It isn’t the same. It is more enhanced power. You get stats that improve the abilities you do have. Tier sets are the closest old WOW had to the levels of borrowed power we’ve been getting recently but even then for most of the history of tier sets in WoW it generally still just enhanced the abilities we had. Rarely did it give a new ability to just use that once removed you lose it.
The Weapon, neck and corrupted gear give us abilities that once we take off we can no longer use those abilities. Some abilities were baked in and some of the abilities are enhancements like gear but over all it is new things for the expansion they show up in and gone in the next.
Not like artifacts and garrisons and… anima or whatever SL is beholden to is.
The concept of gear, the effort and work is persistent. Yes, gear is here today, replaced in a lucky role tomorrow, but that’s it’s persistent nature. And the one thing you can always count on with gear being replaced is… it’ll always be replaced with more gear.
A piece of gear is transitory. The idea of gear is eternal.
Borrowed power, meanwhile, evaporates to be replaced with… nothing. Artifact weapons weren’t replaced with bigger, better, beefier, Artifact-ier weapons, they were replaced with a wholly different system that didn’t come close to living up to what it replaced.
Going from, say, Vanilla Gear to Burning Crusade gear doesn’t mean “gear” is borrowed power - just that it’s an eternal ladder to climb. Going from Artifact weapons to NO artifact weapons and Azerite is borrowed power because there’s no conceptual link between the two, no bridge, no progression. They are two wholly separate ideas and systems linked only by the similarity that they give Blizzard an infinite stake of Expansion*Specific funbucks to hand out without any consideration.
Gear used to just be stat upgrades, so linearity was a thing. You could have a ton of haste on your purple but the green had more stamina and agility. It was the clear upgrade.
The AP system was entirely throwaway. All the neat passives and on demand abilities were stripped. So was half the spec identity.
It’s dumb because it links the borrowed power talents to RNG; which just feels terrible. The only think as bad as that is linking borrowed power to terribly long rep grinds.
Wait we didn’t have any borrowed power in vanilla or bc or wrath? Well those legendaries sure weren’t your power. Neither were those overpowered overbudgeted stat rings that level up with rep. This game has always had a sort of borrowed power. It’s just now we notice it more because it’s LESS rng to get said power. Unlike watching rogues and warriors with glaives wax the raid for you. Or shadowmorne dps crush icc while you try real hard to keep up. Caster staff? Fangs of the father? They went from the design of a few classes will shine to everyone can.
While I don’t like it, I also feel the game would suffer from losing them. Our current dev cycle seems to have a real problem with accepting consequences for their designs, and admitting failure / being wrong. So if we take away their crutch of temporary power they can throw away… then I foresee an expansion with the potential to be far worse than any we have had. Until something gets shaken up in their whole design philosophy and how they interact with the player base, they need their temporary and meaningless power gain.
The problem is the implementation, and eventual removal. Borrowed power should feel like a buff to your character, not like a part of your character’s core. There is just too much emphasis on the strength of borrowed power. It should feel important, but not detrimental to not have.
While I’m sure they will be class specific, I don’t picture the overall theme deviating from the specific Covenant. We will probably not see the variety we had in Legion which could lead to people playing less alts.
I thought increased power through tiers was more than enough with maybe a legendary thrown into the mix to make things interesting. The covenants and unpruning maybe will make things a bit interesting as well perhaps. I’ve been keeping myself mostly ignorant of a lot of things in SL so it’s all new to me when it releases.
no class fantasy homogenizes classes and creates this meta of stacking classes in M+ and other high end content because most classes dont bring anything special to groups
Well, ESO adds new skill lines that are availible for all classes. Just like our essences. But ESO don’t delete them atleast. So you can be Psijic vampire necromancer from mages guild with dark brotherhood and thieves guild passives (which i am playing now)
Personally, I would like to see Professions be redesigned and made to be actually useful and rewarding and have the crafted items be the “borrowed power”.
Put the entire agency of fun and progression into the players hands.
Also, this would be a great way to boost the in-game economy.
I don’t know why people (Blizz especially) think they NEED to keep adding or prune abilities each expac. If they can get a solid class design and stick with it, it’ll be fine. Don’t need to add in abilities to the class aside from maybe another talent row.