Gear isnt borrowed power dude we dont borrow gear lol
So gear is permanent? No. Gear and the power any peice provides is only relevant until the next upgrade.
Thus, the power any peice of gear provides us is, by definition, temporary and borrowed, and is only capped by the player’s desire to push for more and better gear.
The problem isn’t borrowed power.
The problem is that baseline class/spec design suffers because less attention is paid to it in lieu of re-inventing the wheel via borrowed power every expansion.
BfA was rushed so there was very little in terms of attempts made to polish the base classes without their Artifacts or Artifact abilities that would have made the passive nature of Azerite slightly more tolerable.
I want my vehicle for gameplay to be a Ferrari, not a Pinto with rims.
What’s the alternative ?
Permanent power increases are unsustainable in a game this old.
And can you imagine if Artifact weapons and HoA remained relevant in Shadowlands?
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You know how you used to ding cap and then that was it as far as class abilities went ?
That’s the alternative. Go back to that. Gear is how you increase your power. Maybe tier sets. The crafted legendaries in SL look decent. But stop there. No trees of passive Mastery gains when X occurs or Crit in Y situation, no “Class abilities”, no Conduits you have to farm out and grind 15 ranks of.
Just good old fashion ding and get gear.
If SL were basically your L52, L54 and L58 as far as class abilities and then at cap you crafted your Legendaries and that was it, Covenants being glorified Cosmetic and story choices, I bet you’d see massively less complaining on the forums.
The problem is a big portion of game time has been shifted from doing the things people enjoy (dungeons, raiding, PvP) and to maintaining and progressing these systems through unenjoyable grinds (the best Power/Hour like Islands or spam Maw of Souls) to then have limited dungeons, raiding and PvP time with what you got that week.
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Hahahahahaha!
But seriously, just hit level cap and that’s it? The gear treadmill? Every expansion? That might get old as we can’t just keep getting permanent abilities every time.
That’s literally some of the most enjoyable WoW expansions we’ve had. WotLK, TBC, MoP.
And even for Legion, about the only complaints going into 7.0 to about 7.2 were the Artifact system, not the actual game itself.
Blizzard needs to start believing in the strength of the content again. WoD failed because it had no content, not because it didn’t have a massive power grind that forced people to repeat the little content there was.
Classes get redesigned all the time. Your class in Cata wasn’t just the Vanilla base class with TBC/WotLK and some new addons. It’s a fallacy to pretend “classes would just get permanent abilities forever”.
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cant wait for 10.0 
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You mean you got some tier before completing a raid, or do you believe you could have the whole tier set before raid completion during WoW’s life span?
The first one would be true, the second false. Vanilla and most of BC tier came from downing bosses until a badge system was implemented in late BC. Early Wrath required raiding and most of the time a major tier piece was locked behind the end boss. When ToC came out, there was a way to buy tier pieces but it took a while, though I do believe you could buy most if not all the pieces off of a vendor if you were determined enough.
Cata had VP and vendors for both VP and raid tokens but you could only get things like shoulders and helms through raiding.
LFR was introduced with full tier sets available, but still, even if it’s arguable with the level of nerfing, it is completing raid content.
Personally, I do find tier to be better and a motivator in raiding. The borrowed power systems pretty much make me bow out. My characters only feel like half of themselves now and it’s staring down an endless grind that will literally have zero meaning after a year or two as all they have accomplished will be taken away, not built up.
As a side note, it’s funny people blame Cata, saying it’s when we lost our talent trees but we didn’t. They baked certain things into the specs but did lock us into a spec orientated build probably to make it less confusing to players, though we could go into other trees after a certain point. [My Prot Pally, with some creativity, was able to get Long Arm of the Law in Ret and still remain a good tank - it was my only movement increase at the time]. It was MoP that took away the talent trees altogether, along with some abilities which would later be offered to us in our talents. I found that terrible as my Resto Shammy, who I mained then, had to choose between skills she had baseline in Cata but couldn’t have baseline in MoP.
Right now, it feels like they take a whole bunch of stuff away to make us work to get it back every expansion, and it’s what turns me off to really come back. Maybe I’m just old fashioned - I like my characters to be themselves when they hit max level and build themselves up in gear that will be improved upon.
