Covenant Abilities Outside of the Shadowlands and the Borrowed Power Debate – Saturday WoW News



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Covenant Abilities had a short-lived restriction outside of the Shadowlands, and there’s been a lot of conversation around borrowed power systems in WoW. Also, happy last week before prepatch! This show includes discussion of the WoW news of the week and answering questions. If you have any questions that you’d like answered on a vlog, include the word ‘question’ and leave them as comments!

Official Prepatch Notes: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/23529209/shadowlands-pre-expansion-patch-notes
Timestamps

0:00 – Covenant Abilities Outside the Shadowlands
2:24 – The Borrowed Power Debate
5:47 – Surprises in the Patch Notes
6:57 – Tattoo Update and What I’ve Been Up To
7:58 – When is BfA Purchase No Longer Needed
8:19 – Addon Updaters Post-Twitch App
9:20 – BfA Raid Mounts Drop Rate in Prepatch
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50 thoughts on “Covenant Abilities Outside of the Shadowlands and the Borrowed Power Debate – Saturday WoW News”

  1. I heard blizz already changed this… BUT it did make me think. If we are reserving player power as zone-specific then wouldn't it be nice for something like Legion and this "Chromie time" to let people play around with Artifact weapons? Lore wise it make sense because you'd be going back to a time when those weapons worked and then they wouldn't work anywhere else. I just don't like borrowed power that after an expansion disappears and newer people who play through that content it's nothing but a husk… Makes the game really boring for new players because 90% of the game is pointless.

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  2. Blizzard must be real desperate if they are allowing bunch of cry babies to change their decisions. Using Shadowlands Covenant abilities outside Shadowlands is not OK. Were you able to use Garrison/Argus abilities outside specific zones? No. So why should we be allowed to use Covenant abilities it makes no sense anyway. Turning into a spirit fox and running as a warrior outside Shadowlands is as illogical as shooting down Light Beams from a shop that's on Argus while you are farming Silk Cloth in Desolace. And tbh those would be much more useful than Covenant abilities. OK I have to edit because I heard your first sentence which made no sense at all. Why then were you and the rest of the people not so vocal about the before mentioned abilities of previous expansions? Why was not being able to use those OK but not being able to use Shadowlands ones not OK… And many things can be said about Ian or Ion who cares but he is right this is destroying game fantasy

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  3. Re borrowed power: I don’t think one set of borrowed power per expansion is a problem, but the accumulation of layers that make balancing a nightmare: gear (stats, jewels, enchant, lw items) + legendaries + buffs and food + scrolls or drums + covenants + conduits + power this or that – many being class or spec specific. 1 % overall increase upon a stat can end up making 15 % difference in damage or healing. It’s a Rextroy situation where one player becomes a god vs squishy others, forcing players to abandon a spec or class as it cannot compete. So it’s not variety but layers interactive with each other. Imho

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  4. Borrowed powers are good *in theory*. However, they have only been done well once, and in so doing completely destroyed the integrity of the following expansion. Let me explain.

    Legion was widely praised for a return to form following the piece of sh*t of WoD- in a hail Mary they introduced the artifact weapon system as a way of giving players a real sense of the power fantasy- like yeah, how f*cking cool did it feel to wield Ashbringer for the first time as a Paladin? So freaking dope.

    But this was an issue. Artifacts and artifact power were a borrowed power system, so that by the time BFA was released, we were forced to get rid of our artifacts as their unique passives stopped working and basic green and blue weapons outpowered them very quickly. We went from feeling like gods to… well, just being normal WoW characters. So in an effort to make us feel powerful they introduced borrowed power system on top of borrowed power system- I mean, no wonder they never got the corruption system right!

    And here's the core of the issue, and I'm sorry Hazel but you have to be realistic at times- Blizzard's history with borrowed power systems is exceedingly poor, and with the complexity of the next expansion (coupled with just how broken these systems are according to the playtesters), we should all be very, VERY cautious when hyping ourselves up for any future content.

