Their blue post on restricting covenant abilities was in no verbatim literally saying that they wanted to restrict it for lore reasons but also to lessen the impact or attachment to those abilities as they will go away next expansion and they know it feels bad.
Some like it. Some dont. Others are impartial. I know I dislike it and its a giant waste of developer time.
I’ve had an idea about that .
Put in a special talent row that has 3 or 4 slots . Have it so every time a new expansion comes out the row changes.
Talents for this row would only exist for the expansion they are from and would be replaced with each following expansion .
This would give people a new row of talents every expansion , they would be borrowed power because only good for the expansion and there would be no bloat .
In my opinion legendaries are fine, especially if they enable builds diversity.
I could see them drop off bosses and be upgradable so you can keep them. If the bonuses from the latest content don’t appeal you.
When tier sets were a thing if you look at the bonus they offered it’s not that far from what legendaries tries to be.
But back then you had to upgrade to the next tier because of the stats. Remove the stats difference and you probably would see people running black temple in t4 because that was the bonus that they liked the most.
Oh it is simple they need create methods of generating income to make share holders happy.
It’s a question of depth, inherently gear has limited depth of interaction. Whereas the current borrowed power systems take over for gear in larger part. Yes gear is temporary but the base system is largely the same as what was in classic. At this point we’re at gear 4.0 I think? But it’s iterative not rewrite from scratch.
Because I’m a software engineer and it’s literally offensive to me to see that much wasted development effort. It’s painful for me to watch that bad of a development process being allowed to continue when that should have been fixed by management ages ago for wasting company money.
Nope that is changing back .
THis is a response from Ion
Ive heard a few beta testers that do the higher end content and even they acknowledge that these systems are getting way too much time on it. 
Makes you wonder why they admit to mistakes they just keep repeating over and over and over.
The sunk cost fallacy is the usual reason.
Seems to explain their actions. Reasoning and pattern of behavior to the T. 
Quests that involve a good storyline, dungeons , raids and battle grounds . Those were what content was .
All of those you mentioned in the past would of not been considered content those would be considered rewards .
The most fun covenant abilities will become talents or baseline spells for that class, the less popular or clunkier ones will rotate out, and they will use the next expansion to devise new ones. That is how it’s always been, and it’s a much more tenable system long-term than piling on new talent rows ad infinitum.
The folks designing quests/story and instanced boss encounters are not the folks designing power progression so that’s irrelevant.
As for battlegrounds, those have separate power levers (PvP talents and the revamp of Versatility as a PvP stat) so this isn’t really relevant to them either.
Its been like that since BFA. Since you can’t really count WoD going into Legion.
Id hardly say that’s how its always been.
Power is not the content . Our powers are what we use to do the content.
It also makes crafting a mess.
Crafting needs all the help it can get…it doesn’t need to lose half its market because everyone has the same shiny artifact weapon or corruption cloak.
No, it’s been around loooong before BFA. Tier set bonuses from previous expansions (another form of borrowed power, btw) have become baseline abilities and talents in the past. For example, the Warrior MoP Gladiator 4-piece set bonus gave 70% movement speed after using heroic leap - this directly became the talent Bounding Stride in Legion. Another example is 2-set Feral druid bonus from TBC, which made your regrowth faster when you drop out of cat form - this became the “Predatory Swiftness” passive ability in MoP. There are examples of this going all the way back to Vanilla.
Good news, legendaries in SL will require crafting professions. There will be high demand for these throughout the expansion.
I’m talking about this artifact weapon-style system.
And I’m talking about borrowed power as a whole. You know, the thread topic?
But…if they make something spectacular again, which is moderately balanced, not overly-controlling and which doesn’t make players furious…wouldn’t they see a ton of new players, spending money and making those rascal shareholders happy?
when SL got announced at blizzcon, i was excited, new features, new levelling, torghast in alpha looked really cool and i was checking multiple times a day to see if i got in alpha, and then beta, and then they mentioned covenants and soulbinds, was optimistic. was still watching the beta vids and the changes that blizz were doing, was getting less and less excited. got into beta finally and the only tested until level 20 or so because of so many problems and granted most got fixed. seeing all the problems with covenants, soulbinds, conduits, yeah bfa 2.0.
scrap the system and start over. gear should be our only power, enchants should be our only enhancements. why do you think the game lags so much?
and no, i dont mind waiting, getting rid of this crap would do wonders
Amen to that.