Not what I said. I said:
Yes, they make up a percentage of your output (like all power systems).
No, the percentage they made up wasn’t a problem.
Then why did people have to sim a higher ilevel azerite item to determine if it was an upgrade or not?
Sims existed long before azerite. Simming doesn’t mean there’s a problem.
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Legion was the best expansion since MoP for me but it had NOTHING to do with borrowed power. It had EVERYTHING to do with the artifacts themselves and the story/completion of long dangling storylines. Completely removing artifact power for ALL characters during the B4A pre-patch was the stupidest thing they could have done as the content was based around having those weapons & the powers they offered. However, with the squish & such it probably no longer matters.
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No, you dont. See the bold part. It sounds like those talents would fit the description of borrowed power.
How do you think bis lists were created?
In a perfect world Blizzard wants ilevel to dictate if you use it or not, but everyone acknowledges that’ll probably never happen. A 5 ilevel “upgrade” may actually not be because the item is your worst stats, but realistically if an item is 15 or 20 or 30 ilevels higher they want that to be indiscriminately better. As we saw with azerite traits that wasn’t always the case for a myriad of reasons.
The current state of simming just highlights how convoluted the system has gotten since we are now getting upgrades and saying “I don’t have any clue which is better because it’s not intuitive enough for me to know by looking at it”
BiS lists really don’t exist anymore given the nature of how gearing works these days. But generally speaking in the old days BiS lists were actually pretty common sense because raid gear always dropped the highest item level and you always wanted your 4 set bonus. Once you knew your stat priority the pieces largely fell into place.
There were curveballs and outliers. Not everything made perfect sense and people had to rely on others to feed them certain information. What glyphs are better, what hit rating should I run, should I push the next haste breakpoint, am I stacking too much crit, etc. There were and always have been questions and as someone who maintained guides back in WoTLK/Cata/MoP/WoD days I can say that I fielded scores of these types of questions, but in today’s world if you came and asked me what azerite traits should you run my answer is probably just going to be sim it. And hell for the record now that I’m really thinking about this people really did not come to the forums for advice on gearing back then. It was “My DPS sucks, why?” and I’d dissect the crap out of their armory and logs to figure out why.
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short answer, probably
Yes, and that is ok? I mean borrow powers make the expansions. Not a big deal
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Everything in this game is borrowed power… you can grind your butt off in mythic only to replace them with green near closing the gap on the next cap. ya, sure you get to chew through content faster than the average player, but ya… You don’t even own the game you’re playing you rent it.
This game is only worth playing when it’s fresh of the expansion to experience the content then quit until all the time gated content rat race is gone and they add catch up mechanics. You then come in work your butt off on the content and get as much done as you want then quit until next expansion rinse repeat.
I’ve been playing since half of wrath… and after playing cata going through my first experience of the entire expansion and 1-2 expansions afterwards I really saw how pointless it was to mindlessly gear up all expansion only for them to add catch ups anyways. I’ve had my share of hardcore back in my heyday… though it is enjoyable chasing infinite gear and power only for it to be stripped away and start over again.
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This is not what borrowed power is referring to.
You’re wrong.
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I understand what the op means… I’m just ranting non-sense lol
Borrow power hate is silly at best. In fact, borrow powers make some weaker specs compete.
Acting like borrow powers is the reason classes are so bad, ignores the history of wow and ignores how bad classes got without systems we have now.
That’s the problem. The specs aren’t actually complete and instead of fixing the class they use borrowed power to make the spec work. Then the expansion ends and those powers are gone so the class is broken. It also just sidesteps the issue that people playing that spec or class outside of max level are just woefully underpowered at that point.
Edit: and it’s not even about making weaker specs compete, it’s about the spec not feeling like it even functions properly unless you have it. Whether it’s good or not is just a discussion of how well balanced it is.
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it’s ridiculously sustainable they dumbed down talents many times over and then after that took that complexity and shoved it into something borrowed.
if they stoped working so hard on time wasting game systems and focused on game content, talents, and gear. it would be a more enjoyable successful game. it would be the cultural force it was instead of some time wasting keeping-up-with-the-neighbors grindfest.
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I mean, if you consider “I have to sim to discern the best upgrades” to be a “problem”- I’ve got some unfortunate news for you 
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But Blizzard NEVER has done that well enough and the few rare times it happens. It always shifts.
This system is a easier way to balance classes across the board, and even with that it still ends up failing.
I’m just saying that borrow powers is a clutch that without it, things could very well be worse off than they are not.
The reason why specs feel complete with said power is because of how strong said power is that makes them feel whole. While the tool kit itself is weak. But picture if said borrow power was not around. Do you think Blizzard would make your class compete? I don’t think so at all. History shows that they have a hard time with class balance.
So the very thing that people are asking for to stop doing, might be the splint classes need. If it was gone. We would have a worse meta system of classes getting nerfed and buffed like the old days.,
That’s not what is meant by “borrowed power”. Borrowed power is a system that either vastly boosts our current spells/abilities, grants us new & very powerful spells/abilities &/or gives us a new talent tree, then REMOVES all of that with the pre-patch for the next expansion. We “borrowed” those things solely for that expansion.
Granted, we did get some of our Artifact abilities as spec options during B4A, likely because people vented HARD about them being removed in the first place. However, what we got & WHERE we got it were quite arbitrarily chosen by the devs & not much appreciated by the player base. It appears that we will NOT lose the Heart of Azeroth & it’s associated powers/spells/abilities going into Shadowlands, which is a nice change and benefits alts/new players. (However, it would have been nice to have one when rolling a fresh 50 in the Beta…) The removal of Artifact abilities/powers completely for ALL characters in the B4A pre-patch was a disaster due to the fact that the entire Legion expansion was based around characters having those powers/abilities as they leveled.
Gaining gear during an expansion & then “gearing up” in the next is NOT borrowed power, it’s simply player progression. As you progress from “birth” toward “the end” you will find gear, potions, scrolls, foods & drinks that will help your gameplay, but you will ALWAYS outlevel them. This is even true in single-player RPG/Adventure games.
Not sure if you meant compete or complete, but either way that is a BAD thing. Borrowed powers should enhance every spec as an aid to whatever the player is fighting, but specs should be as complete as possible before those powers are added. The definition of “borrow” is that you’re given/taking something that you will need to return at a later date/time - if a borrowed power makes a spec complete, what happens when the return date arrives?
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Basically, yes. I think they did it pretty well during Legion but they didn’t even try to replicate that success during BfA. I’m still on the fence in regards to Covenants.
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I don’t even understand this objection. New abilities are new abilities on your skill bar. Who cares where they come from in lore? Literally doesn’t matter.
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I mean both, but compete with other classes, and what you saying is true…if Blizzard was good at doing that. They are not. So this system helps them in some ways through balance.
Even with it, they still having hard time with balance, but at least with powers being so strong classes who are weak can compete with other classes. Without said powers they would still be weak.
Thinking that these systems gone would make classes better… I’m not so sure that would happen