to your class.

[Makabreska]

Artifact Weapons had interactions with Class kits (Azerite Armor to a lesser degree and Conduits even less) but every other borrowed power system is generic powers that have pretty much no ties to your class.

Glimmer, Packed Ice, Test of Might and many more azerites enabled new builds. Essences enabled fire mage sick burst and rocketed it to the top of specs, or Gluttony build enabled for Vengence. Corruptions enabled Exsanguinate and Icecap builds. No ties indeed.

[Nerovar]

Glimmer, Packed Ice, Test of Might and many more azerites enabled new builds. Essences enabled fire mage sick burst and rocketed it to the top of specs, or Gluttony build enabled for Vengence. Corruptions enabled Exsanguinate and Icecap builds. No ties indeed.

Just because certain overtuned damage procs scale better with some builds than with others doesn't mean there are ties to class design or that they're deliberately designed to promote certain interactions and active gameplay. To imply that this is even remotely similar to the impact abilities have on your gameplay is outright ludicrous.