Simply don’t throw out the shiny new abilities with new expansions.
Let’s imagine for a second a Light vs Dark expansion. During the leveling experience you get a new “Dark Side” talent row with three new Dark-Side themed talents specific to your class. At a later point in the leveling experience, you get purged of the darkness and get a Light-Side themed talent row, with three new Light-side themed talents specific to your class. At level cap, you get to choose whether you want to go light side or dark side… and then you get either the Light-side talent row or the Dark-side talent row FOREVER, becoming a part of your character. Ion Hazzikostas comes out on stage for Blizzcon 2022 and tells us that this choice for your character will carry forward into the expansions after Light vs Dark.
People would feel much more inclined to care about this type of choice because it wouldn’t be temporary. And because there are three talents against three talents rather than one ability vs one ability, there’s a potential for asymmetric balance. Lastly, there’s a lot more potential for strong class-flavor because these would be rooted in your classes talent tree rather than completely external to your character. Imagine for instance, a Dark Side Paladin becomes a “Blood Knight”, corrupting the Light for his own gain. Or a Light-side Warlock becomes an Exterminator, using his destructive powers to decimate entire worlds tainted by the Darkness to tip the balance towards Light. 24 new unique mogs added to the game, one for each Dark/Side combination for each class.
Just my two cents. I think Covenants are cool, but the problem is people don’t care about them because they know they’re external to their character. The solution to this type of design, to bring World of Warcraft back to being an RPG, is to big more deeply, to entrench these systems and make truly meaningful, path-defining choices for characters.
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There is a game for this, its Star Wars
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A) It is more about the thought of how to do borrowed power going forward, and not the specific implementation.
B) Star Wars isn’t World of Warcraft. Doesn’t have its dungeons or raids or PvP or gameplay feel or classes… they’re not close to the same game. So even if this was about the specific implementation, which it isn’t, but if it were, “go play Star Wars” isn’t really a valid response either.
This is exactly how it’d go too.
“Why is Blizz forcing me to play the dark side because it does 0.1% more dps?!?”
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It’s a very overly simplified way of looking at it. The reason why Hunters are very good and reliable in raids isn’t just their DPS, because their DPS isn’t even that high this tier. But Hunters bring immunities and are pretty reliable in terms of being able to do mechanics, and that makes them an asset to a raid team.
If the dark-side “talent kit” bundle had an immunity for one of the three talents you could swap between, then even if the light-side’s pure throughput talent choice did more DPS than the pure throughput talent choice for dark-side, there would be merits to taking the dark-side kit for progression raiding since a class without an immunity that could add an immunity to its arsenal on a per-fight basis could be pretty dang good.
I know speaking for myself if I could take an immunity on my Enhancement Shaman, I would probably be willing to sacrifice some small amount of DPS in the long-term.
Cool, but which one does more DPS?
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Bro, you play a Rogue. Don’t tell me you slave the meta when you’re playing one of the worst classes to play in this raid tier.
I think Blizz already stated multiple times that borrowed power will continue to be removed at the end of each xpac to avoid ability bloating and balance issues in the future.
I like your idea though
Hopefully it is the last expansion where we have more borrowed power, that is killing the game and lowering our lore as main characters in the game.
You act like this wouldn’t be the question that gets asked. The entire problem with your little idea is the “permanent” part. That alone would make people just up and quit.
Nah fam, this ain’t Star Wars.
I’m for this. But there are the obvious issues of ability bloat.
Sure. People could ask the same question about a class choice though, as they would about a sub-class choice. You wouldn’t not add Warlocks to the game just because Mages existed and were better.
The choice simply needs to be compelling, something people actually care about, a choice about who their character actually is, and then people will eventually grow to accept it. The big difference is that asking a person to identify as a Fairy for 2 years is a lot different than asking someone whether their Mage is Lawful or Chaotic.
Sure, sure. You couldn’t do this constantly. And you would have to have “ability crunches” from time to time. Take out some filler, bake that filler into the base class, remove those talent rows and slide everything down. Something like that.
People don’t mind “stat squishes” because they aren’t that frequent and don’t remove the power gap of the immediate expansion. A “talent squish” that removed stuff from 3-4 expansions ago would be less offensive.
There’s no easy way to solve the issues with borrowed power. It’s definitely not as simple as making it permanent.
Borrowed powers held exclusively within expansions reduces barriers for new and returning players. Imagine if Legion artifact weapons were permanent - then every new and returning player in Shadowlands would have to play through Legion to obtain a certain amount of power there before they could proceed in Shadowlands.
Do I like borrowed power systems? Not at all. But I definitely would not support higher entry barriers for new and returning players.
I still think instead of borrowing power, Blizzard could just upgrade one spell for each spec. No new button, and a spell could get a new DoT, new animation, new effect, become a stronger version of the previous spell. Something creative like that. Not to mention the spell would be flavored to that spec rather than this generic stuff like Essences and Covenant Powers.
And they do. Some people around here act like they’re required to keep a full roster of every single class at maximum raiding potential, because god forbid anyone ask them to play anything besides the best at that moment.
And of course they can’t be expected to put equal effort into all these classes. Oh no, they should just be able to do it on one character and just have it count for the rest so that people can play this game like a CoD loadout screen.
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That’s not particularly exciting and marketable though.
I don’t know why people act like you can just add nothing to an expansion but a new raid and new dungeons and people will like it. That’s Warlords of Draenor. It doesn’t work, content is not “king”, that’s a total lie. People do care about these systems that do new, exciting things, that shake up the status quo.
Getting a “Draenor Perk” is not exciting in the slighest. Turning your Paladin into a “Blood Knight” is exciting.
^ This is sus and makes me think he’s been hacked because it’s completely out of character
You’re expected up to level up a bit before playing the current expansion. Adding mandatory scenarios to the leveling experience to “catch-up” the player through those systems to unlock the power doesn’t seem so offensive to me. Exile’s Reach is a glorified mandatory tutorial to introduce certain things about the game.
Hmm?