Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
World of Warcraft’s no stranger to borrowed power—after Blizzard learnt its lesson making borrowed power features the entire focus of an expansion’s progression, it instead started to weave them in as seasonal patch incentives. Broadly optional mini-grinds that were good if you wanted a cheap boost and something to do, or were hankering for best-in-slot gear, but nothing that’d hoover up all of your time.
I’ve been middling on these—the Reshii Wraps, the DISC belt—but I at least think they’ve been broadly interesting so far. For instance, the Reshii Wraps gave you some extra bonuses while you were phase-diving. And, for the most part, getting a new shiny bit of gear’s cool.
But the latest one, the Omnium Folio, is kind of baffling—to put it bluntly, I kinda don’t really get why it’s there.
For the uninitiated, the Folio is a borrowed power system that sees you jaunting to the arse-end of Silvermoon every week to complete a quest chain that, so far, has been mostly filled with the same weekly activities I was doing anyway.
Most features like the Folio have had some degree of interactivity—take the Onyx Annulet ring from Dragonflight, which had a bunch of gems you could find in the Forbidden Reach. And yet the Omnium Folio is just sort of… there. Take a look at this talent tree.
A single lonely line, a linear path, filled with abilities such as “sometimes, you do more damage” and “sometimes, you do more healing”. Three weeks in, I cannot say I’ve felt a single one of these abilities impact my time hitting stuff in WoW one bit—beyond a flat numerical increase. If there are fiery explosions happening, they’re blending into the overstimulated machine of gunshots and big smoke clouds.
It’s not interacting with any of the weekly activities beyond a quest to go and do them, sometimes. It’s not making the routine of hitting enemies feel any different. It’s not impacting my rotation in any way. And it’s not interacting with any patch-specific mechanics. It pretty much just makes me hit slightly harder, and if I don’t do my weekly quest, I miss out on a power boost until I get around to handling it.
You can make the argument that patch 12.0.5 has been—to a detriment, one might argue—rammed with so many optional activities that the Omnium Folio is just a way for Blizzard to get you to try them all.
There’s (deep breath) ritual sites, abyss anglers, decor duels, the voidforge, void assaults, void invasion zones—along with the usual weekly activities of prey, delves, dungeons, raids, so on and so forth. The Omnium Folio forces you to interact with some of this stuff—ritual sites, void assaults, and void invasion zones—but only for a little bit, once per week.
Which means that whenever I log in, I’m staring at this great big orb Blizzard’s stuck on my minimap and thinking: Man, what’s the point?
It’s true that I’m being the kind of overly cynical that comes with sticking with an MMO for a long time—the Folio is inoffensive and basically does its job, but it does its job in such an archetypal, bland way that it invariably represents the worst aspects of itself. I think these sorts of optional grinds can be a great time—and I’m broadly in favour of patch-specific mechanics (I loved drifting in my car in Undermine).
But the Folio feels like the most boiled-down, reduced-to-formula version of a borrowed power mechanic imaginable. It is ostensibly just there, it gives you incremental increases just powerful enough to make participation mandatory, while not being visible enough or interactable enough to feel satisfying to get. It’s not a gear piece, so it’s not even part of the core item level dopamine grind. It hangs on your navigation tool like a limpet, saying “hey, remember when you had to do some ritual sites to fill me out? Wasn’t that neat?”
This lonely-looking talent tree will just sit on my minimap for the next two patches, a reminder of the set-and-forget nodes giving me a 2-4% damage boost—and while Blizzard might expand on it in the future, I don’t really get why it’s there now. Especially in a patch filled with so many little checklists to tick off? It’s making me resent my weekly marching orders from Umbric. And I don’t want to resent Umbric. That’s my guy.
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