Thing about Tier Sets and Trinkets in terms of Borrowed Power… They kept functioning well into the next expansion. It wasn’t until WoD did they decide to make things become weaker and weaker and then not function at all while leveling up.
Things like turning off bonuses outright when they are no longer current content (Such as what happened to the Legion Artifacts) and the removal of set bonuses makes the level-up but become weaker thing feel much more noticeable than riding your end-game raid gear half-way through leveling in the next expansion before the quest rewards and the like actually become stronger than what you had on.
Legendaries and fancy powerful effects didn’t really reach the point of, “Oh, you leveled up beyond X? Guess that thing you had is kind of useless now. Not that you got something better, just it made itself worse” until WoD was done.
this is a specifically bad take
borrowed powers are temporary frameworks that MAKE classes playable but are ripped away without much compensation every expansion
small instances like set bonuses (2pc 4pc pre legion) aren’t issues or things that people usually complain about
and the really good ones usually even make it as baseline in following xpacs (t15 enhance set bonus that became a passive in wod for example)
this is fine because it accents your spec/class and adds a small bonus that’s fun
it becomes an issue when your entire spec is propped up by a borrowed power system that without would make your class borderline unplayable
legion artifacts and some azerite are the biggest offenders
going from legion getting 20 passives and a couple active abilities from your artifact just to lose literally all of them with nothing but 1-2 boring azerite traits in return was a really really ugly move
a good example would be, your current talent tree
imagine if that came in as a fresh bfa system
then all of a sudden in shadowlands they decided they weren’t moving forward with that system and removed every talent on your talent tree from the game
and in place created a new borrowed power talent tree where you get 1 azerite trait as compensation
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Personally I feel they didn’t go far ENOUGH with the unpruning; some classes got literally nothing, some got back abilities most players in hindsight admit weren’t that great and that they didn’t miss, and some got abilities largely irrelevant to their specs (I like that Kill shot is coming back, but I won’t be using cobra and every thing else is MM, should have unpruned more Beast related abilities).
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It’s referring to these items/ abilities we have begun to get every expansion that fall out of relevance.
The real issue people have with it is the grinding required that makes it difficult to play your other characters.
It’s this business w/ azerite and the artifact in Legion. The items enhance your existing abilities and in some cases give you new ones. The problem is they don’t survive their expansion.
A prot paladin solo’d Ilganoth and Hive Mind, stacking versatility and being a great player. You can watch em on youtube.
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If the wod ring was the start, what about the mop cloak? There were other wod garrison buffs as well…herbing while mounted, breath underwater, etc, related to buildings. But I think the big offenders are things the classes are centered around, such as Legion weapons and neck powers.
It’s a temporary, expansion-specific ability. Armor, eg, is not “borrowed” because it’s maintained from expansion to expansion. Echoing Void, OTOH, is “borrowed” because it started with BfA and will be gone when BfA ends.