as always, hiru comes out with his very detailed and based video essay on april fools day.

I know this is an April fools joke, but this is an actually very well thought out and explained video about the pitfalls with modern borrowed power. The borrowed power itself has never really been an issue, and in most cases has been fun. The issue lies in the restrictions and acquisition of them.

Came expecting an april fools video and found an incredibly well put together thought piece. Awesome.

I know it's April's Fools but I could hear you explaining freaking drywalling and would be entertained and even agree with you over how to properly plaster walls by the end of the day 😂

As expected, Hiru comes out with an ambiguous April's Fools video that is also a well thought out essay on a controversial/divisive topic in the WoW Community, best part is that Hiru has the best opinion when it comes to these topics.

I actually like borrowed power somewhat. I think it's really fun to play your class pretty differently each expansion pack. However that's where soulbinds and covenant abilities really fail. 90% of them didn't change your core rotation, and just added another cooldown button to press, which didn't feel fun or rewarding or interesting. Legion legendarys (RNG permitting) and Essences did that well, along with corruptions when the vendor hit.

I thought you'd make the "Zoval Did Nothing Wrong' 😁😂😁

One thing I really liked about the Legion weapons was that they made sure you'd have a good weapon. Due to the artifacts it was easy to increase weapon power whereas you previously had to hope for a weapon drop - and everyone who has gone for weeks without a weapon drop can probably relate that it felt really bad. For that alone I really liked the weapons.

I will say many of the Azerite empowered spells were aesthetically pleasing to look at, and anima as well. But I would like to have our characters having their own power and not grinding temporary ones :') Legion's artifacts were my favorite for gameplay.

Even though this is an April fools joke hiru does have a point with this. As with almost every other April fools video he has done.

Beautiful vid for the first of April, bless you man 😂🙌

I absolutely adore to receive cool unbalanced abilities only for them to be taken the next expansion, thus making all the grind in an expansion completely useless for the next one

Something that I absolutely LOVED in bfa was the customisation options. Even of someone comes and bring the "cookie cutter" argument, I don't care, I can still grab what I want the most and what I like the most that fits my playstyle.

Got whiplash suddenly seeing Metroid Fusion footage, my first ever video game. Great video and thanks for the nostalgia!

I almost cried reading the title, *then I looked at the date*

Most people enjoy the borrowed power. They're also in the majority of people who don't go to forums, wowhead or comment on youtube videos. They just play the game and 'pew pew'.

I was looking forward to this, another absolute banger

Your april fools day videos are always some of your best videos imo, another well done one.

I frequently pay visit to a number of WoW content creator sites, be they for fun and humorous vids or informative type vids but I always end up ensuring I've watched Hiru's vids. Definitely some of the best available on YT. Now although this is a 1st April vid, it still makes a lot of sense in some aspects. Thanks for all your efforts Buddy, much appreciated! :)

Honestly, the necklace in 8.3 was super fun. I loved going through the different content to unlock different powers. It is such a shame they abandoned it once it actually was fun. Also, they should reintroduce old gear to be wearable in new content by allowing to upgrade it through a currency (crafting). It shouldn't be used in PvP, so PvP would be seperate gear, but being able to run old raids as current content to get gear sets to mess around with would be fun in my opinion. If that makes any sense.

Please go into detail on how you implemented corruption gear into DND

I was just looking at your playlists and you only have 10 videos in the videos you are proud of playlist but I reckon you should have more in there, you make really great videos.

I have been looking forward to this

Great video. Thank you.

Its fun to use sometimes, just not fun to grind out.

100% agree, been saying this for a while now! Very well put

only reason i don't absolutely hate aprils fools is because the videos you make are such good ones, it single handly saves the date for me

Saw the title and almost got enraged, forgetting what day it was.

They're fun if they're implemented in a fun way, which blizzard almost never does. They keep wanting your choices to have impact, such as the covenant choice, but it gets in the way of people wanting to be optimized for different environments. Some classes use 3 different covenants for different activities, but I have never seen anyone switch covenant just to take advantage of a dungeon gimmick.

Honestly, what I hate about modern borrowed power systems is the fact that when the expansion ends, everything is just gone, or at the very least, a lot of what was loved about them. To illustrate what I mean, let's look at the Fire Mage artifact weapon, Felo'melorn. Felo'melorn had a special visual effect tied to it which caused burning orbs to follow around the fire mage, not only like, but generally better than, the Warlock's Verdant Spheres glyph (which itself was removed for its sake, and then the fx were removed from it and its "sister" glyphs, at least from other peoples' view). When the ability this effect was baked into was removed and was turned into a talent, that was just IT for a generally pretty beloved effect. This further emphasizes your own point, because it was the cosmetic effects like this that were such a big reason the system was loved. If the end goal of a grind is going to be a cosmetic, that cosmetic *has* to remain available beyond the duration of the grind to be worth it. Otherwise it just feels like pouring water on the ground in front of somebody dying of thirst.

