**Just get rid of ALL borrowed power systems!**

Listen, I think we got off to the wrong foot. I still think the argument you made earlier is silly, but perhaps I misunderstood, as I am kind of confused by what you just said.

Are you saying that you think gear (as a ‘borrowed power’) is roughly equivalent in design, impact, fun levels and player choice as the systems of ‘borrowed power’ they’ve been throwing at us in recent expansions? Artifact Weapons, Azurite crap and so forth?

If you aren’t saying that, I apologize…and have to ask what we are actually arguing about now, because I am unsure.

I understand that gear can be technically termed a ‘borrowed power’, I get that. but I don’t agree that it has the same impact, or even interacts with game mechanics in remotely the same way, as these heavily complicated borrowed power progression mini-systems that we get each expac, which don’t seem to serve any purpose other than needlessly muddying the waters and making players wait to play the game they pay a time subscription fee for.

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Stepping into this thread late, but here’s a question:

What’s the difference between an ability that is in my spellbook (but might be removed in the next expansion), and an ability that’s attached to a piece of gear I’m using all expansion (and might become baseline later on)?

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No thanks, I like borrowed power, gives me more post leveling progression.

I’m saying that gear is borrowed power because it’s temporary and is the vast majority of your power. Your power is not innate to your character, it’s your gear. Your power almost completely comes from your gear.

So the gear is the power, and you borrow it when you put it on and give it back you take it off.

You seem to want to define borrowed power by the method you attain it, how fun it is to the game, or it’s relative power and that’s kind of absurd.

That would make a set bracers that dropped off of a non time gated trash mob that gives me a 5% power increase not borrowed power.

But if it had corruption and dropped from a time gated weekly chest and gave 5% power increase it would be borrowed power.

But either way when I put it on I gain 5% power and when I take it off I lose 5% power.

When you get the ability in the spell book, it’s just that and ability. You didn’t have to do anything else, but reach the level it was given to you.

Now you get the piece of gear for the expansion, it is nice. Now they want you to grind something for it, to make it more powerful, it’s looking better. Hey, there is some more stuff that you can do to to make this piece of gear even better. It goes on and on, until you spend a good part of the game making this piece of gear remarkable.

Another expansion come out, that remarkable gear is now useless. You spent a lot of time making perfect something that is now obsolete. They took the ability away, not as much of a problem. You didn’t didn’t spend hours and hours getting the ability like you did that piece of gear.

You may have misread my post. Or misread his?

Why is spending time getting an ability bad? I loved doing long quests do get my old warlock demons and mounts.

Also, consider Wake of Ashes. What’s the difference between it being on a weapon you got 30 minutes into Legion vs being in Ret’s spellbook now? What about Soul Swap? It doesn’t exist anymore, so it might as well be considered “borrowed” power, right?

In the context of I am posting about (or, admittedly, complaining about), I think it boils down to purpose, ease of balance, player agency and timegating.

For example, let’s consider the spellbook that a player inherits when they pick a class. That is a system that, with a small amount of research, I can opt into when I pick a class, and I can pick and choose the spells I want to use at will, without timegating, without upgrading my individual spells by doing daily chores or amassing an arbitrary currency. The spells are the spells, and they gain power as I gain stats, from the gear I choose. Balancing the spellbook isn’t too challenging (in theory), because a dev team can just tweak numbers or spell effects a bit here and there, in most cases, and keep the class at nearly the same power level as other classes of equivalent stat levels. The spells may change a bit from xpac to xpac, but it’s a system that, as a whole is flexible and can be individually pruned here and there.

Now, let’s throw the gearing system on top of that. No problem right? The gearing system interacts with the spellbook system in what seems like a mostly non-conflicting way, and when there are problems that arise we can make small adjustments, but we still haven’t entered the realm of ‘wt…f are we doing, this is too complicated’. System A compliments system B nicely.

