Are you tired of borrowed power?

[Santti]

No, I enjoy it. If abilities just piled up on us xpac after xpac then there'd be nothing interesting to look forward to in new expansions and our bars would just be a bloated mess.

This.

"Borrowed" powers are the lesser "evil".

If the powers we'd have earned would have been permanent over all the expansions, we'd be in a ridiculous mega OP state right now. Permanent power ups would necessitate something where expansions provide almost nothing beyond stat boost from expansion to expansion, level to level, or risk becoming bloated with new buttons and abilities.

The "borrowed powers" are an expansion gimmick to make us look forward to something more as the expansion unravels, even if those powers are something we've essentially had before, in one form or the other.

This is not an issue. It's something to be celebrated, you muppets.

[ClassicPeon]

Most players have been decked out in purple gear since WOD as raiding has never been easier. And this is part of the reason for the exponential growth in power over time leading to the increased need for squishes. Raid finder makes it easy to get purple gear and these "alternative" power progression systems only add onto that. So going into a new expansion, you often don't need new gear in the first few levels as most of that gear is quest greens anyway.

In fact the prepatch for Legion, BFA and now Shadowlands all offer catchup gear that is equivalent to the raidfinder purples or better.

The only time people went from one expansion to the next with low powered gear that needed immediate upgrades was way back in TBC and WOTLK (and even cata) when raiding was not a common occurrence. Since then purples have become the norm for most players by the end of an expansion.

You realize the colour isnt actually very relevant to how good it is in a new expansion right?

Naxx 10 gear from wrath was replaced right away in cata leveling zones. But it was still purple.

Also you arent very good at formulating your statements. "raiding has never been easier" probably doesnt mean what you think it does. What i'm guessing you think is that the entry barrier into raiding has never been easier.

[lakylog]

your guild was top 200 world?

Whether my guild was top 2, top 20, top 200 or top 20,000 doesn't make a difference. I quit the tier before we got to G'huun, but that doesn't change the point that I'm making, and you keep tracking off with all this other stuff, so I'll say it as simple as I can:

For around 2 months of raiding mythic Uldir, whether you only killed the first boss or everything, it was literally impossible to have enough AP to unlock the Azerite traits so you were stuck using Heroic pieces. It's a fact and your inexperienced opinion on 8.3 azerite armour doesn't change history.

[Kehego]

This.

"Borrowed" powers are the lesser "evil".

If the powers we'd have earned would have been permanent over all the expansions, we'd be in a ridiculous mega OP state right now. Permanent power ups would necessitate something where expansions provide almost nothing beyond stat boost from expansion to expansion, level to level, or risk becoming bloated with new buttons and abilities.

The "borrowed powers" are an expansion gimmick to make us look forward to something more as the expansion unravels, even if those powers are something we've essentially had before, in one form or the other.

This is not an issue. It's something to be celebrated, you muppets.

imagine if progression carried over and you were royally fucked if you didn't have gear from the last tier of the previous expansion and you *had* to go back and farm

anyway mmo-c posters are stupid. Remember when you needed a pattern from aq enchanting in tbc, like threat gloves?

[Santti]

imagine if progression carried over and you were royally fucked if you didn't have gear from the last tier of the previous expansion and you *had* to go back and farm

anyway mmo-c posters are stupid. Remember when you needed a pattern from aq enchanting in tbc, like threat gloves?

Oh yeah, completely forgot about that as well. I guess a "solution" to that would be to carry an ever increasing amount of different systems to increase player power, from expansion to expansion. That sounds like a lot of fun, and great game design.

[Kehego]

Whether my guild was top 2, top 20, top 200 or top 20,000 doesn't make a difference. I quit the tier before we got to G'huun, but that doesn't change the point that I'm making, and you keep tracking off with all this other stuff, so I'll say it as simple as I can:

For around 2 months of raiding mythic Uldir, whether you only killed the first boss or everything, it was literally impossible to have enough AP to unlock the Azerite traits so you were stuck using Heroic pieces. It's a fact and your inexperienced opinion on 8.3 azerite armour doesn't change history.

wow, 2 months, so long, wow.
and fwiw you wouldve been able to get the main trait, the secondary trait. Maybe not the tertiary defensive trait, but you got 90% of the effectiveness of the piece of gear by then

Or are you saying that azerite is unusable unless you can unlock the +5 il

[Nyel]

and a lot of players love tbc bm and destro where you literally press 1 button ad nauseum

opinions can be and are often wrong. Don't harp about class design when classes were 1 button shitfests until cata for most classes.


