After recently seeing people discussing borrowed power and why blizz can’t seem to get away from it with every new expansion since Legion, it got me thinking about the reasons for that. The only thing I could really think of as a good reason was to control ability bloat.
When expansions were being added to the game we kept getting new abilities and this caused our bars to fill up over time until they started pruning our abilities to try and compensate. This upset quite a few people because they perhaps lost utility or some abilities they really liked and others liked having less buttons to hotkey understandably.
One of the main things I and probably others looked forward to for every expansion was seeing what awesome abilities my class/spec was getting in the next expansion. This feeling however almost doesn’t exist anymore due to the borrowed power nature of the abilities after seeing what happened to Legion artifact abilities. Most expect whatever new things we get to be temporary and therefore not class defining or a new iconic ability. We saw this problem with some of the abilities in Legion that people loved just up and disappearing come BFA prepatch.
So I wondered what solution there could be to bring back that feeling of new awesome spec abilities when an expansion drops that everyone can’t wait to try out and play with without causing ability bloat. This problem existed in the old talent trees and so the trees were narrowed down into the new talent trees. This worked at first but as we continued to level they just couldn’t add new tiers to the talent system or they’d run into the same problem as before, thus the borrowed power mechanic was born.
I think the solution the problem was right under our noses due to blizzards own creation in attempting to make the pvp system have more depth.
I propose modifying the existing talent system to function somewhat like the honor talent system. Create a tier or two for Utility, Single target, AoE, passives, and maybe cooldowns. Then have the talent rows work like the honor talent. Click on the single target section and you have a pool of single target talents to choose from, so on and so forth. This way they could continue to add awesome new abilities in an expansion that people aren’t expecting to just up and disappear at the end of the expansion without increasing the amount of buttons we’re actually using.
TLDR: Borrowed power sucks, they think there are too many abilities so have to use it. Modify talents to swap out like honor talents so the button bloat doesn’t increase, and just group the choices by type single-target, aoe, passive, utility, cooldowns.
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I just don’t like that they give us temporary power to fix our broken classes and then take it way two years later. Making all my progress on that front meaningless. I want my character to get stronger, not spin the wheel some more.
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Yeah this is why I was trying to think of a way to retain the abilities added without adding a bunch of new buttons every xpac.
If they would use borrowed power as a testing ground it wouldn’t be so bad. Instead of taking everything away, keep what works.
They do that to some extent, but not enough.
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Their problem is they created this mess and now seem to think they need to go even bigger and more craZy every expansion and the more they do it the more they can’t go back to the good days pre legion. I hope it gets so bad they just revert to the MoP balance days where class balance was at its peak.
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Yes. This is the reason.
Guild Wars used a design like this. I wouldn’t really have a problem with it as long as they rotated some of the not-used options out. While borrowed power addressed action bar bloat, your suggestion has the possibly for adding bloat of its own form - a massively inflated library that most players can’t reasonably stay on top of.
Imagine if there were 60 PvP talent choices instead of 11-13. It’d be a mess to keep on top of. It’d also be an absolute bloody nightmare for encounter design. Player characters could simply have too many possibilities. Most games with these robust specialization systems usually have laughable PvE because the encounter designers typically throw up their hands and say “we can’t realistically account for everything, so we’re just going to put something out there and see what happens”.
Yes, Blizzard stated several years ago that they do the “borrowed power” bit because of ability bloat and to keep things fresh.
No, that PvP talent strategy would suck. Each xpac, you’d look up what your new best talents are, slot them and forget about it for 2 years. Maybe one would change, maybe not. If not, you’re stuck with the exact same class for another 2 years. Not much fun there. But, if you’re the type that doesn’t like change, then I guess that works well for you.
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Mop balance wasn’t good at all.
Classes were awesome though.
Sorry yea I meant how the classes actually played and felt. It was truely the best of times.
Makes sense lol, was going to say… warlocks were pulling millions of dps by keep their dots rolling! More than anyone else!
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Yup. Here’s the thing. Blizzard likes you to choose 1 option out of 3, or 1 option out of 4, because that’s a choice most folk can actually digest.
Covenants? Yes, you can think about whether you want to be a Vampire or a Fairy. Soul-Binds? Yes, you can think about whether you want to swap to single-target or AE for this specific fight.
Most people can’t digest what 60r3 means for them. It’s too overwhelming and people will give up in defeat and use icy-veins.
People will just go to icy-veins in general, it’s the way the game plays now.
And if they don’t, other people just won’t group with them.
I don’t mind borrowed power every now & then, but if it’s going to be in every expansion from here on out it’s going to get old very quickly, which for me it already got old.
People don’t go to icy-veins to choose what class they want to play in general.
I think this idea that the majority of players live their entire WoW life by the whims of a spreadsheet is just wrong. I think people use icy-veins to offload decision-making that is over-complicated for them, but I don’t think each and every decision is made solely based on what icy-veins says.
Something like 98% of tracked assassination rogues use one specific talent, they’re going somewhere to look up talents
How is this much different than what we have already just with less choice if you don’t want to go FoTM. People will always be able to theorycraft the optimal spec, that’s how it has always been. More options or less options won’t change that. I only see people that care less about FoTM getting a great benefit out of this, and people that only use FoTM builds being in the exact same situation we are in now just without their borrowed power abilities permanently disappearing after the xpac ends.
If two traits do damage and you can only tell which one is better via sim, you use icy-veins. If one trait is vastly superior to the other, then you also just go with the better one.
When it comes down to something like Arms or Fury, I think a lot of people just go with what they want to go with - maybe they like the crazy dual-wield style, or maybe they want to have the fantasy of using 1 2-hander. Some people are going to go to icy-veins and chase the meta, but I think some people do have some measure of spec-loyalty.
Pretty clear some people do. Otherwise we wouldn’t have constant threads about shadow priests or survival hunters. I can’t remember the last time (or if) either of those specs was considered good.
Not talking specs, people do play specs because they like them, but when it comes to talents, many MANY go to outside sources.
That’s 98% will use one talent.