No thanks, I like borrowed power, gives me more post leveling progression.
Iâm saying that gear is borrowed power because itâs temporary and is the vast majority of your power. Your power is not innate to your character, itâs 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 itâs relative power and thatâs 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, itâs just that and ability. You didnât 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, itâs 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 didnât didnât 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. Whatâs the difference between it being on a weapon you got 30 minutes into Legion vs being in Retâs spellbook now? What about Soul Swap? It doesnât exist anymore, so it might as well be considered âborrowedâ 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, letâs 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 isnât 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 itâs a system that, as a whole is flexible and can be individually pruned here and there.
Now, letâs 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 havenât entered the realm of âwtâŚf are we doing, this is too complicatedâ. System A compliments system B nicely.
Now, letâs throw an Azurite, Legendary Wep or SL bloated system on top of thatâŚ
âŚand now we have the first 2 systems (not to mention talents, which we didnât 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 playersâ 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 youâŚor 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 blizzardâs 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.
I havenât 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 soâŚbut like I said Iâm totally willing to try out all SL has to offer first.
I readily admit that balancing conduits, soulbinds, covenants and legendaries is much more complicated than balancing baseline spells, talents, and tier set bonuses.
But itâs 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 theyâre 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. Itâs more complicated, but itâs also much more interesting.
I readily admit that balancing conduits, soulbinds, covenants and legendaries is much more complicated than balancing baseline spells, talents, and tier set bonuses.
But itâs 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 theyâre 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.
Granted, and that isnât a bad point; stuff can get stale, especially if it is stagnant. However, I donât 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 WQâs and content that they otherwise might not choose to do.
I am sure that there are more enjoyable, less disruptive ways to tweakâand perhaps regularly changeâcore systems like the spellbook, talents and gear, to keep things freshâŚwithout 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 âexperimentalâ 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, itâs like talents (okay, itâs exactly like talents), but it is a horizontal system, it doesnât require you to play the game a certain way, it isnât 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?
Make covenants something casual for weapon, armor Tmogs and pets/mounts. Id rather they not be tied to progression and all the other mess.
I can not like this post enough
All of it.
Power has always been borrowed. Or are you still rocking your Tier 1?
The amount âborrowedâ (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 donât disagree that more content would be awesome butâŚI 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) butâŚI 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. Iâm hoping that is what is coming down the road in SLands. Guess weâll see.
âBorrowed powerâ is a term people are using to differentiate between the standard gear and the systems that are added as a replacement to the usual addition of talents and abilities you used to get with an expansion.
I have no idea why I have to explain that. Iâm guessing people are being intentionally ignorant for trolling reasons.
Itâs not even a borrowed power problem really. Rather a bunch of poorly designed, overcomplicated, obnoxious systems problem. All MMOs Iâve seen have gear. What they donât have is an eternal never ending grind to nowhere that ends just drains all semblance of enjoyment out of an otherwise exellent game.
Thank you, So tired of everyone saying:
âBuT TiEr GeAr iS BoRrOwEd PoWeRâ
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. Itâs almost like Ion looks at the whole game as a series of dungeons where you canât 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 itâs fantasy aspect. The more holistic approach of Street (aka Ghostcrawler) makes the game feel more natural, but the downside is that if you donât 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.
Designing these systems is only ticking us off and bleeding your coffers/reputation/time, when you could just be designing fascinating environments, dungeons, lore, raids, âŚmaybe several new fricking battlegrounds??..and other stuff that you used to focus on
The game started bleeding subs at the end of wrath and has never really stopped.
But yeah, all borrowed powerâs faultâŚ
They are a control-freakâs spin on hyper-managing the decisions of playersâwho at this point are almost all adults/pros who are probably better at paying the game than the devsâand it makes us grumpy.
Keep it simple stupid.
They exist primarily to passively soft nerf content so the little Timmysâ 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.
He doesnât 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 donât feel gutted either.
Iâll address the seasonal spellbook tab thing in a second.
First, I donât mind grinding or timegating. The former is less pejoratively known as âhaving something to work towardâ which we all praised in Vanilla and TBC when grinding was instead branded with more acceptable names like âattunementsâ or âsets.â As for timegating, itâs necessary so that people who can afford to no-life the game donât end up so far ahead of the folks that canât, that the latter just end up quitting because theyâre 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 didnât 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 didnât. 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 itâs slower than the expected way - then Iâm 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 theyâre yours. Thatâs 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 - thatâs 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 thereâs nothing to do within the first week.
Second, spells and talents arenât 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 youâve completed, they can enhance your classâ 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.
Beautifully said, bravo.
Path of Exile does it best with their passive tree and ascendancy options. No need for borrowed power when you have an endless web of different options and paths. I believe that if talent trees were implemented correctly by Blizzard that there would be no need for all of these borrowed power systems. They just need a little imagination and an open mind and we could be rid of that garbage forever.
KISS /moo
Borrowed powerâ is a term people are using to differentiate between the standard gear and the systems that are added as a replacement to the usual addition of talents and abilities you used to get with an expansion.
Mathematically it does the same thing. Calling people ignorant when they are the right shows your lack of intelligence.