Do you understand how progression works? every expansion is a fresh start. are you gonna complain about not having your entire toolkit at level 1, too?


let me ask you this, how is leveling the artifact any different from say, grinding resistances/+hit? its still progression you have to do to make your character useful to other people. The whole "borrowed power" debacle are people clinging on to buzzwords for pretty much nothing

Progression works gradually and doesn't start at max level. You grow more powerful with eacht level. In BfA each level you lost power and even at max level your character getting stronger was very, very slow.

The artifact gave you something instantly at the start (the artifact skill) and it gave you things you could gradually improve over the level process. That was a huge difference to BfA.

It's not about the toolkit. That's exactly the issue. The entire class design in Legion, BfA and Shadowlands is revolving around borrowed powers. This wasn't the case prior to Legion.

- - - Updated - - -

I believe you misunderstood what they're saying. They said "class design started at 110 and not at max level" but I believe they got their numbers wrong and meant at 100, since Legion max level was 110. What they're saying is that, as you were given your artifact weapon in Legion, you started growing progressively more powerful.

Yeah, maybe I confused the numbers. Legion "class" design started directly at level 100 at the start of the expansion (aka when you get your artifact weapon) and continuend gradually until 110 were you could max out your artifact weapon. On top of that Legendaries and T-Set bonuses came into play which added more layers.

- - - Updated - - -

that's false actually cus you got more rings of azerite

- - - Updated - - -



nope, every new expansion all the progression in wow (see: gear) was reset. Every single expansion you had to regrind.

the only difference between legion+bfa vs prior expansions is that you actually got cool shit outside of raids. Dassit.

Who's talking about gear? Class design and progression is not about gear.

[Zendhal The Black]

You got complete class overhauls in prior expansions and new tier sets every raid that could be considered as "borrowed power"

I don't mind it if at least some could be incorporated as passives/talents

[Nyel]

oh, so comparable to every first tier when you had nonsensical tier/no tier?
and that was a problem for like, the 50 guilds that were full of people who were grinding AP so it wasn't a real problem. When people killed g'huun on M they were close enough to unlocking all the traits at that point.

Or for some reason do you think that progression just ends when you ding?

This was a problem for everyone. Azerite armour felt HORRIBLE the first months and it only grew better in 8.2. They needed almost a year to fix this mess of a system. Have you even played the first weeks / months of BfA with Azerite armor? It was disastrous and basically everyone complained about it. Not only the acquisition of your favorite Azerite pieces, the unlocking of the rings etc. - it was a gigantic sh*tshow.

- - - Updated - - -

Are set bonuses borrowed power?

Because I think they are, and we liked those.

What's tiring is having several stacked sets of borrowed power. Azerite, Essences, Corruption. All piling up on you. And then ripped away the second it all ends. It's completely overwhelming for new players, and isn't any more meaningful than just having a fun set bonus you collect once per patch.

But there was class design besides set bonuses. Something that you had naturally in every expansion (new talent row, as shallow as that sounds) that carried over into the next expansion. Since Legion we don't have anything like that. Even if they implement 50% of the borrowed stuff into the classes, the other 50% of class development from that expansion is just lost. That's not fun, to lose what you've previously earned from a gameplay perspective.

[Kehego]

Progression works gradually and doesn't start at max level. You grow more powerful with eacht level. In BfA each level you lost power and even at max level your character getting stronger was very, very slow.

The artifact gave you something instantly at the start (the artifact skill) and it gave you things you could gradually improve over the level process. That was a huge difference to BfA.

It's not about the toolkit. That's exactly the issue. The entire class design in Legion, BfA and Shadowlands is revolving around borrowed powers. This wasn't the case prior to Legion.

- - - Updated - - -



Yeah, maybe I confused the numbers. Legion "class" design started directly at level 100 at the start of the expansion (aka when you get your artifact weapon) and continuend gradually until 110 were you could max out your artifact weapon. On top of that Legendaries and T-Set bonuses came into play which added more layers.

- - - Updated - - -



Who's talking about gear? Class design and progression is not about gear.

being tied around the flavour of the season isnt a bad thing. Keeps things fresh. Makes the current thing more interesting/easily accessible

[Nyel]

I'm tired of people making negative threads about borrowed power without having a viable alternative.

