Always bending over the people that play multiple specs.
It sucked in legion
It sucked in BFA
and It’s going to suck in Shadowlands
106 Likes
I agree. Borrowed power makes everything chaotic and not skill based.
It forces blizzard to spend effort on balancing rather than enjoyable content.
It makes no sense to many noob players, to the point they get stomped all over and quit.
It makes RNG and time spent = being gud.
44 Likes
Tier have borrowed power, been around since vanilla. Now what?
7 Likes
I hear ya, I hate them too. The only thing Blizzard cares about though is how easy these systems are to tie grinds too.
9 Likes
Tier gear is not borrowed power but I’ll humor your statement and explain them to why the borrowed power of Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands are so harmful to people that play multiple specs and tier sets are not.
When we play and get stronger as a character we have to put whatever currency/power into Artifacts/Azerite Armor/Covenants/Soulbinds we don’t get the benefit of all our specs being stronger we have to pick which spec we want to be stronger or try to make them all mediocre.
With tier sets all of our specs become stronger because tier sets helped all of our specs.
38 Likes
I think most of the playerbase is tired of them. I just don’t think ion and his team know how to make an expansion look exciting without them. The problem is that the expansion doesn’t look exciting and covenants are one of the reasons why
18 Likes
I’m tired of the systems in general to be honest.
SL would have been fine with nothing but the legendary system and some better polish on the classes imo.
26 Likes
My favorite part is how they have the audacity to praise the expac for letting gear be gear.
While it’s true there is so many systems
3 Likes
Borrowed power that you keep forever, and only offered secondary benefits. Good point!
2 Likes
It actually is, a temporary power increase that sometimes even promotes distinct gameplays. The thing you put there is just the difference between tier bonuses and whatever happens nowadays, but you are right in the sense that Tier power is better because it benefits all of the specs.
The problem right now is not borrowed power per se… But rather the amount of them, and how they impact in the gameplay or power levels. Shadowlands will launch with 3 different borrowed powers:
- The covenant active ability
- The soulbind/conduit setup
- The legendary item
And it’s just the lauch! We thought BfA was bad and it was 1 new borrowed power per major content patch. I can’t even imagine myself at 9.3 juggling with even more borrowed power plus a sea of currencies.
If Shadowlands launched with JUST legendaries as the borrowed power, I bet it wouldn’t be as terribly criticized. I honestly keep wondering why the developers can’t stick with just the core class design.
I’m personally perfectly fine with a class rework every 3 xpacs or so to prune skill bloat (that inevitably happens), instead of having a brand new thing every xpac that will only last for 2 years.
4 Likes
To be fair, borrowed power has been something we’ve dealt with since launch. Every peice of gear which has been an upgrade over another peice is, for all intents and purposes, borrowed power in that it grants us a temporary boost to our power. That peice was (and will be) replaced with yet another.
It astounds me people think borrowed power is something new. It isn’t. It’s just that Blizzard has chosen to put many of these borrowed power systems “out in the open” morso than they already have been.
1 Like
Yes but we can all be clear on each others views on how the borrowed power aspect has gone down the sh!thole, majorly.
And?
People are tired of Pathfinder.
People are tired of longitudinal grinds like Artifact Power and Azerite Power.
People are tired of RNG gearing with Warforging then Titanforging then Corruption.
Blizzard knows. They don’t care. They have a greater vision (and some ulterior motives) that drive them to make design decisions that are poorly received by their playerbase. Your opinion is a very popular one. And ultimately irrelevant.
3 Likes
I think after SystemLands we get another expac with borrowed power I will not do the borrowed power grind.
When I’m in the midst of those borrowed power system, I’m usually okay with them. BfA’s were a bit wonky, but I loved the artifact weapon and legendaries in Legion. Getting them, not so much… but once I had them I loved them.
The big problems that borrowed power systems create are:
- It’s a large drain on development effort that could (IMO) be put to better use on actual content (dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, zones).
- They make balancing a complete nightmare. You’ll never get perfect balance in a game like WoW, but you need to get things in the approximate ballpark. And if you’ve got class changes PLUS 2-4 borrowed power systems, that’s a lot of interactions that have to be balanced and rebalanced.
- It just dun’t feel good, at the end of the xpac/start of the new xpac, to have those borrowed power systems stripped away.
- Players often can’t figure out what their BiS is. Legion wasn’t so bad for this, but BfA was notorious for it. I mean, short of consulting Icy Veins or a sim, I never got to the point where I could tell which azerite power was better for me. It was a complete mystery.
They’re removing both the grinds and *forging so uh
And replacing them with new ones. Conduit ranks. Covenant Renown. And I 100% believe some form of gear RNG will come back by the end of the expansion. Remember, BFA didn’t launch with Corruption either.
1 Like
Its the easiest way to balance the game and cheapest route which pleases the cfo.
One day the developers will learn that borrowed power systems are terrible for the game. What really feels good is when we learn and gather power from one expansion and carry it into the next. Not to mention all the problems that are created with these systems. Then they scramble to “balance” them, on top of the normal class imbalance problems and creating content.
2 Likes
Uhhhh what? Tier sets were not only spec specific but they were stat specific. It’s not like a Prot pally got a tier set and could use it for Ret or Holy, nope they had to get the tier sets for those specs too.