Just curious to see how the community feels about this on the whole…
We’ve seen the effects of “borrowed power” in PvP in past expansions, or Tier Sets in Dragonflight that don’t always benefit your specialization in PvP particularly, and how they can disproportionately benefit some more than others.
The War Within introducing Hero Talents is another situation this likely will happen in. There is plenty of time for balance and changes, making it unrealistic to currently assess a meta or point fingers at direct issues. But my question remains simply because of historical data on what “borrowed power” has done to Arena PvP specifically.
Would you prefer these “borrowed power” (I keep saying this for lack of a better word) situations to be disabled in Arena all together? Would it make for a more balanced gameplay experience?
I’ll start:
I’m keeping in mind the complexity of balancing PvE and PvP to begin with, before factoring in a change like this (which would only make it more difficult). I’m unsure it’s realistic with the lack of communication and balancing we’ve seen recently, to expect even more complex balancing to be practiced regularly.
From a new or returning player perspective, it’s significantly easier to level your class and understand what it does, and jump into arena. But the need to obtain tier sets and craft items with embellishments changes the idea of not just your class that you’ve leveled, but also every opponent you face. Also from a viewer standpoint, I’ve had friends who played in TBC watch gameplay and not have any understanding of what Fleshcraft is. It’s hard to get back into a game you feel so behind on.
To be clear, I DON’T THINK NEW ABILITIES ARE BAD FOR THE GAME. It’s necessary to spice things up now and again. But I think TEMPORARY abilities are quite confusing for returning players, and new players trying to learn what everything does.
That being said, TWW hero talents seem similar to covenant abilities from Shadowlands, where we essentially are tapping into more borrowed power, most of which will likely be temporary. While I do love the idea of dual specializations again, multi classing, etc, I’m just not sure it’s good for the state of arena right now.
To make matters worse, I’ve seen no evidence there are plans to get rid of tier sets or embellishments in TWW. It’s very possible we have tier sets, embellishments and hero talents all at the same time. That’s a significant difference from the classes at character creation.
I think that PvP can benefit tremendously from some simplification.
TL;DR - how do you feel about disabling “borrowed power” entirely in Arena.