Yes it bothers a great many of us a great deal and some are very vocal about it. Borrowed power limited to only an expansion is not fun at all when you think about it. Let’s take corruption. How many of us have grinded visions until we started texting everyone IRL messages like “SERVE N’ZOTH!” “N’Zoth sees…all…” etc to get the absolute best corruptions we can have? I know unholy dks who have over 100% haste from buying expedients. That took a few months of effort. Now in a week or two, it’ll all be gone. All that work for nothing. Erased. Not even grayed out like Legion weapons just GONE as if it never existed. We will have a cloak to resist n’zoth’s corruption made from dragon bones and n’zoth ooze but there will be no reference to it apart from a feat of strength perhaps?
SO no Im not looking forward to joining a covenant, gaining a cool ability, grinding it out all day along with soul binds, dailies, Torghast, legendaries, who knows what else. Only to have it all be “tied to the shadowlands so you can’t take it back to your planet” at the end…STUPID
This is complete and utter nonsense, we have had borrowed power in excess for the 3 expansions now (including shadowlands) and so far legion and BfA have lead to cumulative power breaking the game. How about instead of introducing absolute dog tier systems just make it so the item level doesn’t go up by 250 over the course of 4 raid tiers… Jesus Christ …
I agree. I remember the days when getting a Legendary actually was rare and you were revered by your peers for having it. And you actually deserved the power since you either farmed it or got really lucky!
Legendaries are just glorified purples at this point.
Well I had some alts in 415 gear with not so great azurite traits without the runes or corruption gear and I was struggling just fixed one of them with new runes using echos with one piece being infinite stars–works 200 percent better. So answer nope I don’t like borrowed power I prefer the Lich king rules all stats on gear on character gave more power to character.I have zero desire to play another gimmick 3 stage borrowed power system–it’s dumb.
I liked the Legion system, and some of the BFA stuff like the cloak and the essences were fun as well.
I think I would like their approach better if we were in more of an assassin’s creed type universe. Like, at the end of each expansion, we wake up, having lived that reality for 2 years, and then we get pulled back in to start over as something new.
It could even be that while we keep anything we earned during that time in terms of gold, mounts, pets, mogs, etc, at the start of each expansion we can become something new for that expansion’s journey. Then the borrowed power would feel less dumb when it is taken away. At least thematically, it would make more sense. And also, without losing any of your achievement progress, you can become something totally different for your new foray into Azeroth.
I dunno. I guess I’m crazy. But back to the point, without some kind of borrowed power, the game would get kind of stale after a while.
The MOP cloak was a borrowed power system. Sadly we need to go thru these systems. Because if you think catchup is hard now, you don’t want to see it without borrowed power.
Personally I absolutely HATE borrowed power. The game should be playable and enjoyable without any expansion specific gimmick. There should never be a situation where a player feels weaker tomorrow than they did today, where the game is supremely difficult to understand because of weird interactions and procs. If you can’t get 90% of your class’ output with the Mark 1 eyeball, then things are too complicated.
Nerds with no jobs or self control that “need” to spam content with inherent exponential diminishing returns AND a self nerfing system isn’t really the best player base to design a game around.
But here is the thing about the mop cape, you didn’t had to grind it, and if you didn’t have it, you don’t tend to be destroyed by those that did because the game had competing cloaks dropping from bosses.
no offense, but i cant imagine playing thrown together tasks OBVIOUSLY only made to occupy all of your time and considering it fun simply because there would be “nothing else to do” if not for them… this to me is the equiv of a bunch of pigs getting really fat and just walking right into the slaughter house.
arena is FUN, we dont wanna have to do 90 other things to have our class feel good. we want our class to feel good on their own. not occupy our time because the rest of our life is more boring than watering plants in our garrison.
i don’t mind some just how they introduce them pisses me off. like why since legion are they constantly throwing “legendaries” at us. wth makes them so legendary now days if they are dime a dozen and everyone will likely have um?
also the constant power grind to level them up is annoying like the neck/weapon
This whole situation is interesting to watch from both sides, but the truth is borrowed power is always a thing, the key is to keep it in check. Looking at the SL systems, they are doing 3 things objectively correctly, and two things that tend to be positive in the long term subjectively but are disputable. The first is the introduction of the systems from the outset instead of building them over time so they dont upset each other heavily. The second is that they are focusing on more character specific elements ala legion and mop over general elements ala bfa and wod. The third is attempting to upend systems to test waters when the system is currently in a state of decay from the previous space. These are objectively positive routes of effect on a system as they build on the elements and allow the system to realign. Now towards the subjective.
The biggest issue is the borrowed power systems themselves. I find this to be overwhelmingly positive as a direction as not tying risk vs reward to long term decision making inhibits character identity in the long term in an rpg environment but more importantly this implementation seems to be more of a water tester to see if these kinds of deeper longer choice mechanical systems could be implemented again and potentially become a solid part of our characters. By introducing it in this way they can remove it if the players sont find a secondary subclass to be to their liking without tying it into their character intrinsically at first. The second subjective benefit is the introduction of incomparables imbalance elements. Expanding character power strengths to allow the option to choose the sacrifice of throughput for other incomparables such as utility or mobility tools. More specifically tying those incomparables to intangibles so that people have to question their desire for power versus identity. A long standing question. Obviously there is gonna be a battle heavily over these subjective issues as everyone has different preferences but for an rpg to thrive in its operative environment immediate gratification and conveniences are deleterious to the environment. The ability to take decisions away from the objectively better and push it into the realm of specialization and indentification benefits character choice and long term goal focus and inhibits, I want it all now expectations. No I am not accusing people of that to be clear I am pointing out that convenience breeds convenience and kills identification and relatability.
As a result I think this whole thing is beneficial if it’s an attempt to test reimplementstion of deeper and only slightly more complex systems to increase character value. Remember by the way these borrowed powers will effect next xpac as their new system in sl will become the leveling systems in xpacnext. So they can permanently implement these. Soulbinds and consyuts as permanent character values.