Man I forgot how reliably you put out bangers every April 1st

I love April 1st just because your videos.

my favorite part ab borrowed power is GIVING IT BACK!!! I love it when everyone is weak or really broken at the very end of an expac! ESPECIALLY After i grinded for the big boy rewards, SO REWARDING!!!(◐‿◑)

I like how we made professions less important because they wanted people to be able to use gear faster but then, borrowed power could take a week or more b4 you could use a new piece

Well done!

Legion was the turning point with many concerns before the game even came out. Legendary items were obvious red flag, but so were artifact weapons with its talent trees. These things were SPEC specific. Not even character specific. That means - your spec is nuked into the ground with a patch, you pretty much have to respec. And with that - you have to start artifact power grind from the fucking beginning. And WOD saw many such nerfs to specs, for example Demonology warlock in 6.2 got blanket nerfed by 25% on all abilities. Survival hunter didn't got nerfed much but received absolutely abysmal 4-set bonus that granted almost no damage boost (other classes had gigantic damage boosts in their tier sets, such as Ret pala gaining 3 charges of wings or MM hunter gaining instant-cast aimed shot!) They sort of fixed that by artifact knowledge which produced numbers way into billions of AP in 7.3 - you maxed out your whole talent tree from just a single AP pickup. But at launch respeccing was made exceedingly difficult. Grind was harsh even for the main spec weapon (hundreds of Maw of Souls +2 runs), let alone repeat this for offspec. They made another grave mistake with essences which you kinda praise here. They prevented alts from catching up for a full year. Which means - you level a new character way into 8.3 you start with zero essences. You have to start from scrach, go back to 8.2 content and grind it. Even repeat fucking battleground and arena grind. As a PVE player. Because PVP essesnces were the best ones for a few specs. They alleviated this in late 8.3, like six months after this patch came out. It was rough.

Great explanation!

My issue is, they just make the systems up but with Azerite Gear and Shadowland stuff, it was like getting shot in the nuts 5 times in a row back to back. No amount of recovery is going to make your balls forget that pain.

God, what a great video

such a great video

I actually wasn’t bothered by the artifact power grind. After getting my final artifact trait unlocked, I didn’t bother with grinding (because the class halls started sharing research and we started getting millions of artifact power from pieces that used to give us just 5 at the start)

Oh boy this’ll be interesting

Hey but seriously though....What is that cool down tracker the shadowpriest has at 4:45? I assume its a weakaura? Is there a string for it? Thanks

I think just having powers as talent trees is best. Tier sets are the only thing im okay with because those will get obtained as part of your normal progression and also there isn’t choice. Your bonus is your bonus. Legendaries are a pain because you essentially have to grind out currency so that you can buy the rest of your talents. But now its gear and you have to work that into your build. Then u have go have multiple sets depending on the content. Its a bad user experience.

Great video

I think the problem is the Grind + Randomness, there is nothing wrong with the next tier or the next system, unless if you ask to much off the player to grind them just to take them away.

i loved artifact weapons, adding new trait like old talent was so great

*doing world quests is enjoyable* that cant even fly on april fools day

Hiru comes out swinging with the raw truth - love it :)

Started as an April fools joke. But the video ended up becoming very insightful on borrowed power...

It's the most wonderful time of the year!!

You got me there for a second.

Lol, I got recommended a reaction to this vid, and was like, isn't that Duel Logs from the DuelLogs Duel Logs??... And then found the vid and checked the description 😄 Subbed even though I havn't played wow since like classic cos this was interesting - I feel like I discovered someone I know has a second secret life 😂

Ur April fools vids r legit the best

Care to share the D&D thing you were talking about with courruption on your D&D channel?

On one hand we hate that we have to grind for power. On the other, when we grind we at least get something for it. Take Torghast for example, if you are not interested in crafting a Legendary Item(i think they suck) you have no reason to do Torghast, you get nothing for it, at which point it's more like Borefast. They could at least give us a loot chest at the end...

4/1 GREAT JOB HIRU! I almost forgot that the internet is worthless today but funny.

Cool video

really good video wow

Azerite powers could have been continued within shadowlands and built upon to use in the final raid, After all, Azeroth was the target was it not? so why couldn't we have continued to use the necklace and built upon it, in azeroth AND the shadowlands? Mine was sufficienly high item level high when i finished Bf A that i had it on as a simple stat number until i reached level 60, and then i switched it out for a 230 item level necklace. and since we cannot delete the legendaries or artifact weapons, they are just taking up space in my bank. they should be made upgradeable via hard work to keep them relevant.

my favorite part about April 1st is looking forward to the based video essay Hiru is gonna drop about a controversial WoW topic.

