This happens in every industry - software, restaurants, retail, research… You name it. A person in power usually has an idea that they love, and thus it is implemented at whatever the cost is. It might not be the best idea, it might have a lot of flaws but it is kept because the person at the helm just can’t let it go.
Is Borrowed Power Ion’s baby? Is that why we’re getting it expansion after expansion?
I have a question that will probably get me reported to oblivion…isn’t Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker a borrowed power? If so, isn’t this whole “borrowed power” buzzword everyone seems to be talking about existed in wow since vanilla?
I wouldn’t pin it on any single dev. It’s a solution to a problem called ability bloat. Because if they kept giving us things each expansion they’d have to take something away. Its not a good solution, but trusting Blizzard to prune is like having a doctor do open heart surgery with a chain saw.
I’ve stated before that borrowed power as existed in the form of set bonuses since Vanilla.
It’s not Ion’s. More specifically it’s certainly not JUST Papa Ion.
Borrowed power is a buzzword because set bonuses, funky trinkets or weapon procs have been around forever and they often exist as bolted-on things that make the game more fun and cool. You were sad really OP ones were gone but typically something fun was replaced with something else fun, in theory if not every time. What ‘borrowed power’ means now is extra systems that fill holes in their spec that remains every time and never really gets fixed.
Borrowed power systems are fine, they stop us from getting ability bloat. I just wish they didn’t have huge grinds tied to them though and that they were a bit more alt friendly.
Let’s put him on Jerry Springer and find out.
Technically yeah.
The real problem isn’t the idea of borrowed power but rather the fact that the recent attempts at the larger systems of it have left a lot of classes/specs feeling rather incomplete without it.
As strong as Thunderfury was, especially for AoE threat, it’s like not Warriors felt like an incomplete class without one.
I highly doubt it. Borrowed power became a huge thing in Legion, and Ion wasn’t in charge during Legion. I think borrowed power is an idea from higher levels. It’s easier to add in a borrowed power system than to recreate the base class power for every class.
We’re getting it expansion after expansion because this is the direction that games are going in the larger gaming universe, and whoever’s at the top of these decisions (probably a board rather than one individual) is pushing for WoW to go that way, too.
I don’t think you can lay this one at the feet of a single guy, and though Ion is the face of the game, borrowed power pre-dates his tenure in that role.
No. Borrowed power is Blizzard’s answer to an old problem.
If you add something to the game and it’s intended to stay, it increases the cost of WoW development forever.
For instance, they had to pay man hours to designers to add Archeology Artifacts, digsites, etc on every expansion after Cataclysm.
At some point things pile on on top of each other and the cost to develop WoW becomes so massive that it’s no longer profitable.
So the solution was to add features at the beginning of the expansion and then “unadd” them at the end.
So you add something, then you unadd it, then you add another thing, then you unadd it.
That way the cost of WoW development doesn’t rise.
Borrowed power sounds like something that’s an addition, not like something that makes your spec complete.
Shadow priests are suposed to be “masters” of shadow magic but if you take borrowed power away they literally are lvl40 mobs, masters of nothing after all these years.
Same thing with ret, the rightful crusader who won’t be able to move w/o borrowed power, apparently. Ha.
It started to be a big thing after an influx of diablo 3 developers into the WoW team I think.
In D3, most of your power is coming from the items rather than baseline design or balance, so perhaps its those people’s philosophy coming into WoW.
Not in the same way. One you technically get to keep the rest of the time you play the game regardless of said xpac while one goes away completely after the end of the xpac.
In a way yes gear is borrowed power, and honestly it’s never sat right with me that the gear you work to obtain gets banked/vendored every two years. However, I believe the biggest difference between gear and artifact weapons/garrisons/what-have-you, is that I can go into my bank and throw on my Shadowmourne if I want. The bolt on systems are used for a set amount of time, and then they’re tossed aside. Personally, it truly lays bare just how big a waste of time these expansion packs are. You use them for a bit, jump through the hoops, and then toss them in the trash. Obviously it’s just a game, none of it matters, blah blah blah, but they really pull the curtain back on the row of treadmills with these arguably pointless systems.
There is a difference in gear supporting your class vs changing it.
Like stat corruptions vs proc stackers.
Quoted for emphasis.
This is exactly why. To cut development costs and ability bloat.
It isn’t. Introducing leased power systems into every expansion that only work for that expansion’s lifetime does three things: it ensures that your gaming experience will be different with every expansion because every character is essentially starting from square one every time a new expansion comes out, it allows Blizzard to introduce new abilities without having to be fully committed to them, and three, it gives expansions a sense of timeliness - people who played expansions like MOP-onwards are getting a far different experience than those who missed those expansions and came in later.
Ding. This guy gets it. Remember how cool mixing up T9 and T10 sets was, especially if you had access to one of the two legendary items you could get out of WOTLK? Or the legendary cloak from MOP combined with some incredible T16 bonuses? Remember how fast those got old once you crossed over into the next expansion?
All of the power granted via items is borrowed.
it’s like the legion weapon, I think they’re trying to kind of give each expansion its own personality while still allowing us to progress through the game as a whole. I’m neither for it nor against it. I just wish they would stop coming up with all these crappy joke zombie grind systems that drive me up a wall
No. Borrowed power more than likely was added to cause people to keep logging in. Rep only goes so far.
I guess it’s a matter of if “borrowed power” is allowed to be powerful.
If it makes almost no difference it’s not worth caring about.
If it does make a difference than your play experience without it seems lackluster.
We used to get the same comments about Blizzard lazily using tier set bonuses or OP trinkets to band-aid broken specs for years.
nah you can argue ‘borrowed power’ existed in many forms previously but that isn’t the true crux of the matter
what happens now is severe gimping of the characters so that they basically feel incomplete and unsatisfying to play. Then you grind the borrowed power system to get your abilities back. We never grinded core abilities before this crappy system. We grinded loot and our characters felt good (generally) with or without it. Just the loot let us do more damage.
Yes there are times when trinkets and certain gear slots would give us a temp ability but those felt like a bonus, rather than finally giving us back something we should have had to start with. BfA is especially egregious by having gimped characters plus they eventually gave us so many gear abilities (corruption/azurite) that accounted for colossal amounts of our damage. All to motivate people to grind them.
Before Ion and his borrowed power system took over, the game was largely designed around a ‘fun for all’ base and optional tedious grinds were added on the side. Nowadays tons of those old optional grinds are now core and your characters is gimped without them.
It’s not just borrowed power, it’s the way the system was implemented and how heavy handed it was designed. Make it so players can’t avoid the tedium. The entire design now is around the rewards and boredom during play is expected from a player.
Ion truly turned this game into a job instead of a fun experience. And he made our characters gimped and unfun unless we do the job. So by the time you finally get the rewards you are done with your character because it was so tedious.
If you look at the past Ion directed xpacs, he is largely using us as an ant farm to see how much tedious boredom we will endure for various levels of trivial rewards. Something the founders promised they would never do.