During Legion, at the Fel Hammer, the class hall, there was and is a Raid Dummy, a chained Demon Lord.
No one person can beat it, you just see how long you can last. There are two methods, the high dps, take as much of its HP as you can before it takes all yours, and the cover your butt and make it work hard and long, lasting as long as possible before being overwhelmed. By the way I worded this, it is obvious which group I was in. My job is to die last. At max level, with good gear and my choice of Lego’s I could last maybe 15 min., and beat it down to maybe 40-60% i don’t remember the numbers, not important.
What was important is I took off my Lego’s and went at it again. I lost at the most, 10% of damage/survivability.
It was a demonstration for leveling DH’s that Lego’s, while nice, were not gonna give god-like power, that we were perfectly viable without them.
Then came the BfA pre-patch and I tried the same thing. I still had high lvl gear working Lego’s,
but I also had gained GCD’s and lost fire-damage and gained seconds added to my CD’s and lost a percentage of my healing through damage and other abilities
I had owned, and it hadn’t lost a step and it crushed me. Quick.
See, I wasn’t crippled when I walked into Legion, but I was when I limped out, and not because I had lost borrowed power, but because of “pruning”.
Vital parts of the spec had been removed so they could be given back to me as Azerite abilities, and I should be grateful, or understand the need?
I tried that Raid Dummy a year ago, wearing Azerite and Lvl 120, and for some reason, still could not do as well as I did at Lvl110. 80k melee damage every 1-2 secs, plus dummy strikes and Shadow damage that stacks a debuff increasing damage… In Legion I had the tools to deal with it that did not disappear with an armor change.
Simply because most people detest raiding; especially those skilled at the game yet does not like investing too much time into it.
They heard of hedonic calculus and were taken with it
There’s a really really easy way to avoid ‘button bloat’ and still give us a new talent row every fifteen, twenty levels. Have none of you heard of passives? Or talents that replace one spell with another? No new buttons. Non-borrowed power can be done.
It’s due to them building the expansion around the feature. No need to worry, I am quite sure the rest of the expansion will appeal to the Toxic Raiding and Mythic+ community, after they are a bunch of Rabid Dogs who commonly ruin the game.
Well Rabid Foxes to be precised, they have nothing on GTA Online or Competitive fighting games when it comes to Toxic Communities, the only edge the Toxic WoW Community Really had was the monopolization of In Game Content as well as Ninja Looting.
When those privilages were taken away, they begin to complain about Ninja Looting and Kick Abusing being the core element of an MMORPG factor, the strong and chosen are the one who get to actually play the game while the weak does absolutely nothing because they were simply useless.
By the perspective of the WoW community the weak newer players are unworthy to go out in the open world, unworthy to be inspired, and unworthy to play this game.
But they are worthy of being under the mercy of your boot.
Problems like this could easily be fixed if they were indifferent on how others play this videogame instead of Dictating how they should play and demand them to give up their current beneficial hobbies and or professions just to get better in a mere simulation of pixels and code.
No we didn’t. We had lots of favor and highly situational abilities.
Talent trees are a completely separate issue.
Because they started this game in Legion
Lack of borrowed power is kind of making classic more attractive to me. I don’t kill with essence and corruption procs, I kill with my wand and spells, and I need to watch how much of each I use so I don’t run out of mana too quick.
Comparatively I feel like procs just up and murder something every so often just for targeting it. It isn’t particularly engaging, I’d rather get good gear and just feel generally good, than really be mediocre and procs are carrying me. Even if that’s not the case when you compare the two directly it kind of feels that way.
In classic I only worry about my level and my gear. And just a few levels above or below something matters, a lot. In retail level is largely meaningless with scaling and I need gear, azurite essences, corruption, neck levels, and azerite traits on said gear. It’s so much more that it feels like less.
Agree that wow has been breaking their core successful gameplay loop with these unnecessary extra layered systems that are solely intended to increase grind at minimal dev cost
But what do you do? Give every class a single target stun, AoE stun, CC, interrupt, movement spell, dispels, and rotation?
