I had this idea to solve the borrowed power problem the game has had for a while. You see, without artifacts/HoA/covenants, the only aspects of our character we can customize are our class, spec, and race. However what if we added a system with a tiered list of passives/skills for each spec. You can acquire these abilities by allocating points into the abilities and as you put points into each spec, you unlock higher tiers of skills. However, it will eventually come out that some combination of point allocation will be optimal, so in order to prevent people from being excluding on the basis of their choice, there should be a small fee to reset your points.
Now you may say this: if there is an optimal choice, why allow people to choose suboptimally? And that’s a very good question! First of all, even if everybody picks the same choices in the end, there will still be a path of power progression that will be followed to unlock all abilities, giving a sense of growth and progress. But I do not believe there would necessarily have to be only one good configuration per class/spec. There may be a best selection for Solo farming, or Mythic+, or raid, or pvp. Since the only penalty for switching is a modest sum of gold, characters won’t feel locked out of content for their choices!
What do you guys think? Does this sounds like a good system to end all borrowed power in the game?
The problem with borrowed power is it requires so much time & focus from the devs to balance, tune, de-bug and so much more.
Classes are already in the game statically, they could easily just switch focus back to base classes, instead focusing on borrowed power for some reason instead. Talent’s haven’t had a major revision since Mists of Pandaria, an expansion launching 8 years ago.
it’s quite ridiculous that classes are considered broken/unplayable until a particular borrowed power is introduced that makes them perform.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Arms warrior did rather well in early Uldir, blizzard ended up doing some nerfs to execute earning Arms a solid spot near the bottom of the list. This ranking didn’t budge whatsoever until the introduction of Lucid Dreams in 8.2
As borrowed power suggests, you cannot take it forward, so it’s always going to feel terrible losing all of it and leveling in a new expansion. This didn’t exist in Classic > TBC or TBC > Wrath. Your power came from having your T1 or T2 set, making the transition smoother and more enjoyable.
I’m not entirely against systems, but they should add minor power to an already finished class. Not fill in the gaps where the class obviously fall short in playability.
Tier bonuses we’re very nice, but they didn’t offer skill-type abilities, and did not completely define a class. Sometimes they were good enough to keep will into higher content, but you weren’t totally screwed without them.
Power back then came from skills and gear, and somewhat buffs. That. Was. All.
The changes were small. Priest t2 bonuses made greater heal a lot more efficient by giving a free renew, but it wasn’t like a totally new heal.
Priest t3 allowed you to run a renew build, which was useful in bwl, but it was just a mana reduction.
The modifications tier sets offered augmented the skills you already had, and weren’t completely necessary. For example, i never got 8set of t2, but i did just fine healing in AQ20/40 in vanilla. It would have been nice, but it was the loss of a BONUS not the only power i gained.
That being said, I’m really against the borrowed power, and I’ve barely even experienced it. It makes the “work” put into the game feel meaningless. I don’t know of a better solution though for ability bloat.
I actually quit wow around mists, and most of my experience was from before they overhauled talents, and have only been back a short time (this haven’t accessed any of the bfa systems).
I do understand ability bloat though, and it is a tough problem. I know “talent trees” are a meme now, but that would fix boat… Sort of. If most abilities we’re talents, they could add a few each xpac where players world realistically only pick one or two new things, at the expense of old things.
That though is an awful idea for so many reasons, balance would be so much harder, and it would be a lot more difficult to pick a meta as well as quite overwhelming building a while class yourself.
So yeah, i world personally take bloat over borrowed, but it sucks either way.