Uhm, like the alternative we had from TBC to WoD? Real class design with new talent rows and new skills, detached from borrowed powers? Okay...

[Kehego]

Uhm, like the alternative we had from TBC to WoD? Real class design with new talent rows and new skills, detached from borrowed powers? Okay...

"real class design"

Classes now are more complex than classes from any expansion up to mop baseline. You're conflating button bloat with complexity. You don't need shadowbolt and incinerate.
I'm playing on a tbc pirate server while i wait for SL release and I trained about 10 spells I've literally never used.

Great class design

[Aresk]

I'm sick of it, but for the opposite reason. I'm tired of my class having to change multiple times through the expansion and having to constantly find new keybinds for abilities that don't really feel like my character's. Be it trinkets with use effects, War Mode active talents, new racials in BoD, or Azerite Essences, they all felt bad to me, and I personally would prefer to get rid of all of them. I have plenty of other cooldowns to monitor without having to conditionally monitor these as well. I think the current level-up structure of enhancing certain abilities or talenting new features to those abilities is the superior method for giving more power to player if it's determined player abilities should change (which I'm not convinced of given that seasons already convey plenty of power increase in and of themselves).

[Nyel]

"real class design"

Classes now are more complex than classes from any expansion up to mop baseline. You're conflating button bloat with complexity. You don't need shadowbolt and incinerate.

The unpruning Blizzard does in Shadowlands is for most classes and specs pointless. Bringing back useless skills just for flavor is nothing anyone has asked for. Besides some outliers like Kill Shot for Hunters the entire unpruning is sh*t talk from the devs.

People wanted back former skills that mattered and had a major influence on classes or were indeed just flavor skills that made sense (!). As Restoration Shaman I don't need offensive totems, but getting back Earthliving Weapon buff would have made sense as Enhancement still has Windfury. This is the kind of unpruning players anticipated, not what we've got. Or Felflame for Warlocks or whatever - there are countless options they could have done.

Another thing in their recent class design is having former baseline skills as talents, e.g. Ascendence for Shamans. This was a skill you had baseline for several expansions until it was made into a talent. And in Shadowlands it's still a talent.

Classes in MoP and WoD felt great and complex all without borrowed powers. Blizzard could have just built upon that. They didn't. Since then they failed class design in many ways, the low was BfA. Shadowlands looks a bit better, but what's after Shadowlands? We're losing Legendaries again? Covenant skills? Nice! Exactly what we wanted, losing all the development our classes made in gameplay (again).

The one thing that makes it obvious that borrowed powers failed from the start are Blizzard's approaches to fix them. None of the borrowed systems was well-developed from the start. They needed x.1 or x.2 patches to fix a messy systems - that's not a sign of quality.

[TigTone]

Borrowed power are fine imo, one legion it felt great and BFA it was bleh having to constantly hunt for the right gear pieces to have the right borrowed power.

The neck and essences in BFA are nice passives/ on use spells I like those a lot but the Azerite traits not so much.

[Kehego]

Borrowed power are fine imo, one legion it felt great and BFA it was bleh having to constantly hunt for the right gear pieces to have the right borrowed power.

The neck and essences in BFA are nice passives/ on use spells I like those a lot but the Azerite traits not so much.

azerite is tier tho

- - - Updated - - -

The unpruning Blizzard does in Shadowlands is for most classes and specs pointless. Bringing back useless skills just for flavor is nothing anyone has asked for. Besides some outliers like Kill Shot for Hunters the entire unpruning is sh*t talk from the devs.

People wanted back former skills that mattered and had a major influence on classes or were indeed just flavor skills that made sense (!). As Restoration Shaman I don't need offensive totems, but getting back Earthliving Weapon buff would have made sense as Enhancement still has Windfury. This is the kind of unpruning players anticipated, not what we've got. Or Felflame for Warlocks or whatever - there are countless options they could have done.

Another thing in their recent class design is having former baseline skills as talents, e.g. Ascendence for Shamans. This was a skill you had baseline for several expansions until it was made into a talent. And in Shadowlands it's still a talent.