U had me in the first half ngl... Every year....

This video is so obscenely important for blizzard to take note of. I totally completely agree that having systems in the game that make all elements of your content even more rewarding just amplifies how enjoyable the game is and how fun it can be to progress a character. It's like having experience points after you hit level cap, it adds another degree of enjoyability. I have always thought that the flaw in these systems has been the throttling on the character and your progression that made it feel like blizzard didn't actually want you to play your character and to a much greater extent, an alt.

Blizzard routinely changed the classes and specs but those changes were baseline so you didn’t really have to do anything to earn them. The power players chased for so many expansions was just gear. Then at the end of MoP they removed a bunch of baseline abilities and made some of them Draenor perks. Then at the end of WoD they removed those perks; some of which had been baseline before WoD. And they replaced them with nothing. They also removed a bunch of other abilities at the end of WoD with the promise that the Artifact weapon would add a bunch more abilities to each spec to make them feel more complete. And it did. But now players were chasing Artifact power and gear (in addition to legendaries). Then, at the end of Legion, they removed the Artifacts and replaced them with nothing. A lot of baseline abilities had been removed and the Artifact, which was supposed to be the replacement to that loss, was disabled. The problem with “borrowed power” is that it’s not an additional power gain over and above the base spec so much as constantly trying to fill the gap that was created when they removed the baseline abilities for most specs back in MoP and again in WoD. If you take a spec baseline without any borrowed power as it performs now versus a spec baseline in MoP without any borrowed power you will see far fewer passive interactions and customizability with most (but not all) of them.

Another banger

saw this on Asmon's stream. good stuff.

I really enjoyed Essences in BFA, but Artifacts were kinda hit and miss, especially when you had to target the relics with proper bonuses, and it could take ages to just get them, just like legendaries. And than they were just removed.

Glad we're coming out of the "legion can't do any wrong" phase

I think the randomness in acquiring these is linked to the time they want you to get those. They put that stuff in there to keep you playing. So thats what messes with the otherwise ok systems.

Tbh i loved last patch of BFA 8.3….. i was a dh with 478ilvl, 2 versatile corruptions and rest were gushing wounds, till corruption level of 39 (with max cape, max resistance) had all except one socket, and was beautiful in pvp, gushing wound worked so well on dh bc of leech, and gave u a dot and hot in one spell…. So fun playing it

as much as i assume this is an aprils fools joke considering the day....i actually agree that borrowed powers are completely fine....the grind and extra bells and whistles attached to them and lack of functions to let you catch up later is what ruins it and ofcourse blizzards often lack of creativity witht them like this expansion the idea itself was just fine...but the lack of ability to jump around and choose what you wanted without a complete hazzle aswell as the absolute grind that you had to do on not just your main which is fine but on all other characters and only introducing ways around it way later is the issue in my opinion hell even bfa really only had one big issue...that being that the feature just felt incomplete and often boring

My only problem with essences is that you needed to to pvp (or pve depending of how you play the game) in order to obtain your BiS in some cases.

To me a big part of it is sort of the lore or importance of the items, the RPGness of it. For Legion weapons, they each had a big quest chain and story tied to them, not to mention multiple unique appearances you could work to unlock; that's cool enough to go back for even in later expansions. For tier sets, it's a unique tier set specifically made for your class, that you get from a specific raid. Legendary weapons have a whole big quest chain and grind associated with them, they're totally unique. And then there's Azurite gear, which is literally like 3 armor models recolored, with random minor stat increases... Or conduits, which are literally just numbers on the screen, don't even have any visual appearance. Even gear is boring now, since it's all just randomly generated stats on generic looks... Basically if you wanna do borrowed power stuff, make it actually cool and unique and interesting to get, not just "this piece randomly gives +5% swim speed" or whatever.

Hahaha just as i wanted to write "finaly a day came when hiru is wrong" but then i saw comments about aprils fool xD paint me bamboozled

In the end I agree. Borowed power itself is fun, I had a blast with essences and corruption (not really azerite gear, everything about it felt bad). I do feel like they could do stuff better but I enjoyed a lot of stuff about each of them. Even covenants I like, though I do get that people wanted to switch easier but that never bothered me much as kinda casual (though I do M+ and some raiding not really go hard into it). I do hope going forward the borrowed power stuff takes the best of the previous versions though.

