I think abandoning borrowed power is a huge mistake

[Celement]

I think the problem with systems beyond gear is they are almost always attached to grinds that mostly revolve around trivial content with not enough scaling for harder difficulties to avoid then.

This patches conduit system was the first time it felt slightly deterministic with ce, 20s,and glad.

[Khaza-R]

Its worth giving it a shot at this point. I am sure some people will miss the crazy power gains that some systems gave you by the end of the expansion but others will enjoy feeling like they can play multiple characters again or jump back into the game without a series of hoops gating end game.

[Toby451]

They aren't abandoning borrowed power. Ion (I think?) have said in interviews this doesn't mean borrower power is never coming back. They are simply kicking the can down the road until people shut up about it.



The new talent system looks fantastic though. I understand the need for borrow powers to fight bloat but I think Blizz has overly relied on them. We are long past due for something permanent, a new talent row, etc. I cant wait until Alpha begins to see these talent trees.

[StillMcfuu]

Don't care; don't agree.

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I simply don't agree. They were fine on release, and much, much better than HoA/Azerite and much more interesting and unique than Covenant abilities.

I don't mean to be snarky, but that is a really low bar to set your standard by. I liked the artifact weapon system better, but that's because it was tied in to class halls and quest chains. But if you removed the actual borrowed power from the artifact weapons, the artifact weapon system would be just as good. I will say that I do consider Netherlight Crucible to be a good borrowed power system. It wasn't ridiculous and all encompassing, just gave you some little bonuses. It wasn't some massive increase that you would be sore from losing.

[Syncr]

Imo the biggest issue with borrowed power isn’t that it goes away. It’s that you can’t take any breaks from the game or you’re instantly trash and you’re instantly way behind and the only way to get back is to mindlessly grind nonstop to get to the point to where you can actually enter the content you want to do.

[Kilpi]

I simply don't agree. They were fine on release, and much, much better than HoA/Azerite and much more interesting and unique than Covenant abilities.

Eh, they all sucked. But then again so does all expansion-specific features.

[Soeroah]

I think the problem with borrowed power is connecting it to every facet of the expansion leads to a feeling of mandatory progression for people who don't care, and the fact it's grindy.

IMO the best path forward is to keep borrowed power BUT only for outdoor content. Zereth Mortis is a good example: gear that has special effects in the zone, those anima power-style buffs you can get in the zone Pocapoc. If each Dragonflight zone has its own localised borrowed power mechanics like that, but none of them carry into instances, I think it would be a lot better received.

That way it feels less like you lose it at the end of the expansion, too, and more like the WoD garrison building upgrades; special bonuses in a specific zone.

[Aydinx2]

Artifacts weren't any better than any other borrowed power. I never liked it gameplay-wise, nor lore-wise.

They were better because they were less RNG (azerite traits), all content increased their power similarly (azerite necklace needs specific conduits) and didn't tie cosmetics to their power (regardless of what options you choose in the borrowed power, your cosmetics are separate unlike Covenants).

And they generally had interesting lore attached to them, either new or old. I am not interested in Shadowlands Lore the way I am in any of the artifact weapons.

Obviously the system wasn't immediately good and it grew over time, but considering it was the first borrowed power we had it is kinda surprising how it outperformed all the borrowed power systems that came after it.

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Eh, they all sucked. But then again so does all expansion-specific features.

I feel like you saying they all sucked without any argument to explain why isn't really helping cultivate a healthy discussion.
They are measurably less RNG, didn't mess with cosmetics and you could improve their power without being forced to do PvP or old raids. How does this not make them better?

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IMO the best path forward is to keep borrowed power BUT only for outdoor content

Based on what we know Dragonriding is going to be exclusively outdoors content. They were asked if it would be incorporated into a raid or dungeon somehow and they said "at the moment no but it is an option".

[ChairmanKaga]

Back when they announced it we thought we would keep these awesome artifact weapons / get new ones each Expansion which felt great and like a real rpg.

Did people think this? I remember halfway through Legion alot of speculation about how we were going to dispose of the artifacts. It seemed pretty obvious they were not going to remain permanent.

[Gorsameth]

WoW needed borrowed power, it was a solution to an obvious problem. Bloat.

You can't just keep adding new stuff every expansion for 10 expansions and not suffer from horribly bloat.

This problem has not been fixed, the devs just said 'fuck it, someone else can deal with the bloat when I'm no longer working here".

[saixilein]

Borrowed powers suck because they are so strong (if u have bad luck u got stucked with bad BP, like the wrong leggy in Legion) and they are always tied to long, annoying, repetitive grinds. Give me BPs with no grind and i dont take. But in BFA & SL i play 1-2 Characters, because it takes way to much time to do all the stuff with all chars. In Cata - Legion I played 4-6 Chars, mostly pvp only, but it was easily possible. Get Max Level, grind Arenagear for a few hours, be done for the rest of the season. Now you have to grind Daylie/Weekly, your progress is timegated and you have to do content you dont wanna do, like in BFA, farming essences in old Raids, just so you can do pvp on a competitive Level.