Now, let’s throw an Azurite, Legendary Wep or SL bloated system on top of that
…and now we have the first 2 systems (not to mention talents, which we didn’t even mention) and they all have to seamlessly flow together and not break anything, despite the fact that they all do stuff. Add to that the fact that this new/shiny/special/MANDATORY system is something you will continuously grind an arbitrary power level for, for the duration of the expansion, by doing ultra repetitive chores which often are not of the players’ choosing, and you will fall dramatically behind if you fail to comply with this. Azeroth is no longer a place to wander and cherry-pick content from, not if you want to be relevant in most of the flagship content available (pve, pvp). Azeroth is now a game of whack-a-mole, requiring you to mindlessly jump through hoops that the game chooses for you…or else. Add to that the fact that we are going to make players wait X amount of time before they can progress any further on said power system, once they have reached a daily quota limit. Add to that the option of perhaps limiting how often a player can choose to switch or tweak the power level selections they have made. Additionally, when you have this many over-complicated systems sitting on top of each other, attempting to coexist, stuff starts to break. Look at how unbalanced and messy BfA was; how messy SL is. Many, many of the beta testers are begging for these new systems to be heavily rolled back, if not removed entirely.

As an observer, with only BfA, Legion and previous xpacs of experience to draw on, it just feels like the familiar helicopter-parent hand of blizzard’s dev team is swooping down once again to get way too passenger-seat-driver-ish with the game. Like, seriously guys, just give us a few horizontal, well-meshing systems, some fun content to try those out on (like the dungeons and raids that the art team does a fantastic job with), and then back off and enjoy the fruits of a successful design.

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I haven’t tried sl, yet but I do tend to agree. If the amount of money, time, talent went instead to raids, quests, dungeons instead of all these systems, would we have a much more fun game? I think so…but like I said I’m totally willing to try out all SL has to offer first.

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I readily admit that balancing conduits, soulbinds, covenants and legendaries is much more complicated than balancing baseline spells, talents, and tier set bonuses.

But it’s also much more boring. Once the community has found the optimal talent loadout for a given bit of content, there is no more choice there. Every class/spec you run into in PvP or PvE will have the same spells, the same talents, and the same set bonuses, changing only with the content they’re doing - one setup for farming, one for raiding, one for battlegrounds, one for arena. You can look at the class beside you - or the one running towards you - and know exactly what it will do before it does anything.

For all their flaws, Covenants are trying to get away from that. A Kyrian holy paladin might have one set of talents, legendaries, and conduits, while a Revandreth one might have another set. And even within a covenant, two Kyrian paladins could play differently depending on the soulbinds they were able to get their hands on, and want to pick different legendaries as a result. It’s more complicated, but it’s also much more interesting.

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Granted, and that isn’t a bad point; stuff can get stale, especially if it is stagnant. However, I don’t see these super complicated systems as a good solution for this. Especially when they heavily restrict player choice, instill lots of timegating and endlessly force players to grind and re-grind repetetive WQ’s and content that they otherwise might not choose to do.

I am sure that there are more enjoyable, less disruptive ways to tweak–and perhaps regularly change–core systems like the spellbook, talents and gear, to keep things fresh…without adding more systems on top of them. One example (which just came to mind and may admittedly have a lot of holes in it), why not have a section of the spellbook that is themed as ‘experimental’ or something, where lore-wise the mage is trying out new things, but mechanically speaking it is a seasonal section of the spellbook, where they can try new spells, passive effects and abilities. Perhaps players can opt in to only having a few active at a time. In a way, it’s like talents (okay, it’s exactly like talents), but it is a horizontal system, it doesn’t require you to play the game a certain way, it isn’t endless in its hamster-wheel grind and it promises regular change and dev interaction, without them needing to capsize a damn release date to frantically fix the m*********er. Eh?

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I can not like this post enough :heart:

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Power has always been borrowed. Or are you still rocking your Tier 1?

The amount “borrowed” (oh how I wish I could kick Bellular in the Jimmies for popularizing that term) has grown as the storyline and threats we deal with grow.

