Borrowed power has always been taken to be something it isn't. The nature of an expansion is that there is a power budget for when it starts and when it ends. The complaints about 'borrowed power' are mostly about how that power is distributed. Power resets all the time and especially with the start of a new expansion. It's all borrowed in that sense. Blizzard gives it to you as you play through an expansion and then takes it away at the start of a new one. They've just put new skins on it the last few expansions. Even if they had kept Legion legendaries as active weapons after the end of Legion they would have reset either the power of the item or reset all of the effects around it.
So what we get are different methodologies for player power distribution. Some of them click with the population, others don't. The fact is that how they handle player power as part of an expansion is primarily shifting deck chairs around into slightly different systems with prettier names and spell effects (which are visceral and important on their own).
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Borrowed power as alternative endgame progression can work if you actually put decent effort into it. The weapons were an example of that. The moment you try to half-ass it by sharing as much as possible between classes, you stuff it full of random proc shit that has nothing to do with your class and you just treat it as an excuse for a treadmil, then it's obviously going to fail. If you then make a system that actively limits your character's choices on top of it you stand no chance.
But even if you manage to make the system better each time, it would still suffer during the reset periods, so it's good that it's going away. Blizzard is incapble of making it constantly better and they make the trasition as awful as possible as well, so we are better off without it.
You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.
WoW is shit and will never not be shit. They don't give a fuck what you like.
I miss the days where once I got a toon to max level, all I had to do was gear it up and it would be set. I could jump into dungeons or raids, grind rep, work on end game story, or do old content for pets/mounts/mogs/achieves and not miss anything. Now once I get a char to max level and not be a detriment to group content I need to make 2 legendaries, grind out conduits, grind renown so I can use more conduits and upgrade them, and still grind out a full set of gear. And if you want any of this current xpac vanity items you gotta farm a massive amount of anima too. Sure, it's a little easier now that you can send some of this stuff from other characters, but what about new players. What do they do if they start now, get a character to 60, and instead of going right into content you gotta do your covenant campaign, and korthia quests to clear the eye, and torghast for legendary crafting reagents. And then do the zerith mortis quests. Oh, sorry, you also picked the wrong covenant so your damage/healing is going to suffer bad.
The greater the light, the darker the shadow. And this light casts a shadow over all I see - the Prophet Velen, when asked what's next for Blizzard
Wait back up here. Did you not remember the WoD - Draenor Perks? Those were also borrowed powers that went away as soon as we got the pre-patch for Legion.
Sure some perks did become baseline with the class but in that same fashion so did some abilities from Legion Artifacts turn into baseline for BFA.
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Eh but the current alternative isn't better either. Now that you can "freely" switch between covenants means the extra step of going back to Oribos every time you're changing from one content to another... Oh here's the covenant for M+ but for raiding I should be this other covenant.
So the benefit of having all the choices means that players have less reason to level up every covenant to 80 renown and switch as often as necessary.
Early SL did make you pick and since switching had such a higher cost, players had to chose whether they could live with the handicap of a weaker covenant in one area so they could be stronger in a different one.
Was the earlier system better than current live? Maybe not but Blizzard is learning from it and we're being promised that "renown" for DF is going to progress equally for all the flights so at the very least it won't be as much of a grind.
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People have forgotten how shitty legion artifact grind was at the start. Of course we only look back on the last patch of the systems do we praise it.. Similar to how OP post is. It honestly just seems like anyone who thinks that barrowed power is good, could be done right, has forgotten how shitty these systems are for the first year of the expansion.
Oh damn, I actually forgot about these. Maybe because the Draenor Perks were so boring that it didn't matter that it was borrowing power and no one missed them?^^
Really, Draenor Perks were more on a level of Glyphs, which were changed like 2 or 3 times in the history of WoW. Also you didn't had to grind anything for them, which is quite different from propper Legion-Shadowlands style Borrowed Power.
#TEAMGIRAFFE
But think about that... If things don't reset, how behind would you be if player A has been playing since Day 1 and you're just now returning after a hiatus? Or how does it feel for a new player to be at power level 1 when everyone else is at power level 10,000?
Catch up mechanics can help that new/returning player speed through the earlier progression but it's still progression that they have to do.
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Don't be a victim of IFOWISNAWL!
Call 800-Calm-The-F-Down, Operators are standing by. Now taking calls on all your Legion worries.
Wdym actually play these classes?
To me it looks like you are really bad with WW.
You don't need to constantly hit the increase on major abilities. On AoE burst tho? Absolutely crazy having a bonedust brew + empowered fist + empowered dragon punch with ghosts.
And it's pretty consistent if you can just plan ahead slightly. See, here is the difference between someone playing a class and someone doing WQ's trying to be smart.
The mage one is literally the random one, the monk one is not random at all.
If visuals are more important to you then gameplay then idk what to tell you. Grow up?