[Relapses]

They aren't fully removing the borrowed power, they're just baking it into the new talent tree so that it's easier to balance and doesn't require Blizzard to reinvent the wheel with every expansion.

[Pendragon]

You're as bad as the people you're coping and seething about at the end of your post.

Good effort though.

[Kilpi]

They were better because they were less RNG (azerite traits), all content increased their power similarly (azerite necklace needs specific conduits) and didn't tie cosmetics to their power (regardless of what options you choose in the borrowed power, your cosmetics are separate unlike Covenants).

And they generally had interesting lore attached to them, either new or old. I am not interested in Shadowlands Lore the way I am in any of the artifact weapons.

Obviously the system wasn't immediately good and it grew over time, but considering it was the first borrowed power we had it is kinda surprising how it outperformed all the borrowed power systems that came after it.

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I feel like you saying they all sucked without any argument to explain why isn't really helping cultivate a healthy discussion.
They are measurably less RNG, didn't mess with cosmetics and you could improve their power without being forced to do PvP or old raids. How does this not make them better?

The reason they all suck is that all temporary power up is not fun gameplay for me. It doesn't matter how much or not RNG it is. Sure I'll give you that Legions was "better", but it still wasn't good or enjoyable, nor did it ever feel like any sort of accomplishment to get stuff unlocked. They were all just things to activate once and then forgotten.

The lore part is a bit of a mixed thing, since SOME of the quest chains to obtain them were pretty enjoyable, some of them used the same "we can't think of anything else, so we'll just go with the default" (ghost riders near Karazhan, don't remember their names), some were utterly boring and stupid (like Enhancement Shaman). But the problem I had with the artifact weapons lorewise was, that it literally made those weapons gray common items. Ashbringer was one of my favorite fantasy weapons up until it was added as an artifact weapon in Legion. It got so boring to see it in every paladins hand, that it was transed to something else most of Legion for me.

[Goatfish]

The WW monk 4/4 tier set bonus is a perfect example: after using 10 abilities your next 3 abilities deal more damage.
Sounds simple but it interacts with the WW kit (combo mastery) very nicely and forces you to think about your abilities usage more carefully (and rewards with big damage).

Bad example? Frost mage 2/4 and 4/4 tier set:
You get rando comet storms and your rando comet storms increase your dps by 10% for 10 secs.
Literally zero involvement from the player. I mean, yea, the damage is nice but boring. Make it not boring.

Do you actually play either of these classes? The WW rotation is so ridiculous you generally don't have time to think about the set bonus. I mean you're talking about a class with an 11 button rotation where you can't use the same ability twice in a row without gimping yourself. This means the set bonus for WW often turns out to be something you completely ignore or just find an add-on that tells you what to do, but there is no thinking about it. For most people who use this, it's essentially random extra damage sometimes with no animation, just slightly bigger numbers. To quote every guide on this 4pc:

Our tier set bonuses do not dramatically alter our gameplay as a Windwalker Monk. You can min/max a small gain by paying careful attention to try and getting Rising Sun Kick, Whirling Dragon Punch, and Fists of Fury inside the damage bonus window, but unless you are very comfortable with this, you're most likely to lose damage rather than gain it.

Not saying the frost mage one is better interactively, but it FEELS a lot better because you actually see something happen. Yea, sometimes it feels bad because it procs in the middle of nowhere on that one mob that jumped out of the pack, or on something that just died. I'll take that any day over both relatively random and unimpactful visually.

[enigma77]

The game is extremely boring without some form of progression system, like AP & Titanforging. Gear is not enough of an incentive, especially considering how boring it is and how quickly you reach a pretty high ilvl these days.

A lesson they learned back in Mists of Pandaria when they introduced Warforging.

[Zoibert the Bear]

Right now I'm having more fun in wow than I can remember. I can switch between multiple interesting creative and visually spectacular abilities in Oribos and try out new builds in every battleground or raid, and do crazy shit I've never done before.

Correct me if I'm wrong here but I don't think it is borrowed power that is the problem. That doesn't make any sense. Are you saying you want less abilities, less choice, from wow? No. Do you want every ability from every expansion to remain in your arsenal?-no, that would leave you with a thousand different buttons to press.

I think what happened here is a small number of streamers, who have very annoying fans who tend to repeat everything they say verbatim, a) have been playing wow far too long and just end up whining about everything because they are commercially obligated to play wow forever and b) confuse the excessively grindy and repetitive mechanics involved in obtaining the borrowed power with the fun of the borrowed power itself. In 9.2 that grind no longer exists.