Classes in MoP and WoD felt great and complex all without borrowed powers. Blizzard could have just built upon that. They didn't. Since then they failed class design in many ways, the low was BfA. Shadowlands looks a bit better, but what's after Shadowlands? We're losing Legendaries again? Covenant skills? Nice! Exactly what we wanted, losing all the development our classes made in gameplay (again).

The one thing that makes it obvious that borrowed powers failed from the start are Blizzard's approaches to fix them. None of the borrowed systems was well-developed from the start. They needed x.1 or x.2 patches to fix a messy systems - that's not a sign of quality.

and getting windfury and flametongue back was stupid as fuck because windfury is literally a passive on live right now.
all you got was a button to press.

The people advocating for the changes were fucking morons.

Classes in wod and legion weren't really much different, outside hunter imo, and hunter was a conscious decision because steady shot spam was nothing but apm bloat.

[lakylog]

wow, 2 months, so long, wow.
and fwiw you wouldve been able to get the main trait, the secondary trait. Maybe not the tertiary defensive trait, but you got 90% of the effectiveness of the piece of gear by then

Or are you saying that azerite is unusable unless you can unlock the +5 il

For what it's worth, when Mythic Uldir released people were hovering around level 20-22 on their Heart of Azeroth level, whatever you want to call it. The minimum requirement to unlock the very first ring on the lowest requirement piece is 29. That is several weeks if not over a month worth of clearing and grinding just to unlock the main trait. You have no idea what you're talking about and you seem to pull arguments out your ass that prove nothing more than your desperation to "win" in a discussion even when you're wrong.

You even state that it's not a big deal to have upgrades sit in your inventory for 2 months before Blizzard decides to lower the weekly AP requirements to achieve the level required for said item to become an upgrade. I suggest the next time you find an upgrade you delete it and wait 2 months before replacing your current item and we'll come back to you going wow 2 months so long wow in your face.

You should probably stick to making claims about things you actually participated in.

[InfiniteCharger]

You realize the colour isnt actually very relevant to how good it is in a new expansion right?

Naxx 10 gear from wrath was replaced right away in cata leveling zones. But it was still purple.

Also you arent very good at formulating your statements. "raiding has never been easier" probably doesnt mean what you think it does. What i'm guessing you think is that the entry barrier into raiding has never been easier.

Thats because in Wrath most people weren't decked out in full purples from end game raid content. Raid finder was just starting to become a thing back then. Which is the point I am making. Since WOD, most players are decked out in purple gear from raidfinder and other kinds of content. The new expansion greens don't even come close until a few levels in. And most people jump right into dungeon grinding anyway so they don't even need those greens. Whereas this wasn't a common playstyle back in the Wrath/Cata era, because up to that point that quest greens were often upgrades for many people.

[Kehego]

For what it's worth, when Mythic Uldir released people were hovering around level 20-22 on their Heart of Azeroth level, whatever you want to call it. The minimum requirement to unlock the very first ring on the lowest requirement piece is 29. That is several weeks if not over a month worth of clearing and grinding just to unlock the main trait. You have no idea what you're talking about and you seem to pull arguments out your ass that prove nothing more than your desperation to "win" in a discussion even when you're wrong.

You even state that it's not a big deal to have upgrades sit in your inventory for 2 months before Blizzard decides to lower the weekly AP requirements to achieve the level required for said item to become an upgrade. I suggest the next time you find an upgrade you delete it and wait 2 months before replacing your current item and we'll come back to you going wow 2 months so long wow in your face.

You should probably stick to making claims about things you actually participated in.

You were killing azerite bosses on week 1?
and yes, it does matter if you were. Cus if you weren't, why does it matter?

I participated in enough to know that you're full of bullshit, which is why i asked if you were top 200 world.

Cus if you weren't, you're bothered by the problems of the bourgeois. and they didn't "decide to lower the req"

it was fucking artifact knowledge kicking in. A system that they implemented in the previous expansion to make acquisition easier.


jesus fucking christ

[Nyel]

and getting windfury and flametongue back was stupid as fuck because windfury is literally a passive on live right now.

Windfury has been an integral part of Enhancement Shaman since Classic. Not talking about the totem, talking about the weapon enchant. And even if it's a passive, it is a core part of the class fantasy for that class or spec. This is what players wanted. Not some crap most of the classes got with the unpruning, crap that was rightfully removed.

The rest... I think you have a complete misunderstanding of my points and it doesn't make sense to continue this. You like the system of borrowed powers, I don't.