Uh not really? You looked for the best Azerite combo traits you could get at the highest ilv and you were done. Additionally, it was really bad that you could get higher ilv of the same Azerite armor (say shoulder piece) but because your HoA wasn't high enough, the higher ilv item was "weaker" because not all the rings were unlocked.
Reforging is a bad system. First it was necessary because of hit/expertise system. Second, it only provided marginal gains on a bad piece of gear. (Remember only 40% of a bad stat could be converted leaving you still with 60% of the bad stat). Third, it was a very messy system requiring third party addons or website to "properly" handle reforging.
Customization via gems/sockets also broke WoW because of how crazy specs could get with high amounts of X stat. Just look at corruption stacking in late BFA for a more recent example. Granted now with diminishing returns, we shouldn't see that happen as much.
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Don't be a victim of IFOWISNAWL!
Call 800-Calm-The-F-Down, Operators are standing by. Now taking calls on all your Legion worries.
what i think people dont like about borrowed power, is the endless grind attached to it (which isnt bad shadowlands tbh).
but also that baseline specs are slow boring without all the borrowed power bells and whistles.
We saw it in the data in the very first patch of Shadowlands. The vast majority of players chose the best Covenant because it was mathematically better. There were only a few specs that had real options, but wouldn't switch because it's a pain to do so.
Simple answer is yes, fucking get rid of it. I want my class to be my damage, not some random bullshit. And I want real borrowed power that has existed (Tier Sets) that alter how I play my class patch to patch. Same with leggos, which have only sucked because Blizz can't handle giving us a good method of acquisition.
Artifact weapons are the only other one anyone can name that were good because again, it altered how your class played. They've been dead for four years.
Heck no. But that's why they're implementing a system that will give you more abilities and (hopefully) a lot more choice.
Yes. Unpopular opinion probably, but yes. I like having choices and options. I don't understand the people who NEED to have every single ability on their bars. You can organize depending on what you want to do. There are addons to add more bars. You can also scroll between your current action bar which is nice.Do you want every ability from every expansion to remain in your arsenal?-no,
Not a real problem, IMO. This is an MMO**RPG** I expect there to be choices and options.that would leave you with a thousand different buttons to press.
I'm not saying it isn't potentially strong, but pretending everyone is playing one of the most rotationally complex classes in the game while counting the number of abilities they use and managing cooldowns while not running out of energy, maintaining the right amount of chi, AND not using the same ability twice in a row is just absolute nonsense. For the overwhelming majority of WW players it's just a passive damage boost at effectively random intervals, and every guide says to basically ignore it because for most people, trying to play around it is actually a damage loss.
The mage one is random, but has a pretty high proc chance and a set cooldown so there is some ability to play around it, though granted not much. The difference is that it actually feels good because you can see the effect directly and know you are doing more damage, whereas with WW you can basically pretend it doesn't exist and be perfectly fine and competitive up to +20 keys.
I'm just saying it isn't the amazing use of borrowed power you claim it is. I'm in the top 11% of PvE monks in the world playing casually and I'm telling you straight up that it's meh. I mained frost mage in CN and SoD and still play it as an alt pretty frequently, and I can tell you for sure that the free comet storms feel better and more impactful even if they are relatively random and sometimes frustrating. They would have been better off making a more visually stimulating and less complicated set bonus rather than something maybe 1% of monks are actually going to track and care about to min/max a statistically insignificant amount of overall damage.
Last edited by Goatfish; 2022-05-18 at 05:31 PM.
So you don't like the set bonus because you actually have to play with it?
Yea, no wonder we get boring passive % increases all the time with this mentality.
Even if most monk players won't use it to its full potency it's basically a passive dmg bonus to them.
For players who care and not doing DH levels of braindead gameplay they can get some absolutely massive damage from it.
With the mage one what can you do? It doesnt matter if youre good or bad, the effects the same every time.
That's boring.
I dunno what you are talking about having "no visual" feel good moment.
Have you noticed the dps meter? That 60k+ aoe burst is enough of a visual fuck yea for me. Results > pixels my man.
tier sets are where the borrowed power should stop and end. tier sets are a way to shake up a specs main play style, rotation, etc in a small but interesting manner. Does it suck when you have only 3/4 of the set? yeah. but with the 2 piece providing decent bonuses, it can be made smoother.
I always remember thinking that artifact power and levels should've just straight up replaced traditional leveling, yet Legion still upped the cap to 110. It wouldn't have been hard at all for the questing zones to reward traits and artifact levels instead of actual experience, but alas.
Borrowed power is a bad concept though. It's always been a bad concept. Pouring resources into systems just for them to be wiped out and replaced immediately is horrible design. Think of how much money they've spent designing all the gimmick features that immediately get abandoned after an expansion ends. What kind of foolishness is that?