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  5. If there is more than 10% borrowed power I’m already annoyed. I want to do the work. Not my stuff.
    Same with trinkets. They are way to powerful. They should be some gimmicky nice addition but nothing more

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  6. I am on the fence about the borrowed power issue, but I would love if I could choose to run an alt through any previous expansion and have that expansions borrowed power working as if it were a new expansion. I want to experience Legion on my alt not just zoom through it to get to current content. I am still sore about losing my artifact weapon, can you tell? 🙂

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  7. Question: what are your thoughts on covenant-locking battle pets? Blizz recently implemented a restriction so you can only summon certain earned/purchased covenant-based pets if your character is in that covenant (unlike class hall pets that were account-wide available after unlock).

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  8. Blizzard keeps attempting to force their vision of "meaningful" RPG choices that sound good on paper for single-player games yet are entirely out of bounds when needing to account for how people play MMOs

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  9. Question. So I am in the secret finding discord and awhile back they said that the solar spire hawk was 100% drop rate in PTR is that still true? I doubt it but would like to know

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  10. Yeah I use the Heart of Flame (or whatever it's called) power on my warrior and even though it can do a LOT of damage and gives me an additional ranged tool, it can sometimes make my character feel like a delivery mechanism for azerite xD

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  11. Question! In your recent video of the stream VOD opening up the collector's edition of SL, you open up your appearance collections, which shows several tabs unfamiliar to me. What addon makes those exist? I'm always looking for better ways to view things like my appearance sets!

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  12. So in my opinion, the borrowed power thing was fun for the first like two times they did it. Now it just feels like we almost can't exist without our hands being held by more powerful beings or items. I thought we were supposed to be powerful heros? It really makes the whole strong character idea stale because I can't stand on my own unless I get all of this extensive buffing. They should consider the way it used to be with tier gear. That used to be your little buff. We don't need covenant buffs and abilities, corruption, etc. Make our professions more useful like they once were.

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  13. idk the borrowed power thing has never bothered me? Excalibur returns to the lake, the one ring returns to mount doom. If the power is connected to the journey of the story, it makes sense that it'd go with the story? The problem i always have is that they've been hollowing out characters to make room for the new items, which….makes your character at the START of an expac feel kinda lackluster.

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  14. QUESTION well more of a notice for you. It seems there have been some changes to the Lockouts for Raids and you cannot change raid settings from inside them anymore, which means Lockouts Shares have to be on the difficulty you need to run them on, and could potentially ruin mount farming.

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  15. I have a question about gearing for SL – will we have to go through BFA quests at level 50 to get the Heart of Azeroth and azerite gear, or will we be able to gear fully in our chosen leveling zone and be fine without the heart?

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  16. Borrowed power is fine, but instead of the shit they have been doing they could try having some special trainer who over the course of leveling in Shadowlands trains us in the ways of ________. No annoying farming, and a justifiable reason for things to be over once they are over. They could even add a small cutscene where you say goodbye to your teacher and thank them or something for the hardcore RP folks.

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  17. I'm a huge Asmongold fan and hav been watching all the reaction videos about balance and pvp balance and borrowed power. I have to say, after going away and thinking about this myself, I completely agree that borrowed power serves to not make characters to bloated and adding way to much to your base class. Great to hear someone saying this as I get the frustrations with borrowed power but do think it is necassary also.

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  18. I wish they would get rid of the borrowed power systems… and focus on the classes…. That's what i remember being so great about Wotlk. You could lvl a guy and all you needed to do was grind some battlegrounds and in a week or 2 you'd have a full pvp set. There was no grinding for borrowed power, just gems and enchants. You could grind rep for better ones but wasn't necessary to compete. Who wants to grind for countless hours on each character just to get these borrowed power so they can compete…It takes enough time just to get the gear. The more alt friendly the better imo… I feel that the decline of WoW is due to these borrowed power systems and that these systems will inevitably kill WoW….

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