10 minuets....... It took me 10 minuets.......... To catch on to this April fool prank... Goood Job Hirumaredx You Got ME

I haven’t really played wow since wotlk, but I still watch wow content to this day

Heart skipped a beat with this one. GGG has an interesting take on borrowed power systems in PoE. When most of the people were making builds based on Occultists because they had such a good energy shield keystone in their ascendancy tree, they removed it from the class and added it to the passive skill tree - although in a weaker form - n order to have every spec in the game be able to spec into it. You don't have to completely remove a borrowed system because it is broken or powerful, just dial back its power and keep it in the game.

I actually like borrowed power in lore terms, otherwise without borrowed power our characters would be the most powerful beings in existence. But with how Bliizard does balancing, and has been doing the lore in the past 5 years. My hatred to this borrowed power systems has grown so much.

Corruptions and Azerite gear had so much potential , it was really fun , lot of choice for customization . as a tank , i could be unkillable because of full vers % stack or i could go full dmg with twilight , or litteraly a mix .

Omg how many channels do you have? I watch your yugioh videos as well and stumbled upon this immediately recognizing the voice.

tier sets are accepted because you don't have to grind for them since you are usually raiding anyways and are easy to get compared to grinding AP for days

i think the azerite pieces from BFA was a great system, and at the start of the expac i also realized that they were way better in terms of overall power than tier sets.. if only blizz had added the system to obtain it, the way it was in the end of the expac, from the beginning, it would have been much more well recieved. and i truely hope that blizz learns from that. having targeted gear available from the beginning, is a comfort for players because despite all the unluck in the world, we can still grind towards a targeted piece of gear. wether it be legendary like the end of legion, or azerite gear in the end of bfa, or a new system.

I personally loved azerite armour- the abilities it could grant like the resounding protection shield were amazing- i just hate the grind, as im sure most people do. i don't raid or do mythics, it stresses me out (I have autism and ADHD), mechanic often confuse me- and i've been playing since Vanilla. I main a Blood DK, and i chose Venthyr, my covenant abilities are awesome, but the grind for the Legion artifacts, the cloak against corruption etc etc annoyed me, I like playing the story out, but man the amount of time it takes to grind! And that's considering I was in college 3 days a week, it would take me forever, i feel sorry for people who worked full time and played WoW in their spare time- the time and effort to grind for stuff must have been awful!

You nearly got me bud, nearly

Others have said this is an April fools, but there are some good points being made. That said; it's also a semantic game. When people talk about borrowed power, they're not talking about class rebalancing, new abilities, tier sets, procs etc. Borrowed Power as a term really means 'systems' that really came into effect in the last few expansions, coinciding with the decline of the game. If we were to expand the meaning of borrowed power to include any temporary ability, you could literally say anything in WoW is borrowed power, since you don't get to (e.g) Chaos Bolt people in real life.

Your argument for Azerite being better than tier sets is just... Wow. No words. If this is an april fools joke. Bravo. I have been fooled. If not... well, at least I will know that I am not the fool.

The only problem with the essence system is the unlocks not being account wide

(I actually really liked the corruption patch. It made Mistweaver playable for the time of one patch and it was fairly fun to use)

the problem with essences was the different ranks were obtained at different points. Memory of Lucid dreams took like 6 weeks to get to rank 3 while other's could be grinded out in 1 week

I agree, with the exception of essences. Getting blood of the enemy felt like a fucking nightmare to me, a non pvp player

Still waiting for gladiator stance to return, maybe someday.

I wish Blizzard would add quirks to gear that are weighted by taking stats or accompanied by a negative quirk. Quirks being effects like we saw on Benthic gear, but perhaps more varied and interesting. You shouldn't be able to mitigate the negatives in the same way as corruption.

Legendarys and tiersets actually modify the way you play what provides new fresh look at your class. In legion subrogue played way diferent on every tier of raid what was fun, on nighthold there was 10combopoint meta, on TOS there was leggo hands meta and we had absurdly fun opener.

Artifact weapons were the only good borrowed power system. Just needs to remove the relic stuff or make a better system for obtaining.

I was so confused. Then I saw the date.

i like borrowed power too. i think its why I enjoyed legion so much and the artifact weapons. playing the new outlaw rogue spec while grinding the hidden appearance of the thunderfury while getting good RNG legendaries (rogue Insignia of Ravenholdt ring that was pretty good) was probably why I enjoyed legion a lot.

that feels like a video the bald man might react to

In Legion if we could have gotten artifact power a little easier/faster at the very start, didn't do the concordance thing with the weapons and we could select our legendaries from a vendor like we could towards the end, it would have been a perfect expansion all throughout the entire expansion if you ask me.

bruh i was waiting for another episode of -someone- did nothing wrong, but still, great video as always