I don’t disagree that more content would be awesome but…I question how much of the player base would be kept engaged if gear only every increased in power whether that was in huge jumps or dribs and drabs. There are absolutely those that would love it (I could get behind it TBH) but…I think not the majority.

I really hoped to the original artifact system extended across expacs so that we would move beyond what we were given to making our own. I’m hoping that is what is coming down the road in SLands. Guess we’ll see.

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Thank you, So tired of everyone saying:

“BuT TiEr GeAr iS BoRrOwEd PoWeR”

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I think when it comes to these things we are seeing the contrast of two different game designers with very different outlooks on how games should work. Ion seems to take a much more compartmentalized view of game aspects than Greg Street did which is why we see so much systemization now. It’s almost like Ion looks at the whole game as a series of dungeons where you can’t have the same mechanic over and over again. Street on the other hand was more apt to look at the game as a whole and try for a consistent flavour that ran through the game.

Both outlooks have their strengths and weaknesses. Too much systemization and the game feels disjointed and it loses it’s fantasy aspect. The more holistic approach of Street (aka Ghostcrawler) makes the game feel more natural, but the downside is that if you don’t get things right it can feel like the entire game is out of whack, not just one aspect of it.

I hope the current dev team can moderate their system heavy approach to game design and try to find a happy medium between what we have now, and how things used to be.

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The game started bleeding subs at the end of wrath and has never really stopped.

But yeah, all borrowed power’s fault…

They exist primarily to passively soft nerf content so the little Timmys’ of the wow world can clear content. As opposed to when they just nerfed everything by 20, 30, or 40%. Spoiler, people complained about that too, see classic.

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He doesn’t know PepeLaugh

I would be fine with these borrowed power systems if they were enhancing fully fleshed out classes and specs, ones that are a solid foundation and can stand on their own without anything bolted on to them. No more bloat because all these enhancements go away at the end of the expansion, but our classes and specs are complete without them therefore our classes and specs don’t feel gutted either.

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I’ll address the seasonal spellbook tab thing in a second.

First, I don’t mind grinding or timegating. The former is less pejoratively known as “having something to work toward” which we all praised in Vanilla and TBC when grinding was instead branded with more acceptable names like “attunements” or “sets.” As for timegating, it’s necessary so that people who can afford to no-life the game don’t end up so far ahead of the folks that can’t, that the latter just end up quitting because they’re no longer having any fun being middle or back of the pack at best.

I 100% agree that being forced into content you hate to do content you love is a bad thing. I abandoned my previous main (Monk) in 8.2 because I didn’t want to have to PvP for Conflict and Strife just to be competitive in PvE. If MOTHER had had echoes of nyalotha in 8.2 I might not have had to do that, but she didn’t. As long as there is a catchup mechanic of some kind - a way to get the rewards I want from the content I want to play, even if it’s slower than the expected way - then I’m fine with it. Shadowlands is already ahead of BFA in that regard, because it has that Maw vendor that can (over time) give you every single conduit in the game.

Now, for the seasonal spellbook/talents approach. First, spells and talents are automatic - get to a certain level and they’re yours. That’s not enough progression for a single tier, never mind a whole expansion. Imagine if you were done getting all your azerite traits (except for the Uldir-specific ones) and essences by the time you hit max level, or all your golden artifact traits in Legion - that’s what this system would be like. Nothing to look forward to except one set of gear per spec and maybe some crafted stuff like gems. People would be complaining that there’s nothing to do within the first week.

Second, spells and talents aren’t capable of the depth that a full progression system can have. Talents are spec-specific and the tradeoff is always whatever else is on that row, while spells have no tradeoff at all, you just get them. Essences can be spec-locked, universal, different ranks depending on the content you’ve completed, they can enhance your class’ strengths or compensate for its weaknesses in various content etc. I truly thought essences were brilliant, I just wish we had had the entire expansion to focus on them instead of them just being one more thing thrown on the pile.

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Beautifully said, bravo.

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