I wanted to do a bit of a discussion on Borrowed Power in Path of Exile. I think this is the term that’s been used a little, especially in recent leagues. And there used to be this thing where there would be little bits of power creep in each league. And things would get added over time slowly, and eventually, you’ve got a much more powerful set of options available to you. After all, these new lead mechanics and different interactions are taking place.

But more recently (especially in the last four or five leagues), I found that many players’ understanding of the new league is often only on the surface, and they have not delved into the core content of the game. You may say that a league mechanic is probably not going to go core because it’s just way too strong and it’s really fun as a lead mechanic.

But then once the league is finished, it’s gone for good and maybe some remnants of the league will hang around. And players will interact with different things. For example, players are still waiting for recombinators to come back from Sentinel League and a lot of people thought that would be a great addition to the core game. But GGG hasn’t brought that back to the game just yet. They have said that they would like to do it. But they don’t really know how to do it correctly yet without introducing insane powercrete to the game.

As far as I understand, the term Borrowed Power is the meaning of giving power to the players in a given league and then taking that power away again. In the current league, you have things like the Crucible Passive Trees and the weapon passive trees that I think are extremely unlikely to go core. I don’t really see that ever happening. They’re way too powerful. These things are insane.

I actually just saw a post yesterday on Reddit with a 1800 DPS ax, 1900 DPS ax and some ridiculous damage ax. In general, I think weapon passive trees are very powerful. You can get like plus nine to maximum resistance or like a single maximum elemental resistance on a single shield, which is crazy.

Overall, I think Borrowed Power is a really interesting idea where you can make a league really fun, and is different compared to other leagues. It feels very different and then you can remove that power away from the player and the player then gets to play around with something else in the next league. I think that’s actually a really good way to approach leagues and you can always come back to a league or come back to the idea of a league at a later date and re-add something that was an interesting idea or an interesting concept back to the game.

But in a way, that is healthy for the game going forward. For example, we had the Relics in Sanctum League where you could gain like these really nice stats. Some of them had like plus three to maximum resistances, flask gain charges or things like that. That was a really strong a new equipment slot that just got added to your character. And you could just have this on permanently and that was obviously very strong as well, and that got removed from the game. Maybe GGG will add Sanctum again in the future, but I don’t see it having relics I think it’ll be more of a dungeon crawler-esque thing like it was but you’ll probably just have loss of the POE Currency and not so much of the Relic system. Maybe you’ll also still be able to get the unique items.

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But I do really enjoy the concept of Borrowed Power. I think that designing a league with the intention of it never going cool is an interesting concept. Because you can have a lot more flexibility there and you can always go back to that concept at a future date and pick out things that are at work. And you can just decide how you can add it correctly in a way. That’s not going to damage the game going forward.

So, I think there are a lot of things in the game that are bloating out the endgame. There are a lot of mechanics that are not necessarily a great fit for the game anymore. For example, I don’t think metamorph is that great. I think that mechanic can be completely removed from the game and they can add quality to jewelry elsewhere. They can actually add it in a completely different way. They don’t need to have these catalysts or anything like that. I think catalyst is a kind of awkward concept to begin with and I think that you could just have jewelry quality added elsewhere and put it in in a different way.

But there are league mechanics like that in the game that I think can be completely removed from the game. And they can kind of rework different things and add things in. For example, jewelry quality could probably be added to Betrayal, and it just has one of the Betrayal members. You just interact with the Bench and you get 20% quality or however much quality on a piece of gear just like you do with weapons and armor with Hillock.

What do you guys think about the concept of Borrowed Power? Do you like the idea of leagues being designed in a way that they are never intended to go into the core game, or would you prefer a league that is designed?

So, maybe the power creep isn’t so high, but it has the initial intention of going into the core game and then perhaps it gets balanced and tweaks out at some point and they eventually do add it to the game. Or, maybe you like the idea of really strong and overpowered league mechanics like Crucible and the initial Harvest or things like that. But you want to easy to actually add these things to the game in a way that’s they deem healthy for the game or something like that.