No one likes borrowed power

Azerite gear is build your own tier sets.

I think its more around 2k.

I get about a 400-600 dps increase per HoA level. Even past 85.

Shadowlands will be giving you a temporary new talent row via Covenants. Have fun with that.

If the classes had a sense of progression each expansion instead of giving you new toys and throwing away the old ones maybe it might be better.

I look forward to the day a Demonology Warlock can just go after gear that buffs pet damage or gives you a proc to summon additional demons based on whatever at some point but I doubt the devs have much creativity to implement equipment bonuses on gear.

Alternate Advancement levels work. This borrowed power stuff is a really poor implementation of that so they can treat each expansion like a season (more of the Diablo III team’s stuff?) and not concern themselves with actually designing and balancing AA levels.

“Borrowed Power”… lol

This term is lame. Borrowed power has been a thing since day 1. Every tier, every season, every expansion, it’s all borrowed power until the next one comes along.

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Do they really work?

EQ is the only MMO thats been around as long as WoW. They have intense AA bloat. More of your abilities come from AAs than actual spells/etc. Its so much bloat they have to start giving you a ton for free, and even then its still an intense grind to get to an acceptable amount.

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Champion points in ESO are functionally that and seem to work well enough. And they’re account wide so if you roll an alt they get all the cp immediately.

It’s nowhere near a good solution but I don’t care for borrowed power and raising the cap every expansion has its own issues

Not a fan of any system that pushes you to create alts. I really didn’t like ESO on multiple levels.

SL is going to be yet another xpac that gets deleted in 2 years time… sigh.

True, but they essentially both work as perfomance enhancers just in different ways. One by augmenting existing skills and the other by adding new ones. Either way, a new expansion comes, we ditch the old stuff and start the struggle over where we are weak at the start of a new expansion and by the end we are steamrolling over everything. Same concept, different package.

The main reason they exist is to create a grind to keep you playing. It’s the purpose. If not for these pointless grinds, you’d log in maybe twice a week, buy some potions/food and go raid, get your loot, log off. Does that sound FUN to you?

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i don’t mind borrowed power, as long as we can use it when we do that expansions content (like, the garrison abilities in the WoD zones). but not being able to use it again after that expansion is over (like artifact abilties) sucks the big one (the big one being an egg).

I’d agree that there is too much going on with azerite, heart of azeroth, essences, cloak, corruption and everything and in my opinion I feel like this was an over compensation on blizzards part in response to how universally disliked azerite was. I don’t think they will pile so much on in the future.

The game has always had borrowed power.

This might be true depending on your definition, but what’s also true is that our characters stopped getting permanent advancement in WoD. Take a look at how empty Legion is now that artifacts have been retired. You basically don’t have to worry about weapon drops while leveling through that content and that’s it. Your character doesn’t grow at all besides level, which is relative to the content anyway when there are no new abilities to go along with it.

I am hoping honestly Blood Death Knight Bruiser Builds at least make a return, I care little for borrowed power, long as it provides the option to have a Bruiser Tank Build.

The game has always had “borrowed” power, and if people think it didn’t they didn’t play the game.

The necessity and AMOUNT of the power to make a class or spec feel playable on the other hand is another topic of discussion that is currently an issue in the game. But I have no idea where this idea came that borrowed power didn’t exist until Legion. It ALWAYS did, but it just so happens that in the last 4 years that power was put into confusing, and convoluted systems locked behind a massive grind with hints of weird RNG sprinkled in.

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I think the bigger issue isn’t how this ‘borrowed power’ is obtained, but rather that there’s no permanent growth alongside it. That’s gone away, but all the temporary or borrowed stuff still remains and is being pushed harder than ever in an attempt to hide the lack of actual character development. All the new abilities we get each expansion are now just temporary, or at best made a talent choice in one of our already-existing rows instead of adding new ones. That’s the issue I have personally. I want something I can take with me from BfA into Shadowlands and there’s nothing like that. Shadowlands is looking to be the same, with our characters keeping nothing moving into the expansion that comes after.

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Welcome to power creep. If the game kept building and building over the last 15 years and some of this “power” never went away we would all be demi-gods sitting atop Azeroth ruling the world. I don’t mind losing my artifact weapon that I grinded for for a couple years, but if you don’t give my class any compensation in return and it feels awful in 8.0, like it did, then I get upset.

If we kept everything from each expansion the game would be an absolute disaster. Just imagine Wrath talent trees with MoP’s amount of abilities with Legion artifacts, Essences, Azerite gear, and corruption. They design these systems to REMOVE them because they know they can’t stack them. That’s why I think the systems are doodoo (but I kinda liked my artifact).

I’m personally not saying we should keep everything, and I’m not in opposition to temporary abilities or features. I feel as though you’re responding like I want nothing but permanent character growth, when that’s not the case at all. The complete lack of permanent character growth in the past two expansions (and soon three) is what bothers me. Temporary stuff is fine, but I want permanent stuff alongside it, even if it’s just a little.

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Agreed! I think one thing they 100% should’ve done is add some of our artifact abilities and passives baseline to our class and spec so it felt better in BFA. Everyone knew when you built a class around a weapon and then remove that weapon that there will be huge issues, as we saw in BFA.

If our characters “learned” some of the traits from the artifact and brought them into BFA with us as baseline passives or active abilities, then BFA would’ve been a lot better in terms of class design. They missed the mark so hard on that, and I’m not sure what they were thinking.