Maybe to you Mr. Cliche (dumpster fire, really?) but for me, I find it entertaining.
“Classes would never get changed on an expansion by expansion basis if borrowed power didn’t exist” is a pretty hot take.
Now that most dps specs stack % stat corruptions it does.
Azerite is essentially a tier set system (some traits are literally old tier sets).
Essences are to me the lamest because they can be fairly significant without tying back to your class.
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The game would be so much better with no borrowed power. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t provide enough egoboo for the game developers who come up with their pet clever borrowed power ideas.
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WoW has always had borrowed power. Gear IS borrowed power. BfA just has way too much of it, and way too many systems on top of systems.
I mean, I guess. But at least before your characters would advance from expansion to expansion. New talents and skills and whatnot.
How many years has it been since we’ve gotten new abilities? Since WoD?
IMO I think it’s because of how convoluted Blizzard makes them. Not to mention the mountain of RNG they bury them under. 8.3 was the straw that caused me to stop playing. I tried but I just couldn’t put myself through that much torment and pain.
I much more prefer a system like tier sets and having a know drop source for them. I kill the Boss and I get the item or I don’t. If I don’t then I come back next week and try again.
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Meaningless. Classes in D2 stayed the same for over 15 years and people still play them.
EQ Jugg has been a thing in Path of Exile since 2013 and guess what? It’s still one of the top specs in PoE.
Change for the sake of change is dumb.
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You have a choice, you can have borrowed power systems that get remade every xpac or you can have ability bloat and an ability squish every 2-3 xpacs.
I don’t like the borrowed power but at this point in the game it really is a necessity. The problem is Blizz puts far too much importance on it.
Instead of having a solid core for every spec and have the borrowed power be an enhancement, they have half baked specs that they use the borrowed power to fix. So instead of starting out the xpac in a good spot and making things more fun, you start out busted and stay that way until you hit max level and gear up so that the borrowed systems can fill in everything your spec needs to function.
I’d rather that tbh. Add a bunch of new stuff, every few years get rid of what’s not useful or isn’t working. Replace that, see what sticks, go at it again.
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There’s always been some amount of borrowed power. We had tier sets and legendaries going back to vanilla, after all. We’ve never seen this much of it all at once prior to Legion though. Set bonuses were things that only serious raiders had and the rest of the game wasn’t balanced around having them. That’s very much not the case today.
If I could play devil’s advocate on this…
Isn’t gear borrowed power? You grind your way to a specific piece or pieces until the next patch/expansion comes out, at which point you grind your way to the next collection of pieces, and the gear you managed to acquire are rendered inferior. If we examine things like the azerite/artifact systems against the simple act of acquiring gear, what is it about the azerite/artifact systems that raises ire in the minds of players, rather than them accepting the grind as a part of the nature of an MMO?
I would argue the reason for that is in how the systems feel. The reward of gear in and of itself feels rewarding enough, and is tangible enough to see the direct effect within your individual performance. By contrast, the azerite/artifact systems (less so with the artifact system, in my opinion) feel less rewarding, as the actual rewards from those systems are spaced out over, oftentimes, arbitrary timegates.
I don’t have an issue with the idea of borrowed power myself, or the idea of having something to go for as end-game currency (WoW has had end-game currency grinds since BC). But the reward structure should have a reliable pace that is absent of the RNG of gear. The azerite essence system introduced in 8.2 did this well.
What? Barely anyone plays Jugg and even less play EQ Jugg.
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I’m happy with it. Imagine coming to a 15,year grind. People already complain about a 3-4 week grind.
There are ofc alternatives like keeping all systems and balancing them accordingly whether that’s something they’d be willing to do is another thing.
As I see it, the gear itself might be ‘borrowed’, but not the primary stats they confer. Eg, Armor is always there, gear after gear, expac after expac. It’s not temporary.
Resounding Protection and Echoing Void are borrowed, because they’ll be gone with SL.
I mean to an extent I guess yes, but before your classes/spec got more powerful and gear was just the cherry on top.
Now they design these systems to power up your character and then get rid of all of them at the end of the expac and you’re left with an empty shell because they balanced and designed around you having these systems.
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Where are you getting this from? In SSFHC we have 3 of the top 10 are Juggs.
Old borrowed power was more like an enhancement to the classes or specs because they gave buffs or triggered special abilities that were cool .
But in the end even if you didn’t get some of these borrowed powers (tier sets , trinks ect.) You still didn’t feel like you character was incomplete at max level.
New borrowed powers is you are now max level you hit like
Because you need borrowed powers to be complete.
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Literally every expansion had forum posts about how Blizzard sucks at class design and bandaids tier set bonuses or broken trinkets to fix gaping holes in the base design.
For BfA, IMO, essences should have just been left out.
12% of the least popular way to play the game doesn’t make it extremely popular
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