So I suspect what will happen is this: Blizzard will put much less work into offering the players diversity of options in Dragonflight, because that's essentially what we asked for and its cheap. Then the players will whine about it like they didn't cause the situation in the first place. That happens a lot.

Does no one else see these train wrecks coming?

(Cue lots of guys talking about wow in a retrospective, creepy way as if it were an ex-girlfriend that dumped their ass years ago.)

I think you are wrong. It worked before, I'm sure a lot of people need their monkey brain chemicals, but a lot of people do not, and would rather have a consistent experience. It can also work in the future.

There is this other MMO game that doesn't have any of this that manages to do this successfully as well.

[Heavens Night]

Right now I'm having more fun in wow than I can remember. I can switch between multiple interesting creative and visually spectacular abilities in Oribos and try out new builds in every battleground or raid, and do crazy shit I've never done before.

Correct me if I'm wrong here but I don't think it is borrowed power that is the problem. That doesn't make any sense. Are you saying you want less abilities, less choice, from wow? No. Do you want every ability from every expansion to remain in your arsenal?-no, that would leave you with a thousand different buttons to press.

I think what happened here is a small number of streamers, who have very annoying fans who tend to repeat everything they say verbatim, a) have been playing wow far too long and just end up whining about everything because they are commercially obligated to play wow forever and b) confuse the excessively grindy and repetitive mechanics involved in obtaining the borrowed power with the fun of the borrowed power itself. In 9.2 that grind no longer exists.

So I suspect what will happen is this: Blizzard will put much less work into offering the players diversity of options in Dragonflight, because that's essentially what we asked for and its cheap. Then the players will whine about it like they didn't cause the situation in the first place. That happens a lot.

Does no one else see these train wrecks coming?

(Cue lots of guys talking about wow in a retrospective, creepy way as if it were an ex-girlfriend that dumped their ass years ago.)

A rather whiney post I have to say.

But sure I'll bite. Borrowed power is lazy, uninspired, detrimental garbage. It is completely counter productive to the genre and the quality of the game, which has slipped so far below where it needs to be in recent years, and borrowed power has been a major contributor in this.

Finally it seems Blizzard have realised this. It is not sustainable at all, and needs to be replaced with content and systems that are good for the game now and in the years ahead to be built on.

[Unholyground]

Borrowed power hurts personal progression for the vast majority of players who happen to be casual. Most players play multiple characters and borrowed systems are not time conscientious to the player. Having to re-unlock your player power feels terrible every expansion, this isn't a Metroid game where you get all your power back quickly, you have to wait months with borrowed power. Guild Wars 2 does it all way better, they even allow you to share most gear between characters account wide.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Correct me if I'm wrong here but I don't think it is borrowed power that is the problem. That doesn't make any sense. Are you saying you want less abilities, less choice, from wow? No. Do you want every ability from every expansion to remain in your arsenal?-no, that would leave you with a thousand different buttons to press.

Yes, we want every ability from every expansion to remain. That has been the main complaint about borrowed power since it was tested in WoD with the "Draenor perks" and introduced for real in Legion with the Artifacts and Legiondaries.

Blizzard introduces a new system that's shit in the beginning of a new expansion, keeps on making small changes and finetuning it until it's a decent system that actually works at the end of the expansion, then scraps it again when it finally works, only to release some broken shit system at the beginning of the next expansion, and the cycle continues...



Cata and MoP was the objectively best expansions for classdesign (yes, if you disagree with this, your opinion is wrong ). Why? Because we had fully working modern classes WITHOUT ANY EXTERNAL BUFFS OR ABILITIES. Cata and MoP classes were designed to have their full toolkit once you hit maxlevel.

That's a massive contrast to the Legion/BFA classes that were absolutely broken and simply didn't function properly without the borrowed power from their respective expansion. SL reintroduced a bit of pruned stuff and made the base classes a bit stronger, but they are still nowhere close to as complete as they were in Cata/MoP.

In a perfect world, all the stuff we got from the borrowed powers in WoD/Legion/BFA/SL should have been added to the base classes instead. Redesigns/changes between expansions will naturally prevent ability bloat from becoming a problem. MoP was the height of ability bloat, and it was nowhere close to being a problem then.



Also, stop taking stuff that used to be baseline in previous expansions, and reintroducing it as a fucking talent in the new expansion. This has been such a huge problem that it wouldn't surprise me if Blizzard took Fireball away from Fire Mages and made it a talent instead...

Any one can whine about stuff, you have to offer a better alternative.

Come up with an idea for something new and cool for the next expansion, but instead of adding it as borrowed power, they should... wait for it, here comes the revolutionary idea... add it to the base classes instead!

Which is exactly what we have been asking for ever since it was announced that the cool Draenor perks would not be baked into the base classes at the end of WoD.