Endgame progression =/= Borrowed power systems grind.
The borrowed power system grind is at the endgame same as the gear though
It’s exactly the same. EXACTLY. You start off weak, you play the game, you get strong. It resets. It’s borrowed power.
I seem to remember grinding Artifact power, Azerite power, and with the exception of season 1, Renown in every character as soon as my alts reached current content.
Your gear is there getting replaced every step of the way as you reach current content too, and then replaced there over and over and over
So, what, then? Everything is borrowed power?
Borrowed power requires that power to not be innate and permanent. In this case “chosen power” is more accurate. Just like specializations in general are a “chosen power.”
The borrowed power is going to be gear sets, and having something clearly better to choose makes the “borrowed” part feel better when it is time to “return” it.
Gear is a default power metric. It’s always been a thing. Comparing getting gear upgrades to introducing a new external systems grind is intellectually dishonest.
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Gear certainly is, but it’s like I said earlier people are just accepting of it because it’s what they’ve known gaming in rpgs their entire life. Gear is actually a far longer grind than something like renown even.
What isn’t borrowed power, then?
edit: I guess battle pets aren’t borrowed power.
Basically nothing. You could say a couple of abilities like shadowbolt that was never taken away at any point but even something like that has gone through several changes over the years.
Alright, so if everything is borrowed power, than you just need a more useful word to describe the concept.
That’s the whole point of my post. Everything is borrowed power when it comes to combat, which is why the term should be dropped and we should stop talking about it.
My point is that the people who use the term borrowed power are being intellectually dishonest, because they are trying to make some systems more important than other systems, when in the code they are mechanically the same. They are mechanically overhauled, abilities are removed and replaced, and everything has been non-permennant and continue to be non-permentant.
If wow was built from the ground up on artifact power as a default sytem and 13 years later they started adding gear as an external source of power we would be complaining about gear instead.
Like I said it’s just internal bias cause ‘’ it’s always been like this’’
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What term would you propose for the systems people commonly group together as “borrowed power”?
People who try to claim “but this is technically borrowed power too!” don’t understand that people don’t randomly hate on things just because they got a label on them.
It’s expected things will be tweaked or altered, but talents are expected to hang around post-dragonflight. If they remove the system entirely in favour of something else, then yeah people are gonna complain about that too.
It doesn’t matter what you call it. People don’t want the “system where you have to grind for power throughout the expansion that we will lose entirely at the end of the expansion”.
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Ah yes, the - they definitely won’t change things this time pinky promise after 20 years of changing stuff every expansion.
Exactly, and to describe it, they coined the term “Borrowed Power”. Trying to change that to win a semantic argument completely misses the point.
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Welcome to the internet.
I don’t posit a replacement term, because the term would be describing something that doesn’t exist. Systems are systems are systems. If it’s gear or talents or artifacts or conduits or necklace slots or apps on an iPhone, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Blizzard will change our abilities every expansion just like they have always done
and that’s
O
K