There gets to a point when with 36 specs you have abilities that tread on other classes abilities, or other classes niches. You get homogenization, and at that stage it doesn’t matter if you play a Warrior or a Monk or Mage because all of them feel the same because they all bring exactly the same thing to the table.
This right here, and while the intentions are good they should only allow borrowed power to run for one patch, then scrap it.
I once had a great comment that hit home:
- RPG is only fun when the progress bar is rising
So, they always have to do systems that hit that mark.
People don’t want to be beholden to someone else’s power. One that can be taken away at any time.
It’s better to design good classes than good borrowed powers as that way you can iterate on the good design choices instead of constantly coming up with new borrowed powers after you’ve taken the old ones away.
Borrowed power is lazy game design. Spread the word! 
Gives them an excuse to delete everything we have worked for over the 2 year expansion cycle making us weak as piss and building us back up to hit the reset button over and over and over.
YAWN…
Exactly.
The excuse is that they have to prune every six years with a normal talent progression system.
I am thinking so what?
Sure beats seeing rentals erased and pruned every 2 years.
New skills with each expansion doesn’t have to be active skills, they can be passive bonuses like +5% crit chance to a certain skills. Look how the game is nowadays. Is it your skills that plays the game or is random proc skills that play the game for you? I prefer the first one because it focus more on player activity compared to random procced skills.
To be fair most players wouldn’t accept a 5% bonus something on an old ability as a reasonable new toy for an expansion unfortunately.
Certainly there are some situations where it would work and I do agree it is something Blizzard could look into, but it seems they are either unable or unaware of what they might change.
Like a good change for balance druid would be getting something like the legendary helm effect from legion that reduces starsurge cost and increases it’s damage over a short period of time. It was quite a fun effect legendary promoting specific gameplay changes like pooling to get more starsurges out during that period etc.
Definitely agree with the whole random proc garbage. It’s been terrible throughout all of BfA to the point where the servers are physically unable to keep up with them, not to mention how bad it feels to have so little control of your dps.
Not a BfA issue (think it changed in Legion) but Destro lock even has really annoying RNG. The rotation itself has absolutely no RNG making it really nice to play as you can set things up and prepare for certain moments etc, but the mastery bonus itself is a flat RNG bonus to every single spell.
Each spell I cast has a chance to do between 0 and 27% more damage, that’s just absurd and something I have no control over.
Sometimes I’ll do 80k dps, sometimes I’ll do 70k dps, sometimes I’ll do 50k dps all whilst pressing the same buttons.
Really makes you consider whether you should bother with combat potions when a larger portions of my damage is reliant purely on luck anyway.
Give me back higher player focus any day.
Yeah, i would think that perhaps you should get one active skill / expansion and perhaps a few passive bonuses ones to certain skills. Remove all those random op skill attacks. Make the player play the game again. That way you still keep the class identity and you don’t have to reset the class with every expansion.
Why do your class has to get strucked by memory loss with every expansion because your class for some reason forget how to use a certain skill that used to be a borrowed power from previous expansion.
Take DK’s for example. Compare the class now with Wrath. It’s not even the same class anymore because of all the changes.
True that. Honestly I think Blizzard is making a mistake with the Shadowlands class design, they wanted to make it focus on class identity but have really just tried to shoehorn it in and make it stick.
Realistically to focus on making each class feel like a complete class and not just 3 specs they really needed to break each class down to their essentially without their specialisations and then built them back up again.
Basically went back and said “ok well this is what a warrior is” and then “ok now this is what a protection warrior is more specialised at” instead of just going “yeah lets just give them back some old unusable abilities and call it a day”.
Like maybe warrior’s all have shield wall, die by the sword, and enraged regen but they all share a cooldown. So you could choose a weaker mitigation with parry, or a better mitigation that requires a shield, or weaker mitigation that allows you some healing.
But then Fury would benefit more from enraged regen because maybe they get better healing benefit, and prot gets more mitigation from shield wall or maybe they also get increased block chance during it, and then maybe arms has increased parry during die by the sword or maybe they make each parry generate rage or something.
Like actually make them specialisations of the class not just completely different entities.