Is dragon riding in World of Warcraft Dragonflight borrowed power?
So there’s a whole lot of stuff to talk about right now when it comes to World of Warcraft: Dragonflight; that’s not under debate. Heck, I have about four or five topics that all sprang to mind just from the initial presentation alone, and then there was another topic based off of a particular interview comment that itself springs off into an entire column. (There are actually nonzero odds you read that one first. I’m just writing these columns and trying to play the drums, man.)To get more news about Buy World of Warcraft Gold WLK, you can visit lootwow.com official website.
But one of the things that I found immediately fascinating as soon as the announcement was made was the discussion about getting your own personal dragon to ride around with the new dragon riding system. A lot of people (including me) were almost immediately happy to see the re-introduction of talent trees and the change to how systems were set up while proclaiming, “Oh, good, no borrowed power!” Other people have been looking at dragon riding – a system of locomotion that works only in the Dragon Isles and is almost certainly not going to persist after this expansion – and saying, “Look, that’s borrowed power!” So… is it?
To answer that question, we have to first discuss another question. What is power? No, don’t worry; we’re not about to get into a lengthy discussion of definitions because what we’re very clearly talking about here is power in an MMO. Where it is… a remarkably fuzzy subject!
For example, you know what is absolutely power? Gold. Gold is power. More gold provides more ability to purchase stuff, more mounts, more pets, more auctions, and so forth. It even allows you to grab game time without spending any real money. Gold is absolutely a measure of power.
By that definition, every time a way of making gold hand over fist is introduced with any sort of time-limited component, you could argue that it’s borrowed power. You got a big chunk of power, and now it’s going away! Borrowed power! Except that I don’t think anyone would really argue that “those reagents that no one wants any more are no longer valuable” is the same problem as, say, Azerite Armor.
In other words, we’re going to need to narrow our focus a little more and take a better look at what makes borrowed power a whole thing in WoW. Borrowed power has, in various ways, been an element of WoW since set bonuses were introduced; you would get a benefit that helped you in some way, and then you would have to lose it when you upgraded your kit. But the way we use the term really has its origins in Warlords of Draenor.
See, Garrisons absolutely offered borrowed power… on a zone-by-zone basis. This is because in every zone, you had a thing you could build to give you an extra button to use every two or three minutes. This was, decidedly, a form of borrowed power. However, it didn’t really matter much because it was functionally just a minor open-world benefit that added some new flavor to what you were doing.
Where borrowed power started to become a problem was Legion. In that expansion, every single class and spec got an artifact weapon, and every single artifact weapon carried with it a button you could press to do something. And every single spec, bar none, was designed to operate around this one button to some degree. Some specs made it central to their rotation (Windwalker Monks, for example), while others had it as a valuable part of your gameplay without being a functional lynchpin (Enhancement Shaman), but every spec was still designed around that power and the mechanics of artifacts.
