I guess you never had to replace gear then? Oh, wait all that gear is gone.
There has always been borrowed power and there will always be borrowed power.
I assume you are speaking of tier bonuses? While some enhanced our abilities and even changed somewhat how you played the spec, I find it hard to compare it with current systems. They aren’t that alike.
I couldn’t care less if it’s “bloated”. Just means I have a lot of choice in how I play.
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They are alike they bring player power. Nerf the old set to bring in the new set.
The dungeons and raids are enough for me personally and some people just need a solid story 
In wrath all I did was random heroics, raid, and wintergrasp. Original WG was crazy fun and I’m not even a pvper but I was in there all the time lol. Cata was the same, dungeons/raids + Tol Barad, MoP again dungeons and raids.
I get that’s not enough for everyone though.
Borrowed power does two things really well.
1 - It lets you add new toys mid-expansion. Things like essences, corruption, new new artifact traits and legendaries, etc make people feel more powerful over time in a way that just putting more stats on gear does not.
2 - It reduces ability bloat. Since things are designed to be temporary you can add powers and abilities every expansions without ending up with thousand button rotations.
On the other hand it also has some pretty major downsides. Having to play major catch up if you come in late or take a break is never fun, nor is losing all your toys at the end of every expansion.
That said, borrowed power is fine as a concept. We’ve had smaller scale things like tier sets, crazy trinket effects, legendaries, and so on all along. They went all in on it in Legion though and it’s been painfully obvious that Blizz is incredibly bad at balancing borrowed power on this large a scale.
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It’s more that they have to.
For example take a class like Hunter which has around 30 abilities in vanilla, now say each expansion all classes get 3 new tools (in the older expansion most were getting much more).
We have currently had 7 expansions with an 8th soon on the way, that’s 21 additional skills by BfA or 24 by Shadowlands.
So a class like Hunter would now have around 54 abilities that it is required to use. That’s just too many for a class to play well, especially without many of them being very infrequently used niche abilities.
With borrowed power instead Blizzard can maintain a desired number of abilities whilst giving the player more new things to play around with each expansion only with the caveat that they will change each new release.
The current issue with todays system is not how it works, but that a lot of the classes are reliant on the borrowed power system to play correctly, instead of the base classes functioning well by themselves.
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Hmm,catch 22 more option for play skill or more bloat for headache.
It’s only a headache for devs.
Players will play how they want to.
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I’m for that 
Man, excellent usage of some solid words in here. Why can’t you be the one to write those multi-paragraph manifestos we see every now and then?
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Yep, the truth is… ideally whether people like to accept it or not, you really don’t want on any given spec or class a rotation that is bigger than 4-6 abilities.
Then around 2-4 CD’s
and 1-3 Defensives
Plus flavor, situational, CC, etc.
Remember the more abilities you have to engage in frequently, as a cost, the less complicated fights have to be. You simply cannot sustain or justify from a development stand-point a 12-button rotation on a fight like, G’huun for example and call it good.
I think a lot of that is lost when making these arguments.
Abilities also are intrinsically tied to how complex raid encounters have become. It’s a trade-off.
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Not every ability needs to be useful for every situation.
It’s fun having niche, infrequent things to use for varied situations.
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I agree, however when this argument of borrowed power comes, it’s not because people want more niche abilities, its because they want primary and engaging ones. At least that is what I see. No one likes a situational ability as your “cap” talent.
There is tons of niche in the base class, I know I will be having 8 buttons just for cc/utility. That’s just too much.
No it’s not.
And it doesn’t help the few abilities we do have are so barebones and boring without two years of stacked borrowed power.
It’s all garbage…
It also allows for expansion themed abilities , which is great
Borrowed power is still power, it matters not where it comes from. You just don’t want to work for that power.
I don’t want to work for it and then lose it all and start over.
Gear being like that is enough for me…
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I can understand the frustration but what alternative would you propose?
Isn’t the fundamental purpose of the game just that? To rebuild your character over and over every expansion, pushing higher into the capability of the class?