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Can you elaborate borrowed power?
You forgot to add legendary cape.
This about sums it up
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I’ve had my 4 pc bonus before we ever reached the last boss, which is “full tier” IRT gear progression, and this has held true since TBC.
Starting in Cata and heck, probably WotLK, I’m not going to go back and fact check this, the last boss doesn’t even drop tier (often they’d have a “wildcard” token for catch-up pieces for anyone still working on it) and when multi-tier difficulties became common in WotLK, you’d have tier from the previous difficulty giving you all your set bonuses going into the final progression push.
I’m not really going to read your big novel, as it’s a waste of time and a massive goal post move to get a “gotcha” in there. These are facts.
As a side note on the talent tree thing, I feel like with the level squish, now would be the perfect time to reconsider a more traditional style talent tree system.
In other words. “I will not try to understand something which is contrary to my current opinion. Regardless of whether it could contain factual information, a clarification of a point which I support, or simply an engaging discourse to better understand a topic.”
Even if you disagree, to engage in a discussion or an argument it to be flexible enough to understand the other side and actually be able to see their perceived truth.
I give you Bruce Lee.
“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”
Be flexible in your thoughts and actions.
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It was not contrary to my opinion.
It was contrary to facts before him.
You can’t rewrite the history of tier sets in WoW and expect anyone to read a novel filled with fan fiction when we have the Internet to prove it all wrong.
The original claim is simple : you would have full tier (IRT Power systems) before you finished a tier. That has pretty much always held true except in BWL where 8pc could only be gotten off Nefarian.
I’m not going to entertain goalpost moving and outright fabrications. No.
You are using your own personal experience as proof of a broad argument. There were Many instances from Molten Core to Dragonsoul and beyond, where in my raid groups there were many people who had not completed their tier set before we cleared the raid. Unless you are gear funneling, your raid group would have to be progressing extremely slow to have even a majority of people in 4 piece tier before you clear the raid.
And farming LFR and Normal and counting that as your 4 piece before you clear heroic doesnt mean you have your 4 piece heroic before you clear heroic.
All raiding guilds I’ve been in, pushing 4pc into the hands of raiders has always been a priority early in progression, and it has always held true.
Congrats on being US Top 100. I really doubt that’s a thing, but that’s what you’re pretending here.
It absolutely does.
4pc >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ilvl in most cases.
This is another goalpost move. People have absolutely went out of their way to get 4pc, regardless of from where and at what ilvl, because just having the bonus in most cases is worth way more for the raid than having higher ilvl gear. And yes it counts. Because at that point, you have your “Power” component from Tier.
It’s insane how much people are attempting to rewrite WoW history just to push a really stupid argument that’s completely irrelevant to this topic anyway : Tier is not “borrowed power”.
Blizzard needs to start making content more complex again.
People would get bored of leveling their ten and pick a talent for twenty years. WoD was a reflection of that. Raid or die isn’t appealing anymore. Final Fantasy is rising in popularity because of focusing on content outside of raiding.
You can’t take back all the conveniences Blizzard gave to players because they would go ballistic, look at how flying went.
Legion had plenty of content. Just the artifact appearance hunt, the class mounts, the class campaigns was massive. It was silly little things, people running around farming cosmetics mostly and experience the same story from a different angle, but it worked.
I like how you go back to WoD to find an example of lack of content. You ignore the elephant in the room : Legion without Artifact Power would still have been a massive success.
BfA got better at the end. If Heroic Warfronts with a possible currency and mog vendors, the Islands with doubloon vendor, and Azerite requiring no “power” farming, the whole expansion would have been received much differently. I know people now who do Islands for the cosmetics, ever since they weren’t made a total PITA to acquire. Heroic warfronts proved to be much more interesting, and the last remaining frustration is unlocking Tier 3 armors being completely RNG.
The WoW content team is good, the WoW art team is good. The WoW systems and rewards team are focused on RNG and complexity unfortunately, not believing in the strength of the content itself to give people a reason to do it more than once.
What conveniences ?
There is nothing convenient to borrowed power systems. They’re just massive grinds.
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